Reading Dyer and Batuman ....

I am flitting between two totally different writers, who, if not overtly, by measure of the emotions evoked are very similar; I don’t know if it’s just me but reading the sober, whimsy tongue-in-cheek Geoff Dyer ( Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it..) alternately with the energetic, airy, delightful Elif Batuman ( The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them) is a party of epic proportions.

In cinematic terms it’s like watching alternating shots by Wes Anderson and Terrence Malick add up into a perfect narrative montage. Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it… is about Dyer’s travel-pieces ( that’s the best word I could come up for the chapters of  his book) and The Possessed is a chronicle of Batuman’s experiences of studying Russian Literature and all sorts of people she meets in the process; While Elif sends you on silents spasms of chuckles, Geoff makes you hold them, turn them into a reverie and float in them for a while relating your own travel experiences to his before you let it all go in an audible sigh or even an utter, that startles cab drivers! I am alternating the essays from the books and it’s just wonderful. If you are not too caught up see if you can try the combination, you will surely not regret it.

Here's a shot of the index of Yoga for people.....what Kindle can't offer :)

More soon 

Third Class in Indian Railways

Gandhi was forty five when he returned to India - the land he had left as a teenager, the land that was now completely alien to him.  As the hero of the South Africa he was extended several invitations by the Congress to join the nascent ‘national freedom struggle’. He politely refused them; instead he chose to travel. He travelled extensively throughout the subcontinent, mostly on trains. The main purpose of such a venture, as he had said himself was ‘to get a grasp of the life’ in India.

During these jaunts, it is believed he made very elaborate entries on his ‘first’ impressions of India. When I picked up this book (free ebook lying in some corner of  the net) I was hoping to find his journal entries during these travels. But as it turned out this book was a compilation of six essays/ media articles/ speeches between 1915 – 1918, after the major chunk of his travels were done.

Enriched by his travels, and the success at Champaran, he started giving shape to his ideas - on a social, cultural and a political level.  These essays were his initial arguments, where he is still somewhat ambivalent, where he still comes across considering their pros and cons than being conclusive about them.  These ideas would later gather momentum, evolve much more powerfully to eventually enter the national consciousness as the core 'Gandhian' values.

The first essay is actually about the travel in third class in Indian trains. He describes the hopeless conditions of the third class in Indian Railways and as always with Gandhi, makes a case for their improvement.  These passages are perhaps one of the earliest documentation of reverse culture shock by an Indian. Consider this one, and imagine the comment section if the following passage for published in an Indian web portal:

Not during the whole of the journey was the compartment once swept or cleaned. The result was that every time you walked on the floor or rather cut your way through the passengers seated on the floor, you waded through dirt.

The closet was also not cleaned during the journey and there was no water in the water tank.

Refreshments sold to the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales. These were previously sampled by millions of flies. I asked some of the passengers who went in for these dainties to give their opinion. Many of them used choice expressions as to the quality but were satisfied to state that they were helpless in the matter; they had to take things as they came.

Subsequent essays are values one usually associates with Gandhi. Ideas like  'vernaculars' and 'The Moral Basis of Co-operation' are just of historical relevance now. Few others, like the chapter on 'Ahimsa' are perhaps still valid? The one titled 'Swadeshi' is penetrative where he espouses how religion and politics in India are inseparable. ( which is true, contrary to liberal opinion even to this day). Gandhi’s arguments are times warped, at times too vague but it does reflect something unique for that time – one man observing the world, preparing a ground report, and suggesting solutions.

The writing is typically colonial replete with waxing and waning of humility and excessive consideration. Personally, as far as the ideas are concerned, nothing written was new to me; I was looking to find a personal voice, something more direct that would reflect on the writer himself. But Gandhi writes in a very impersonal tone. Even in the article 'National Dress' where he defends against personal attacks  (Irwin who had criticized Gandhi for choice of desi clothes against European attire) he remains rather circumspect.

What the book reaffirms to me is what Naipaul had written long back about Gandhi –

No one, no one had understood India like Gandhi had.

As an aside here’s Gandhi writing about Banks and credit system in 1917. See if it rings any bells?

