Read 100 of 2022. Ulysses: Mahler after Joyce by Nicholas Mahler. Translated from the German by Alexander Booth

Title: Ulysses: Mahler after Joyce
Author: Nicholas Mahler
Translated from the German by Alexander Booth
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 9780857429933
Genre: Graphic Novel
Pages: 284
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Nicholas Mahler’s Ulysses – his interpretation of the 1922 classic, and perhaps the most inventive book ever written is topsy-turvy, mind-boggling at times, and absolutely surreal to boot, and all of this in a graphic format.

I haven’t read Ulysses. I have been meaning to for a while now, and maybe will – very soon, but for now the status remains unchanged. Reading Mahler’s interpretation though, managed to surface all that I had heard about the book – what it’s about – three people trying to make sense of life – as events unfold on a single day – the 16^th of June 1904.

Mahler sets his Ulysses in Vienna. Leopold Bloom becomes Leopold Wurmb, as he roams around the city, attends the funeral of a friend, gets to know of the impending affair of his wife Molly, ruminates about his child, no longer alive, and just walks along.

You don’t need to read Joyce’s Ulysses to read this one. Both the translator, Alexander Booth and Mahler ensure that the text and the pictures tell if not a different story – then the most inspired version. Mahler makes this Ulysses his – varied graphic forms with every chapter that is titled as per the name Ulysses, he takes us on this fascinating journey of less words, and more emotion, through simple illustrations – making us collectively feel so much. I would most certainly have to read Ulysses now.

Read 34 of 2022. Our Santiniketan by Mahasweta Devi. Translated from the Bengali by Radha Chakravarty

Title: Our Santiniketan
Author: Mahasweta Devi
Translated from the Bengali by Radha Chakravarty
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 978-0857429018
Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Pages: 124
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

I think Bedanabala was my introduction to Mahasweta Devi’s works. That was way back in 2006, and since then I haven’t stopped reading whatever she had to offer. I think my extreme fan boy moment happened when I got to meet her briefly at Jaipur Literature Festival in 2013. As a writer, if there’s anyone that has made an impact on me, it would be her.

Our Santiniketan is a short memoir of her days spent at Santiniketan of course and how what she learned there and unlearned shaped her entire life – her thoughts, ideologies, and even her writing to a large extent.

This book is also about ageing and what you choose to remember in the form of a memoir. Mahasweta Devi brings that up in so many places in the book – subtly, and sometimes not so. It hovers throughout. But as a reader you believe it all, because that’s her writing and conviction of what she recalls.

You know as a reader that your childhood was not like the one Mahasweta Devi spent at Santiniketan and will never be. Yet, you relate when she speaks of nature and trees, the food eaten there, the friendships forged, the lessons taught, and idyllic evenings which one wouldn’t think of as the case, given the place.

Mahasweta Devi’s writing goes back and forth in time – there is the past and the present, in which she speaks to the reader as well about time being what it is and doing what it does to the nature of memory. Radha Chakravarty’s translation serves the original the way it is (you can tell a little by the tone adopted), but also adds her own element to it – I think when it comes to dialogue and some descriptions to make it easier for the reader.

Our Santiniketan is a book that must be read slowly, to be savoured really, to know more about Mahasweta Devi, her writing that came later, more importantly her family and her relationship with them, and the place that came to be second-home to her.

Read 21 of 2022. Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India by Danish Sheikh

Title: Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India
Author: Danish Sheikh
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 978-0857427502
Genre: Plays, LGBTQIA
Pages: 164
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

You don’t see a lot of LGBTQIA literature coming out of the sub-continent, even though section 377 has been read down. You just do not. I am not surprised though. But what I was pleasantly surprised by was this text, aptly titled, “Love and Reparation” – a collection of two plays about the decriminalization of queer intimacy that took place on the 6^th of September of 2018.

One decision that changed so many lives across the spectrum. From being “criminals” to not being criminals overnight, and to have full sexual agency meant something for most, and yet there was doubt about the future, given how we lived in the past. The future is as uncertain even today, almost four years into the judgement.

