Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

If you read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, you will understand what makes a city, its people and their lives.  The stories collectively say what Rome is to people who stay in the city or visit it. However, the themes are diverse. The Boundary is about a family which moves to rural Italy leaving their city life. P’s Party is about a writer whose preoccupation with a woman works itself into a hysteria of sexual desire and then he does something he lives to regret. P’s Party moves at a pace brisker than other stories in the collection.

More than the stories, it’s Jhumpa Lahiri”s languid, carefree prose which drew me to the book reminding me of the pleasures of reading her Unaccustomed Earth. However, it was a bit strange to imagine that I was reading a translated work, originally written in Italian, of a writer who until a few years ago wrote famous books in English.

At the time Roman Stories became available in India, I had read its review and had decided to get my hands on the book, but other releases in subsequent weeks had somewhat diminished my interest in it. One day I was in a large book store not for any particular book but to generally update myself with the latest releases and to reconnect with some old ones. A foreigner within earshot was asking a store assistant if they had Roman Stories – and the latter was not able to follow him. There was a copy of Roman Stories in front of me – I picked it up and gave it to the foreigner. A conversation ensued.

“This book is a translation from Italian and only a few years back Lahiri was a sensation in the world of English writing,” I said breaking the ice.

“Ohh…she is a scholar. As much as it is difficult to write a book in our own language…” He replied.  

The interest the book review had generated in me, which had diminished in subsequent weeks, rushed back. I purchased Roman Stories.

A theme that keeps recurring in the stories is the immigrant problem. Well Lit House is, of course, about a migrant family which bears the brunt of xenophobia. Most of the family moves back to their country of origin and the husband chooses to leave the white locality.  But the migrant theme keeps recurring in other stories suggesting that it’s now impossible to consider the Roman demographic scape without considering them.

But other characters also come up. A diplomat’s wife, an elderly lady who lives alone, youngsters who have taken to criminal activities, the book is a truly inclusive canvas.

A Room of One’s Own

I always knew A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was a novel (maybe my ignorance) and was surprised to discover one day at a bookstore that it’s a compilation of Woolf’s lectures at Oxford. The lectures are on literature with a keen focus on feminism. From Woolf’s childhood and how she was brought up as against her brothers’ upbringings to the misogyny of famous writers and thinkers, it includes everything. Woolfs, by the way, were a huge brood of siblings.

The lectures are a constant attack on patronizing attitude towards women. The attacks are well-reasoned arguments from a proud feminist and intellectual, and not laments of someone seeking sympathy. Woolf shines a light on women geniuses who had to give up on their pursuits because of discouragements and beliefs of a male-dominated society. Some of these women live in perpetual obscurity. She talks about talented women who had to give up on their talent and continue to live in obscurity overshadowed by their male relatives, or known only by their association with them. A very-talented sister of Shakespeare, who had undeniable literary talent, lies in an obscure grave. Similarly, there are many other women who gave up on their literary aspirations sometimes in fear of what other male writers would say about their outputs and it was considered completely normal to do so. She also talks admiringly about 19th century greats like Austin and Gorge Eliot.

A Room Of One’s Own is not political feminism with some predefined villains and an agenda. The views are mainly framed by personal experiences and reading. 

Papyrus – A fascinating read if a little parochial, a book review

After defeating Darius 3 to conquer Persia, when Alexander had walked into Darius’s palace and into his living room with his acolytes, they had found an exquisite box. Alexander had asked his men what he could keep in the box that would be befitting its exquisiteness. Gold and rare stones his men had replied. “No, I will keep my Iliad in it,” the world conqueror had shot back.

We have always had a strange relationship with books. Books have been revered, feared, assiduously preserved and burned. A look at how books continue to face proscription around the world – whether it’s Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Orwel’s 1984 – will tell you that our relationship with books has hardly transformed.  But books as we know them certainly have.  Books have evolved from engravings on stones to papyrus and animal skin scrolls to how we know them now. These developments range several thousands of years. Books predate and coexist with any historical event (empires, emperors, invasions, periods) you can think of. They form fascinating history, and Irine Vallejo has narrated it in Papyrus in a fascinating manner.