The credit which is becoming the money power of the world has little moral basis and is not a synonym for Trust or Faith, which are purely moral qualities. After twenty years' experience of hundreds of men, who had dealings with banks in South Africa, the opinion I had so often heard expressed has become firmly rooted in me, that the greater the rascal the greater the credit he enjoys with his banks. The banks do not pry into his moral character: they are satisfied that he meets his overdrafts and promissory notes punctually. The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath. I have witnessed the ruin of many a home through the system, and it has made no difference whether the credit was labelled cooperative or otherwise. The deadly coil has made possible the devastating spectacle in Europe, which we are helplessly looking on.

The entire book, first published in an Indian Lahore, is now available for free online. Suggested for light reading may be as a break in between heavy books. Obviously for readers interested in  Pre-independent India and Gandhi.

Among other things, this is my first book read on Kindle.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi...

Apologies for the absence dear readers, but I come with the promise of many reviews. Here's the first one : 

I became more interested in Geoff Dyer after I read Lavanya's post here. But other affairs, Galgut and travel kept me occupied. Dyer is not as popular a writer to walk into a bookstore and stumble between Emma Donaghue and Dave Eggers, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found Dyer's Jeff in Venice and Death in Varanasi at Landmark in Bangalore, India.   Took it along to Rajasthan where I travelled, and eventually, between other worries, twittering and work finished it a good month after I had bought it.

This is my first Dyer and I liked it. That, in itself,  would make it unlikable for an average reader.

The book is really two separate novellas: the first is the story of Jeff Atman, an aimless middle rung journalist in London who is assigned to cover the Venice Binneale to a ‘scoop’ interview around a story of prized nude photograph of a singer?

The action moves to very ‘otter’ than ever before Venice. Jeff, portrayed as somewhat of an outsider at the international art scene, trudges along the parties and galleries gulping Bellinis and snorting Cocaine. He meets Laura an American gallery owner (or was she a curator?)  Anyway, they hit off. They roam around piazzos and gallerias cracking airy drunken jokes and witty repartees at each other. They duly end up doing what two people who hit off are expected to do – have roaring sex! The segment is well written – cynical but dipped in comical smugness, an unmistakable sense of lurking gaiety pervades through the pages as Jeff looks down upon the clichés and the quirks of art world between his broad range of experiences in Venice - absolute aimlessness ( keenly observing a pigeon on a pavement or snorting cocaine in a cathedral) to kinky sex and snogging in public toilets. He even manages to get stoned with his celebrity interviewee.  I loved the sense of humour that Dyer smuggles into this segment - not overt yet well ingrained within the dialogues. There are quite a bit of puns too. (Dyer – hair dye etc) 

The second part is the story of an unnamed protagonist (May be Dyer / may be Jeff, it is never revealed ) who gets assigned ( ? again)  at the last minute as a substitute to write an article about Varanasi the historical-holy city of the Hindus.

He starts off at a typical arm's distance – mildly disdainful of the poor hygiene and the mad Indian traffic, but slowly gets drawn into the Hindu idea of the life and universe.  He overstays well past his assignment, gets initially attracted to a fellow Brit and later a Swiss traveler but not as much as to the city itself which continually entices him like a long lost lover, unraveling through its strange inhabitants and mysterious ways that appear, at once, both profound and meaningless to him. Under such contradictions he grows more interested in mulling over his existence and life in general; he becomes more distant from his wants and lacks, finally he is shown to develop abstract spiritual ideas of his own. 


The second segment, needless to say, is more engaging  - the Dyer potshots are more subtle though at times gross and unnecessary ( talking goat - a chide at Rushdie and other magical realists). The description of the scape is more detailed, which lingers away as the book progresses. The change to within is well captured, as the protagonist turns more reflective and zany by the page. 

At times the book was predictable, at parts needed tighter writing, but generally I liked it. It's in my favourite genre too: part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophy without any plot whatsoever. Readers looking for plots are suggested to make an easier choice.  I loved both the novellas, each I could easily relate to: hedonistic frivolity of the west to the silent fatalism of the east. The book draws its title from the old Thomas Mann classic – Death in Venice - a novel that also deals with the same themes of life and death but with somewhat greater intensity. 