Danish Sheikh’s two plays bring out the true nature of how we feel. It is a representation I am glad exists. Both the plays bring forth the intermingling of the personal and the political, with the legal aspects playing a major role. Sheikh writes with so much empathy, yet never straying away from facts. Being a queer person, Danish speaks through these plays – everything that is so personal is out there.

“Contempt” and “Pride” are the two sides of the same coin and it couldn’t be truer. One play examines the before and one the after. Both speak about living with the law and what are the repercussions. I learnt the language of longing and desire pretty late though I knew somehow what it was a lot earlier. I have lived through a time when Section 377 was used by my family to put me in place and I have thankfully (perhaps) also lived to see the day when this section was read down.

Contempt was written as a response to the Suresh Kumar Koushal vs. Naz Foundation judgement in the year 2013, when the Supreme High Court reinstated section 377, overturning the Delhi High Court judgement. Pride was written as a response to the decriminalization of 377 in the year 2018.

I felt deep sense of satisfaction after reading these two plays and yet I also felt this deep sense of loss, of something that is still not complete and needs to be looked at, with one eye on the future. And yet, these plays have provided so much hope and love inside of me for what’s to come. A love that can finally speak out loud.

Read 4 of 2022. A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and Esther Kinsky.

Title: A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations
Author: Hans Magnus Enzensberger Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and Esther Kinsky
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 978-0857425799
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 137
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 4/5

I do not read much poetry, but this title caught my fancy and I had to read it. Well, I also believe that it is impossible to understand the essence of a poem in one reading. You have to read each poem perhaps multiple times before you get to the its bare-bone understanding. This becomes perhaps an even more difficult task when the form is in translation as this collection is.

Enzensberger’s poetry covers a vast range of subjects – private moments, long-term relationships and their trajectories, portraits of historical and literary personalities thrown in for good measure (an elegy to W.G. Sebald that is most moving: “Who touched us, / who seemed to have come from afar / to the sinister, unhomely homeland. / Little kept him here. / Nothing but the search for traces / with a divining rod of words / which twitched in his hand.” Translated by Martin Chalmers), cosmology, and even philosophy.

And in all of this, there are clouds. In various forms and ways – they exist in these poems – more so in the twelve-part title piece that ends the collection. The poems are transparent, sometimes very difficult to comprehend as well, but very empathetic at most, and there were times I also felt that I was left without any thing to hold on to.

The translations by Martin Chalmers and Esther Kinsky are spot-on. The emotions don’t hold back, though there were times I felt I wanted more as a result of the translation. Having said this, A History of Clouds is a great start for anyone who wants to understand poetry and start somewhere.

Is It The Same For You? by Priya Sebastian and Neha Singh

Title: Is It The Same for You?
Authors: Priya Sebastian and Neha Singh
Publisher: Seagull Books
ISBN: 978-0857426963
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 24 
Source: Publisher 
Rating: 5 stars 

Young girls in conflict zones perhaps face so much more than we know of or will ever know. What do they think? What do they feel? When does childhood end and the reality of being where you are hits you hard? What do governments have to account for then, when innocence is lost way before time? Is it the Same for You in its most raw form asks all these questions, making the reader constantly reflect with every turn of the page.
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Priya Sebastian and Neha Singh take different moments of a young girl’s life in Kashmir and bring them to fore. Amidst all the conflict (political and religious) and terror, the question remains that is it the same for all young girls out there? How is it when their bodies change? The book looks at shards of life – the ones that are rarely come about – when the not so normal becomes normal, when you get used to what you aren’t supposed to get used to, and life is lived just on the sidelines.
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Neha Singh’s text coupled with Priya Sebastian’s most stunning illustrations will constantly haunt you. Each page of sparse text is a story with so many layers and so much to see. The girl who takes comfort in the assumption that maybe this is what it is for all girls over the world and who is to say it isn’t? In one form or the other that is. From one conflict zone to the other. From one state of normalcy to the next. Is it the same for you?