Books | A new leaf

Hardcore political allegory? A feminist fable? Magical realism? A love story? Noneall of the above? K.R. Meera’s Qabar (published by Eka), translated from the Malayalam by Nisha Susan, was impossible to pin down, which made reading it a magical as well as disturbing experience. What more can you ask for from a novel?No matter what the theme of his fiction is, Jerry Pinto as novelist does life and Mumbai—not always in that order—in a way that plays with every sensation and feeling that you thought you had under control. The Education of Yuri (Speaking Tiger) was no exception.Small things like these novels, one of them titled Small Things Like These (Grove Press), remind us that you don’t need to write a doorstopper to tell a big, big story that will draw you in with its characters and sense of place or time. Claire Keegan’s novel needs just over an hour to read, and stays with you for a long, long time. Amitabha Bagchi writes his fiction in English and candidly acknowledges being inspired by the greats of Hindustani writing. His novels carry the unmistakable strains of that music. Which is why his labour of love, the translations of Munir Niazi’s ghazals into English, published as Lost Paradise: Selected Ghazals (Juggernaut), is such a pleasure to savour..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}One of the joys of being fanatical about a musician is imagining the circumstances in which their best songs were written. When the musician in question is Leonard Cohen, it’s necessary to imagine the backstory of every song of his. Leonard Cohen: On a Wire (Drawn & Quarterly), drawn and written by Philippe Girard in French and translated into English by Helge Dascher and Karen Houle, does just that in a wonderful graphic novel format. I read it as slowly as Cohen sang.Arunava Sinha translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali to English. His latest translation is Dear Reader: A Memoir, by SankarResisting the temptation to include my own books among the favourites published in 2022, I immediately thought of three other books that I loved, quite different from one another.The first is Jennifer Homans’ Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century (Penguin Random House), about the great ballet-master and choreographer of the New York City Ballet, who was Homans’ teacher (and, long ago, mine). Homans hauntingly and in almost novelistic detail re-evokes the people and the ideas of the Russian world in which Balanchine grew up, and the European and American worlds of music and ballet that he changed forever. The second is Lorraine Daston’s Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press). Daston manages brilliantly, often with humour and wit, to balance fascinating, often arcane details from many different worlds—from the Rule of Saint Benedict to the worlds of fashion and spelling and law—with important, grand conclusions that will be debated for some time to come.The third is Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns (Speaking Tiger), edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle. I was astonished and delighted to discover how many of the Indian authors I thought I knew (and others I had never yet encountered) had in fact written, unbeknownst to me, fascinating stories, essays and poems about Christmas. From a poem by Rabindranath Tagore to a memoir by Damodar Mauzo, these 27 writings reveal an astonishing range of thoughtful responses to Christmas—some satirical, many pious—by fine Indian writers.Wendy Doniger is a noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology. Her memoir, An American Girl in India, was published in 2022The world of Indian writing in English is a happy one. Why shouldn’t it be? There is no one to call the bluff, no one to say how awful or good it is, or why it is awful or good. Thus, a few hundred more books pour down the drain of forgetfulness in which slim books, especially slim first books, are easier to forget than fat ones. Avinab Datta-Areng’s Annus Horribilis (Penguin Random House India) is only 76 pages, but written, mostly, in big slabs of verse. Each sentence ignites the next one, and when you look up from the page, “Two men go past the gate carrying a cling-wrapped carving of Jesus.” When did we last see something as momentous as Annus Horribilis? For this we have to go back to Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri (1976), or Eunice de Souza’s Fix (1979), or Agha Shahid Ali’s The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987).In Vineet Gill’s Here and Hereafter (Penguin Random House India), we witness the birth of literary criticism in India, a work that can be read for its own sake as much as for what it tells us about Nirmal Verma, the subject of the book. And then there is the unclassifiable The Sweet Salt of Tamil (Navayana Publishing) by Tho Paramasivan, translated by V. Ramnarayan, which sold 50,000 copies in Tamil. Would it sell 5,000 in English? And why hasn’t anyone written a book called The Sweet Salt of Punjabi, my mother tongue?Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is a poet, translator and critic. He edited The Book of Indian Essays (2020) Published By: Aditya Mohan WigPublished On: Dec 30, 2022--- ENDS ---

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Books | A new leaf

Writers ring out the year with their selections of the best books they read in 2022

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