This is a love it or hate it sort of a book. I get a feeling that goes for Dyer as a writer too. Once you finished the book it’s not hard to see why Dyer chose to weave in the two cities as a part of a book. In essence, the book is about the these two cities, their similarities and contradictions. Both are very distinct cities – literally poles apart yet very similar. Varanasi being symbol of the abstractness of Hindu philosophy while Venice an international art hub of sorts.  Both attract travellers but for totally different reasons. 


Venice isn’t as detailed as Varanasi in the book, but I still suppose, it’s fair to say that the book is a charming tribute to both the cities, a sort of testimonial that makes you run to them the very next holiday. I haven’t been to Varanasi but I already feel I know a lot about it. I’ve even been googling hotel Ganges View.


Now onto other Dyers.

A reader's manual of painting and calligraphy

I shall go on painting the second picture but I know it will never be finished. I have tried without success and there is no clearer proof of my failure and frustration than this sheet of paper on which I am starting to write. Sooner or later I shall move from the first picture to the second and then turn to my writing, or I shall skip the intermediate stage or stop in the middle of a word to apply another brushstroke to the portrait commissioned by S. or to that other portrait alongside it which S. will never see. When that day comes I shall know no more than I know today (namely, that both pictures are worthless). But I shall be able to decide whether I was right to allow myself to be tempted by a form of expression which is not mine, although this same temptation may mean in the end that the form of expression I have been using as carefully as if I were following the fixed rules of some manual was not mine either. For the moment I prefer not to think about what I shall do if this writing comes to nothing, if, from now on, my white canvases and blank sheets of paper become a world orbiting thousands of light-years away where I shall not be able to leave the slightest trace. If, in a word, it were dishonest to pick up a brush or pen or if, once more in a word (the first time I did not succeed), I must deny myself the right to communicate or express myself, because I shall have tried and failed and there will be no further opportunities. (p. 3, tr. Giovanni Pontiero)

The start of José Saramago's Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is unmistakable in its trademark tone. The lulls and pauses in the phrasing are searching for a way forward. The prose is laden with qualifications, trying to overcome the clauses that skirt away from the general idea. The ideas are spreading like ripples in the pond, while above hovers a unique voice, a singular mind, a ruthless thought process. The only comparison I can instantly think of is the masterful opening of a Javier Marías.

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is a work of fiction, a novel, but it is an essay in the same way that Blindness and Seeing are essays on blindness and lucidity. It is narrated by H., a fifty-year old painter commissioned by S. for a portrait. The first few pages unfold slowly, telling of H.'s difficulties in producing two simultaneous portraits of his client. In order to get around to this problem, or more like to escape from it, H. decided to produce another third portrait of S., but this time the image will be in words. Through some hidden impulse or instinct or whatever, H. decided to turn into writing (the "calligraphy" in the title).

I never expected this book to develop in the opening chapter a similar theme of another novel I finished last year, also from the Portuguese language. The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector (tr. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz) is narrated by a female painter who writes of her innermost consciousness and feelings the way paint drips from her brush pallette, i.e., the way consciousness streams forth from a fountain of imagination. But where Lispector's prose issues forth quick as quicksilver, Saramago's brush paints from a slow easel, building from primary colors as he established his plot. But as in Lispector's "art book," plot is probably the least of Saramago's concern here. Manual is, from the outset, a novel of ideas: ideas about art, about the expressions and forms that art makes, and the relationships of these art forms.

Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia first came out in 1976, only the author's second published novel at that time. The first, the still untranslated The Land of Sin, appeared almost thirty years earlier. In between, he produced some collections of poetry and newspaper articles. The English translation of Manual appeared in hardcover from Carcanet Press in 1994, and in paperback from the same publisher a year later. Among his earliest works in the original Portuguese, this is the first "window" to his works as it remains to be the earliest with an English translation. But the translation has since gone out of print.

