Read 6 of 2023. The Possession by Annie Ernaux. Translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis

Jealousy. The rawness of this emotion perhaps cannot be compared to any other. It slices you open, and you lay bleeding – for all to see, because it is visible – that’s what this emotion ensures – to come in plain view. It is as though you are different person under its spell, and hence you are possessed – as Ernaux was when jealous of an ex-lover’s current partner.

There is no timeline in this very slim work about this emotion. And like all Ernaux’s books, this memoir feels as though it belongs to the reader – it is always that close to home (at least for me). “The Possession” made me see myself as that person in love – the one that is obsessed with the other – the one that will not let go, the one that seeks closure but is unable to find it, the one that seethes in his own agony and suffering, day after day, wanting the same for the lover that once was.

She wants him back (is it because someone else has him now?). She years. She longs. She wants. “I want to fuck you and make you forget the other woman”, she says, and you know that everything before and after doesn’t matter. Ernaux’s writing is not only lucid but also it is the story of writing this book – how she wants to pour her emotions on paper, how that is perhaps the only way she will find some comfort – she may have given up everything else in the name of love or desire, but not her writing.

Anna Moschovakis’ translation is stunning, and you can tell by every sentence and every word used in all its glory, and brevity. Ernaux’s emotions I think may not have been easy to put on paper even in the original, and for Moschovakis to translate it the way she has is commendable.

The Possession entered me through its pages, and I have a very strong feeling that it will not let go for a while now. And I also feel the same way. I also want to be the other. The one who has him. The several others who are now with my several hims.

Read 5 of 2023. Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

Learning to Talk is a book that marvels, that makes you infer, come up with connections of your own to Mantel’s memoir. “Giving Up the Ghost”, and finally makes you marvel at how she connected these stories to moments from her childhood, to give us an experience like no other.

The stories in this collection are raw, precise, part memoir, part imagination, and all wonderful with sentences that flow and words that fit seamlessly. This book is about teenagers and children who are odd with their families, neighbours, the school, and the world at large. Each story laced with curiosity, cleverness, and different ways of seeing the world.

Mantel through these stories allows the reader to glimpse into her world and life growing up and yet ensures that there is some distance that is always maintained between how much she wants the reader to know and how much she does not.

Each story is about when a child’s life shifts – what moments define it – when a pet dies, when the child is lost and finds itself eventually, a teenager’s realization about what love is and how adults work in the world, and about how daughters come to view their mothers over a period. Mantel doesn’t let go of any emotion – of each sentence being in the place it must.  

And in all this there are times when she draws on history to tell these stories and that’s when each one comes alive with even more exuberance and nuance. There is attention to detail, there is attention to every heartache, melancholy, and the political and personal mingle in all the specifics of time and place.

Learning to Talk is a delightful read that will stay with me for years to come. I may not recall every story but that will then be the perfect time to reread this collection.

Read 4 of 2023. Bliss Montage : Stories by Ling Ma

I hadn’t read “Severance” but then I decided to read this collection of short stories and will most certainly go and read her novel. The stories in this collection are surreal, funny, satirical, and extremely confident, though not all of them, but they do the job of making the reader think, feel, and be surprised as well with every turn of the page.

We meet Chinese American women trying so hard, processing their dislocation, their loneliness and how to make sense of the world they are thrown into. In “G” two friends want to relive their youth by going all-out into the night. “Office Hours”, “Peking Duck”, and “Tomorrow” are laced with an equal amount of humour and empathy. “Peking Duck” will make you relook at ethics and what it means to be moral – and more than anything about how narratives change, and so do narrators.

“Los Angeles” and “Yeti Lovemaking” were my favourite stories from the lot. They are peculiar, wry, and stuns you into thinking about other worlds. Her stories stay with you – with their jagged edges and imperfect threads. They exist for that reason alone – to make you see how these characters navigate life and the world at large, unpredictable in their ways, and often quite hilarious.

Read 3 of 2023. Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor

Age of Vice is a book that doesn’t cut corners. It doesn’t hold back from saying what it wants to about the vast difference between the haves and the have-nots in the Indian society, and what happens because of that. At the same time, it is heartfelt in the way the story unfolds sometimes. Mind you, those times are very rare in the book, so when you find them, you are overwhelmed, broken, and realise your failings as a person, in comparison to that of the well-nuanced, messy, struggling-with-life, and fractured characters that inhabit these five-hundred-and-forty pages.

Age of Vice is set in Delhi – the book opens with a crime – and Kapoor doesn’t shy from showing us how it was done – getting into the gory details, and the intended result of that crime that takes place in 2004, but the story begins in 1991 with Ajay – a boy of eight – a boy from a lower caste – a Dalit, and what happens to him till and after he starts working for Sunny Wadia, the heir to the Wadia empire and its nefarious dealings. Basically, a crime syndicate, and how inextricably the stories of Ajay and Sunny will be linked for years to come. And in all of this, there is Neda, the headstrong journalist, whose gumption is tested to the point of it not being there, whose moral compass is uprooted, and how she becomes a part of the world inhabited by Sunny.

