Putting it together: The joy of anthologies

SPEAKING VOLUMES

One of my sharpest memories is of walking into a venerable London bookstore and stopping in my tracks when I saw the section—not a bookshelf or two, an entire section—devoted to anthologies. I believe I had the same expression on my face that I once saw on a cat that had entered a fishmarket for the very first time in its life, ravening greed mingled with bafflement—where to turn next?

It’s hard to find good anthologies in India; the ones so freely available in the US and UK seldom make their way over here. But often it’s been anthologies, rather than any individual book, that have offered me the best of the year’s reading. Who could withstand Jeffrey Eugenides’ collection of great love stories, My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, for instance? This came out in early 2008, and my copy already has the dog-eared, comfortably used look of a book that’s been around and been re-read for over a decade.

Eugenides does a wonderful job of recording the random but focused nature of the anthologist’s task: “In discovering and gathering these stories, my method has been maximally random and sociable. At lectures and book parties, in elevators with editors and at literary festivals with fellow novelists, on college campuses, in loud tapas bars, over a Delirium Tremens at the Hopleaf on Clark Street, I asked whoever happened to be nearby to name a favourite love story.”

This captures the compulsive nature of the true anthologist—a need to collect, to weed out, to have everything that is necessary—as well as the nature of the task, which is to plunder the treasures of the collective reading mind. Eugenides, a disturbingly brilliant writer, had an edge in that the brains he picked belonged to the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Jhumpa Lahiri, but most anthologists would confess to employing the same technique.

Another of the staples in our household every year is a collection of the year’s best science writing, and the annual compilation of science fiction writing edited by Gardner Dozois. There are plenty of SF anthologies around, but after years of doing this, Dozois has a knack for finding the timeless stories, the ones that will remain classics 25 years down the road.

Here are the three Indian anthologies that stood out for me this year, for very different reasons. 

 

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction: Edited by Rakesh Khanna, translated by Pritham K Chakravarthy: I’ve written about this before, but this was an absolute delight. The titles of the stories give you a sense of what to expect—’Hurricane Vaij’, ‘Sweetheart, Please Die!’, ‘Tokyo Rose’, ‘Glory Be To The Love That Kills’. This unabashedly pulp collection features intrepid detectives, supernatural forces, killer robots and other delectable treats, and the translation is almost pitch-perfect. In India, where “translated fiction” can often be shorthand for “mind-numbingly boring ‘classic’”, this collection was a breath of fresh air. 
 

Memory’s Gold: writings on Calcutta: Edited by Amit Chaudhuri: This collection has been almost a decade in the making, and it’s simultaneously intriguing and imperfect. Amit Chaudhuri’s literary scholarship allows him to seek out memoirs, obscure writers and poetry that would have escaped the eye of a less well-read editor, but his tastes can be limiting. I know how unfair it is to accuse an anthologist of sins of omission—at 540 pages, Memory’s Gold packs in as much as it can of Calcutta’s history, sloth, colour and insanity—but there just isn’t enough on film, food and sports, to name three grand Calcuttan obsessions. Despite these limitations, this is one of the great anthologies about any Indian city. 
 

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets: Edited by Jeet Thayil: This collection, edited by one of our most intelligent contemporary Indian poets, has “authoritative” stamped all across it, but aside from the wide span and range of poetry it contains, it’s also interesting for the debates it sparks off. William Radice pleaded in a recent review for less gloom and more Indian colour and Indian rhythms.

Thayil wrote a fierce rebuttal asking why Indian writers needed to be held to standards that he felt were deeply Orientalist and old-fashioned. It’s the old debate: Does the West still expect Indian writers to produce the equivalent of postcards, pretty and informative but depthless works? Or, if you take the opposite point of view, is contemporary Indian writing dour and insular? I think Thayil’s anthology stands as enough of a rebuttal in its own right, but this argument isn’t going to go away.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

(Disclaimer: The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal.)