Last year The Collected Novels of José Saramago was released in e-book format, as an exclusive compendium of Saramago's fiction (twelve novels and one novella). This collection is missing Manual of Painting and Calligraphy. Why this book was not reprinted or included in the collected edition of his fiction is a mystery to me. Was it due to the quality of the translation? Saramago was known for being very exacting about translation of his books. There was an instance when the novelist requested for a more faithful English translation of Baltasar & Blimunda as the first published version contains editorial amendments that he wished to be overruled. What could be the reason for him to suppress this translation while he was still alive?

Maybe initial sales of Manual were poor so the publisher did not produce any more copies? But Saramago, Nobel laureate, is a big name now, almost a brand. His name recall alone will be enough to pull new readers and drive sales of this book, especially a book with such a lyrical title.

Perhaps Saramago consider this work to be minor, not at par with his later novels which are considered masterpieces? But the book has been released lately in other languages. So is it the English translation again? But Giovanni Pontiero is a multi-awarded translator and well-regarded even by Saramago.

Maybe there are some copyright issues with this book? Or maybe the supposedly overt political theme of the book is the reason? I doubt it. Saramago courted controversy like black ink stain on bright white paper.

Whatever the reason, the rarity of this novel makes it Saramago's priciest book.

Okay. Here's the bragging part.

I happen to own both the paperback and hardcover. A month or so before the Senhor died, the OOP book suddenly appeared online at a very cheap price. Through a friend, I was able to snag a copy of the hardback. The paperback I got from the book swapping site BookMooch, of all places.

Reader Alert: Open Library

I am still navigating Open Library but here is what is exciting:

• Over a million free e-books
• Books can be read or read-to (there is a nice audio integration) - Gutenberg + Librivox say
• Signing up is free; it gives you the ability to add or edit stuff
• You can create lists (woo hoo! though I wonder why I need another listing service for)
• A small but growing lending library

Signing up already? That's what I thought...

The Captive Mind

I started reading this book somewhere in April last year, then abandoned it due to travel schedules, and have been reading it amidst different books since last month. A long drawn read sometimes hampers a reading experience, but not when the book has been written with as much clarity as Czeslaw Milosz has accorded the Captive Mind.

Milosz, a Polish writer, lived through the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and the Russian rule in Poland, and initially lent his cooperation to the Communist government by becoming the Government's Literary attache to Paris. These were the initial times, when the Red Army was trying to win Intellectuals over by giving them some literary freedom, as long as they did not criticize Russia or its theories in their writing. Neutrality then, was acceptable. But soon, the noose tightened to swerve these intellectuals into praising the regime, and it was no longer possible to be a writer without contributing to the party's agenda. Milosz struggled with this acceptance for a while, until his ideas of literary freedom won and he seeked political asylum in Paris. Captive Mind was completed during this phase, even though the seed had begun during his years of cooperation.
This background is essential to a book in which Milosz explains his initial cooperation and the cooperation of several Polish intellectuals. He does this through a couple of concepts, followed by 4 biographies of such writers. The concepts are interesting. Take for example the pill of Murti Bing. In a fantasy written by Witkievicz, an Eastern Invader Murti Bing defeats Poland, and offers a pill of happiness to its exhausted people. People take it willingly, because everyone inherently wants to move to a harmonious state. Milosz likens the pill to Communism - which offers a harmonious existence to all men, dissolving divides. People exhausted from the Nazi rule willingly accept it.
What takes the center-stage in the book are the four biographies of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. All of these are Polish writers, and for different reasons are drawn to the idea of Communism. Alpha is drawn to purity and monumental tragedy, which a war-torn country gives him aplenty. Beta is a disappointed lover, a nihilist who has witnessed first hand the society that builds up in a concentration camp, and is a brutal narrator of it. The realism of Marxist regime appealed to his love for brutal truth, as did its materialism.
Gamma, a slave of history was a non-entity in the literary world before the war, but was elevated to a position of prominence & power with his embrace of the socialist regime.Lastly Delta, the troubadour was a jocose storyteller, who liked the regime because it paid him for his popular writing.
These portraits are tremendous, and each presents a different logic for embrace of a tyrannical regime. These writers, including Milosz are making some compromises, but considering the alternative - of not being able to write, or of exile to a nation where no can read your writing, their compromise does not warrant a harsh judgment. I would really like to know who these authors are that Milosz represents, and if possible read something from them - at least from Beta, whose writing seems a harsh portrayal of human nature under duress.
Milosz' language is a little poetic, he is not a debater and he sometimes digresses from the argument into memory lanes, which makes the book a little charming,and melancholy despite the ideological theme.
Once the portraits have ended, the book has become a bit monotonous. Perhaps Milosz should have ended sooner.
An interesting term in the book: Ketman. Act of paying lip service to the authority while holding personal opposition. Wonder why it has not come up in my earlier Totalitarian reads.

