Read 16 of 2023. Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan. Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim

Occasionally, there comes a novel that shakes you out of your reality, places you in its reality, and makes you want to live there forever, no matter how trying the circumstances, how matter how brutal the lay of the land, and no matter how beastly some characters who inhabit that world. Whale was one such novel for me this year, and maybe for a long time to come.

Whale is a book that breaks all compartmentalisation of the novel. It is literary and then it isn’t. It is fantastical, and then you see reality overflowing from its pages. It dons the hat of magic realism, only to for the magic to be stripped off early on, to make an appearance again and again, leaving you confused and begging for more. It is full of emotion, and stoicism at the same time. It is funny, mostly emotional, heart-rendering, brave, strong, weak, reflects the societies we inhabit, speaks of women and how they are treated, is also cognisant of people on the gender spectrum, makes note of objects having a life of their own, shows how movies can change people, and how success and failure are only ever transient and not constant.

Whale is a book that made me feel so much. I didn’t want it to end – as stereotypical as this statement gets about things we love; it couldn’t be truer for me when it came to this read. I am so glad that this was translated so beautifully from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim – she takes the novel and makes it her own. She tells the story of Geumbok, of her daughter, of her lovers, of the twins, of the elephant, and of everyone in the novel. It stops being a novel by Cheon Myeong-kwan and takes the form of being the translator’s novel, at least for me. That is the beauty of translation, of how it can resonate with the reader because of the expression and words, and emotions chosen by the translator. Of how they make a work theirs and see it for what it truly is.

The plot of this book cannot be explained by me, and I shall not try doing that. What I will say is that you would be missing out on something extremely special by choosing not to read this one, and it will be a huge loss. So, choose wisely. That’s all.

Read 15 of 2023. Hospital by Sanya Rushdi. Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha

I read “Hospital” with trepidation. I was apprehensive about getting triggered regarding my mental health issues, but if anything, I am glad I read it, because while it may seem that the book is about descent into madness and maybe to some extent it is, but it is also about so much more. It is primarily about language, and Arunava Sinha being the translator par excellence that he is uses it sometimes playfully, sometimes using melancholia, mostly matter-of-fact, and sometimes as a means of self-exploration for the protagonist Sanya (yeah, it is a metanovel inspired by real-life events). He is in absolute sync with the mindset of the writer, the protagonist, and more than anything else with where the story unfolds – that in a hospital in Australia.

The story is told from the perspective of a patient – all in first person – of Sanya’s feelings, of what is unravelling slowly yet surely, of what is hidden behind a wall of caution when it comes to giving away too much, of safeguarding oneself and seeing the world as an enemy by and large, Hospital asks big questions: What is sanity? Who is sane? What is the societal parameter of someone being sane or not? And all of this is questionable a little more than ever, because you as a reader are made aware from the first page that the narration could be unreliable, but you cannot help it – you have to read it, you have to know how is it going to be for Sanya – what her life is going to turn out like – how her world is constantly shifting and changing.

Arunava’s translations are always a delight to read. He gets into the skin of language, and what emerges is something extraordinarily unique only to what he has translated from the source. Hospital cuts like a knife and makes you so uncomfortable as a reader, which I think should be one of the objectives of literature – to shake the reader, to get us to spaces that are suffocating, and make us see things – whether we trust them or not, rely on them or not, that is secondary – in fact should not even be considered, given how the story propels us further.

Hospital by Sanya Rushdi quietly takes you by the hand, and then leaves you to your own device in the mind of the protagonist. We live with her, and see the world through her, the places we know, and the places we are made aware of. The titular place then becomes most ordinary, turns extraordinary, lets us in, and makes us see all the failings and sometimes joy of living.

Read 13 of 2023. Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

It has been about a week since I read “Wandering Souls” and there are times in a day that I keep going back to the novel – in my thoughts, in my subconscious and scenes from it keep playing back. Scenes of kindness in times of unimaginable pain, trauma, and hurt. Scenes of what it means to be family – of creating family after its loss, of living life in a new country and yet while there is racism, alienation, and isolation, there is also unimaginable kindness, and kinship from unexpected quarters.

“Wandering Souls” is a book about the unsaid and the unknown feelings – feelings that are bottled, that you choose not to encounter, because it is best to move on, it is best to think about a hopeful future, it is best to dream of a better life. It is a book about atrocities that one country inflicts on another in the name of liberation, in the name of a conspiracy theory, because a nation was afraid it waged a war and ruined the lives of families. It is about closures, about finding peace and joy, about reconciliation of emotions, of a family torn apart and how they heal themselves.

Cecile Pin’s writing about three siblings (and a fourth) and their journey to a foreign land, to try and come to terms with how life has changed so quickly, and how to make sense of the world around them is heartbreaking, uplifting, and presents trauma in the sense of being most empathetic, catharsis-inducing for the reader, and for all of us to see and consider questions of humanity, kindness, and the role it plays in the world we live in.

Read 7 of 2023. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier. Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

Title: The Birthday Party
Author: Laurent Mauvignier
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 9781804270226
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 504
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier will test your patience. Nothing happens till the book reaches the last 250 pages or so. A lot happens – a lot more than we can imagine and Mauvignier takes us through lives in a hamlet, with such unassuming clarity and nonchalant writing that as a reader you feel removed and involved at the same time – if that can ever happen while reading a book, and yet it did happen to me.

The Birthday Party takes place in the present time, hurling back into time, traversing happiness, and melancholy, only for the characters to tumble into unbearable catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a French hamlet, is out on an errand for his wife Marion’s 40^th birthday. Their daughter Ida is on her way home from school to get a cake ready with their solitary artist neighbour Christine. In seconds, or rather what seems pages and pages, Christine and Ida get taken hostage by intruders. Why did this happen? What was the reason? Who is behind this? Is it connected to Patrice, Marion, and Christine’s past?

There is a lot to cover to get to the answers. Long winding paragraphs, each character and their experiences are fleshed with great care, the translation by Daniel Levin Becker is busy – all over the place, given how the original is – till the reader finds a rhythm and pace to the chaos that is about the unleash itself, both on the reader and the characters.

The Birthday Party is so much more than what meets the eye. A book about families, about should the past really matter when it comes down to it, about what we have done that cannot be undone, about the evening itself, about what we truly know when it comes to those closest to us, and what lays beneath – quietly, silently, most dramatically, waiting to explode.

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.