| The year saw new books by Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach), Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero) and a score of others. Anne Enright's The Gathering(Vintage Books) won the Booker with her tale of the nine Hegarty siblings as they attend the wake for their alcoholic brother. Enright's sympathetic look at a family embracing its own dysfunction is beautifully wrought, but like many Booker winners, this may not be all that well remembered a few decades down the line.
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| Don deLillo's Falling Man (Picador) took on 9/11 from the perspective of a performance artist walking away from the wreckage of the Twin Towers. DeLillo's prose hums with controlled anguish in a book that bears comparison with works like Underworld. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Penguin) asks: what if a terrorist is someone who has been welcomed into and found a place in our world, rather than an outsider? Hamid found a slick narrative device by placing his 'fundamentalist' at a Lahore cafe in conversation with a silent, presumably American, figure who remains shadowy until the very last sentence. David Davidar grappled, less successfully, with the complexities of the Babri Masjid novel in his second book, the punctilious and polemical The Solitude of Emperors (Weidenfeld & Nicholson). There were moments when Solitude flashed into life, but it was burdened by the weight of its own arguments.
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| David Leavitt offered a very different perspective on the outsider-figure with The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury), a precise and often deeply moving fictionalised study of the relationship between the mathematical genius Ramanujan and his mentor, the Cambridge don Hardy. Leavitt quite deliberately chooses to describe both Ramanujan's homesickness and alienation in England as well as his "alienness". We see Ramanujan not with the sympathetic gaze of the Indian who has crossed the Kala Pani himself, but with the incomprehension of the English who cannot understand why the vegetarian mathematician can't eat their food.
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| Equally close to home was Indra Sinha's Booker-shortlisted Animal's People (Simon & Schuster), a look at Bhopal's tragedy from the viewpoint of a survivor who possesses one of the most darkly comic and horrific voices in all of Indian fiction. Many reviewers noted that Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions (Hamish Hamilton) featured not a single Asian character -- an inevitable shift, given Kunzru's fascination in this book with the revolutionaries of the 1970s. As Mike Frame grapples with his revolutionary past and his blandly conventional present, Kunzru sets up interesting tensions, though the novel is often overwhelmed by the weight of its own political obsessions.
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| One of Indian fiction's most bizarre and beloved characters, H Hatterr, was back as the NYRB released a new edition of G V Desani's classic All About H Hatterr (NYRB). It was the year of the classic: for all the buzz about 1857, perhaps the book that most captured the essence of the Mutiny was Ahmed Ali's 1940 classic, elegant and elegiac Twilight in Delhi (Rupa).
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| Two different but equally brilliant examinations of war came from the graphic novel genre. Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly) made Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis look like a comic book for kids. Modan's protagonist is an Israeli taxi driver who wants to know if his father was killed in a suicide bombing; his father's much younger lover, Numi, has her own games to play. And Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman (Grand Central) satirised the idea of war as raw material for an ever-hungry media machine in Shooting War, which gained a cult following online before it was released in old-fashioned tree form.
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| But if I had to choose just two novels from this year's crop, they would be Roberto Bolano's extraordinary The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (Picador). Johnson's Tree of Smoke proves that there is, indeed, room for another Vietnam novel: this one captures the intensity and insanity of 'Nam for the cynical generation that saw Iraq as just another immersive role-playing game. Bolano's poet, invited to join a group of literary guerrillas, notes in a first sentence that should give you some idea of the pleasures ahead: "I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."
nilanjanasroy@gmail.com (Disclaimer: The columnist is Editor, EastWest and Westland Books; these are her personal views.) |
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