The book cover sets the expectation with the reader that Papyrus is only about earliest seminal books. But a few pages later you realize yes, it is but you are in for much more. The world that those books belonged to, their politics, evolution of languages, their adoption, starting and ending of civilizations, let alone empires, evolution of educational systems and so on. In short, Irine has dealt with a subject that spans probably all human developments from the beginning of civilization to date.

And yet you never feel that the narrative is going off the tangent. Each incident, personality, event which has contributed to the development of books and help build an ecosystem around them to sustain them and pass them on to posterity, is mindboggling. 

Each one opens up a whole new world of knowledge before you. Kudos of course to the subject she  has chosen, but also to her ability to pull together everything into a coherent narrative.

As I write this, I find it tempting to take you deep into at least one of the many worlds she recreates – its richness of details, diversity and fascinating-ness – but it would be unfair to talk about one and leave out another.

But broadly speaking, the Papyrus can be divided into two parts – ancient Greece and Roman Empire – and their cultural exchanges. The Roman Empire, for all its material achievements, was culturally inferior to Greece.

Rome’s writers were fewer and less celebrated than those of Greece producing fewer books than their Greek counterparts. To make up for it, Romans used to have Greek scribes, who were mostly slaves to rich Roman men, make Latin copies of Greek books and put them in their libraries passing them off as Roman literature.

Before printing arrived, books used to be manually copied and circulated to libraries and for personal possession. Books were costly and were mostly a privilege of the rich; beyond the means of commoners. Rome’s cultural cussedness notwithstanding, books and reading became more democratized and common during Roman Empire.

The book captures the developments that propelled books further post the classical European age very briefly. Great books, storage and dissemination systems that existed outside Europe, particularly in India, at the same time as the classical period in Europe, like Nalanda, have not found any mention. The geographical spread of the main narrative is Greece, the Roman Empire with a long halt in Egypt to cover the Library of Alexandria as the narrative mooring and referral point. The Euro centric focus of the book makes it a bit parochial, but it also keeps open the possibility of a sequel.

The Nutmeg’s Curse: A Review

To tell one story Amitav Ghosh tells another story in The Nutmeg Curse: Parables for A Planet In Crisis. The book is a sequel to The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Albeit the connection between the two books ends there. The Great Derangement had a tight scope: apathy of serious literature towards climate events.  Nutmeg’s Case, the sequel, on the other hand, has an expansive canvas: the book seems to carry the onus of telling the whole story about how capitalism is to blame about our present climate woes.

The narrative starts with brutal takeover of Banda Island by the Dutch for nutmeg but from there it moves to America during civil war. And from there, it further goes to other regions of the West to talk about the pernicious effects of treating the Earth as a resource.

But, to the decerning reader, the purpose of this narrative excess is always very clear; in fact as the countries and events come into the narrative sweep, the clearer it becomes: a strong indictment of imperialism and capitalism for looking upon all inanimate, natural things as resources to be used to fulfil greed.

The book scrutinizes both past and present to make some interesting points. The pandemic, which rocked the world couple of years ago and whose grip the world is slowly emerging from, was handled better by less capitalistic and “developed” countries like Cuba, Vietnam and even some African countries. According to Ghosh, their equitable societies and systems helped them respond to the pandemic better.

Wars, even those going back to the 19th century, are some of the biggest contributors to climate change. On a more specific note, Ghosh blames the advanced technologies used in famous war campaigns of the 19th century; the Opium War, for example, is one of them. There are many such advanced weaponry deployed by super powers in the wars they wage in modern times are equally to blame. “These technologies are not out of use in peace times,” he observes.

Amitabh Ghosh traces the origins of anti-climate activities to supremist beliefs which enjoyed wide subscription mostly among the educated white elites in the 18th and 19th centuries in England. Obnoxiously racist, these theories insisted that ‘weaker races’, African and other non Europeans races, would eventually die out, justifying colonial projects and the exploitation of humans and nature they involved.

The book observes that our pursuit of scientific truth to the exclusion of everything else has obscured us to the secrets of the natural world. That centuries of imperialism have marginalized the belief that nature is a living entity. That this marginalization was brought by imperialism relegating natives to the margins. And that movements around vitality of nature are breaking out in different parts of the world.

Amitav Ghosh is one of the greatest living writers. And as is expected of him, the book is an excellent piece of argument on why we should singularly blame capitalism and its various expressions for the  planetary crisis we are going through, but to blame capitalism alone, overlooking the industrialization that the communist countries went through in the 20th century, is to discuss one side of a problem.