Don Q, via Cide Hamete

Do we live in the age of translation?

Cervantes, an early instance of greatness in the "history" of the novel, has a ready answer in Don Quixote. The novel is presented as a translation by a Spanish-speaking Moor, from the Arabic of a certain historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, of the history of the knight errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. While the unnamed narrator recounts this "translated" history, he constantly reminds us of this fact. At several junctures in the novel, the narrator interjects the (i) translator's and (ii) his own annotations of the Arab's version of the events. In Part II, for example, the narrator interrupts the story to say:

Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words: 'I swear as a Christian and as a Catholic ...'; to which the translator adds that when Cide Hamete swore as a Christian and a Catholic, being a Moor, as he most certainly was, he only meant to say that just as when the Christian and Catholic swears something he swears, or should swear, the truth, and he swears to tell the truth in everything he says, so Cide Hamete was also telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Christian and a Catholic, in everything he wrote about Don Quixote ... [Part II, Chapter XXVII, tr. John Rutherford]

Ah, the truth! And then Cide Hamete (through the translator, via the narrator) goes on to discuss a seeming "inconsistency" of previous events in the first part of the history, specifically the theft of Sancho Panza's donkey by the convict Ginés de Pasamonte. The inconsistency arises presumably from the "printers' carelessness" that led to the omission of the incident in the publication of the first part of the history. This "has led many people to offer their opinions and blame the printing mistake on the author's poor memory."

It appears then Cervantes craftily introduces a mistake in this long and clumsy history, but its teller (Cide Hamete), its translator, and its narrator are there to set the record straight. The mistake acquires a new kind of significance as Ginés, now a puppeteer and master of a fortune-telling ape, becomes embroiled again in the glorious adventure of our knight errant and his squire.

To answer the question posed above, it may be best to quote again an interruption by our narrator regarding the integrity of the history, demonstrating as it is how the telling of Truth (with the capital t) in every History is ever so relative in every telling of it. At every remove, of the novelist from the story, of the translator from the source, of the teller from the tale, and of the reader from the page (not to mention the English translator's remove from the Spanish prose), the accumulation of subjective interpretations and authorial decisions is staggering.

It is said that in the original manuscript of this history one reads that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter his translator did not render it as the Moor had written it, with some sort of complaint against himself for having undertaken such a dry and limited history as this one about Don Quixote, always feeling himself restricted to talking about him and Sancho, never daring to venture out into any digressions or more serious and entertaining episodes; and Cide Hamete added that to have his mind, his hand and his pen always constrained to writing about one subject and speaking through the mouths of so few characters was intolerable drudgery, which yielded nothing to the author's advantage, and that to avoid this problem he had in the first part had recourse to certain tales, like those of Inappropriate Curiosity and the Captive Captain, which stand, as it were, apart from the main story – although the other tales narrated there are events in which Don Quixote himself was involved and which could not be omitted. [Part II, Chapter XLIV]

And then the narrator went on to describe Cide Hamete's justifications for the apparent divergence of style between the first and second parts of the history. Both the translator and narrator of the Quixote seem to be acting as apologists for the historian, smoothing out the wrinkles in the narrative, and justifying the choices and style of its composition.


Note: I'm presently on page 792 of the book, which I'm reading intermittently since July as part of a group read. Obviously I was waylaid by other books and failed to stick to the schedule. I still have some 200 pages to cover.