There is opulence, decadence, wealth that one cannot imagine – brands being dropped constantly on every other page, and while initially I thought what was happening, I realised very soon that it was much-needed. To show the farmhouse culture of Delhi, to understand the poor, we must understand the wealthy. Kapoor has this insider-outsider perspective – there is biting satire that unravels itself slowly and quite deliciously. As a reader, you must wait, you must go through the finer details of living – and losing, and the sheer heartbreak of the story – of Sunny and Neda’s love, of how as humans we will go to any stretch sometimes to ensure we have the one elusive characteristic that places us on the top of it all – POWER.

Power to claim people, to make them see where they belong in the larger scheme of things, to rule them all (Bunty Wadia and his brother, Vicky Wadia’s constant pursuit), to understand who must be manipulated and controlled to what extent, the plot of Age of Vice races on full-throttle mode. Incidents happen swiftly – people die at the drop of a hat, injustices take place and no one dare utter a word because of the “crime family” at the helm, and Kapoor’s Delhi seethes, and spectates, and we move from place to place with guilt, the idea of freedom in the minds of the characters, never letting go of privilege, of understanding its worth, of being punched in the face with self-awareness, and to then bear the burden of living.

Deepti Kapoor takes us through Goa, the hills of Himachal, Nepal, back to Delhi, to Italy even, to the center of it all – Uttar Pradesh, and all the places to make us understand the futility of living – there is no higher purpose anyway. There are truths and lies, and in-between the ones – the living who tell them daily, to live after all.

Age of Vice is about decaying – the rotting that takes place spectacularly, on such a grand level that the ones involved, the ones watching from the sidelines, and the ones encouraging it also perhaps – know it all – they are aware of what is going on and yet cannot take their gaze away, they cannot walk away – they must endure. Deepti’s writing is sharp, incisive, and makes no bones about how it is. “It is what it is” – this phrase came to my mind so many times as I turned the pages, and it sticks – the indifference of the phrase lingers throughout the book, and in this indifference stems the need to seek validation, to make something of your life, to make it worth it, to make it count – whether for Ajay it is the idea of family, or for Sunny it is about validation – the strong sense of urgency to do good or the idea of it, and ultimately for Neda – to try so hard to be right and yet constantly failing to her own lofty ideas about living.

The back and forth between the sacred, the profane, the good, the bad, the moralistic, the amoral makes Age of Vice what it is – a reflection of our times, of the Kalyug that Deepti mentions at the beginning of the book, the dark times, of the doomsday cometh, of pain and pleasure – both unbearable – the complexity of living, and the simple ways of death – Kapoor’s writing astounded me, made me want to get up and slap a few characters, to show them the way, to play God even, only to quickly realize that as a reader I had been given no power at all – so I enjoyed the read, lapped it all up, thought about the book for days to come, and cannot wait for the next two instalments of this fantastic trilogy.

Read 215 of 2021. Sansei and Sensibility by Karen Tei Yamashita

Title: Sansei and Sensibility: Stories Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 978-1566895781
Genre: Short Stories
Pages: 224
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

So, here’s the thing about Karen Tei Yamashita’s writing – not only they seem absurd or abstract most of the time, strangely enough they also seem complete and concrete. The writing that doesn’t miss a beat or rhythm and it is all perfect, not quite though. Sansei and Sensibility is a collection of stories just like that. And of course, let’s not forget the Jane Austen wordplay, which I will talk about later.

The stories in this collection centres around sansei, or third generation Japanese-Americans. We have stories that set context – culturally and politically. There are the issei, a Japanese immigrant to North America and nisei, an American whose parents were immigrants from Japan and then of course there is Sansei. It is all clearly laid out as the collection begins with the section “Sansei”. A lot of sanseis were born in the 1930s and 40s, they grew up in Second World War internment camps or just heard stories from their parents or grandparents about years spent in camps.

The second half of the collection “Sensibility” is light-hearted in a sense, taking off from Jane Austen’s novels, where “Monterey Park” is a spin-off of Mansfield Park or for that matter “Omaki-San” is based on Austen’s Lady Susan and works perfectly because of a single protagonist’s point of view. Yamashita’s pace is frenetic and unyielding. It is as though she has so much to say and so little time.

Short stories aren’t easy to write. To be able to communicate it all and sometimes not everything is an art in itself which I think very few writers master. Yamashita is one of them. The stories are told in many voices and that is what makes them even more exciting and palpable. Read this collection, and then read her other works.