It’s harmful if climate concerns get appropriated by the global Left. The more to the centre climate concerns remain, the easier it is to build a consensus across ideological barriers, to enlist more people to the cause.

Colonialism shouldn’t be seen through the prism of capitalism. Capitalism as an administrative idea hadn’t shaped up in the 18th and 19th centuries. If some men’s profiteering motive is capitalism, then it can be argued that capitalistic tendencies come more naturally to us unless we are conditioned by information/ awareness specific to a time period. Some people acting out of avarice in a world without international rules and oversight, is mere chaos, not capitalism.

Some people acting without any concern for something is ignorance caused by absence of awareness. It’s not capitalism. People live by the rules of their times. Toppling statues of 19th century figures would cause chaos, encourage unruliness. Not correct past wrongs. Nor address climate concerns. Because Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s works had Jew villains, we can’t blame them for anti Semitism.

Be that as it may, The Nutmeg’s Curse is a compelling read.

Remains of the Day – a Review

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro connects with you at different levels: as the story of a British butler who lived through exciting times; as the recollection about a man misunderstood man; as a reflection on a profession which probably doesn’t survive today at least not in the same shape and form (as in the 20s to 50s); a deliberation over professional values that are quite universal. But, at its heart, Remains of the Day is about England. When I was reading the book, I was surprised that I never read any book review mention this point. Maybe some did but I haven’t come across in the many reviews of this famous book I read before I read the book. And yet, through every page England leapt out at me. English cultural nuances, customs, beliefs, politics of the time, countryside, countryfolks and an England of war years slowly disappearing (its values, landscape, people, social order) to make way for an England of post war years.

 

The novel has the conciseness of any Kazuo Ishiguro novel – a tight plot, few characters, very few plot digressions. And within the limited frame, it explores plethora of issues, deals with multiple layers (immediate and broader themes, reality versus collective memory). The novel has a languishing feel to it, yet it never feels slow: there is always an undercurrent, tautness, a tension about how an unfolding situation will finally conclude. I guess this is signature Ishiguro.  Artist of the Floating World, which also had a very sprawling narrative canvas, had a similar dual feeling to it, an underlying tension without compromising on the charms of a reflective novel.

The year is 1956 and Stevens, an aging butler, is recollecting the years he spent serving Lord Darlington as a butler. The years were tumultuous, in between the 1^st and 2^nd World Wars. The Treaty of Versailles has crippled German economy through reparations and Nazism is on the rise. Lord Darlington, a Nazi sympathizer and a political activist of sorts, arranges meetings between high- ranking German officers and leading politicians from other European countries at his mansion to help the ‘German cause’. Stevens is a mute spectator to these meetings where things that are reshaping Europe are discussed. His dedication to the finer points of butlery obscures him to the events of global consequences unfolding before him.

However, in 1956, while journeying to the countryside of England many years after Lord Darlington is dead and now infamously remembered as a Nazi sympathizer, thanks to newspaper reports, Stevens struggles to reconcile what people he meets during the journey say about his former employer and how he remembers Lord Darlington, as a noble and kind person.

This was my fifth Ishiguro novel and each one only whips up my appetite for more.

Rebels Against the Raj – A Review

Ramachandra Guha’s latest book deals with a subject regarding India ‘s independence which gets very little attention. Rebels Against the Raj is about numerous Westerners who contributed to India’s independence struggle and social development in several ways. All of them mayn’t have been forgotten – Anne Basant and Mira Behn, for example – but we remember little more than their names. And the rest are completely buried in obscurity.

Guha has exhumed and brought them to light at a very curious time – The Rebels Against the Raj was released a few months before India celebrated the diamond jubilee of its independence. He writes in his foreword that it is relevant particularly at a time when Indians have stopped believing they have anything to learn from others.

Almost all these characters came to India and devoted themselves to the country inspired by Gandhiji. They accepted Gandhiji as their guru and followed his footsteps. The Mahatma is the linchpin around which the book revolves and as an ode to his central position in the book, its cover very artily and unobtrusively contains a white ‘M’ against a deep blue background.

However, not all the white rebels against the British Raj were beholden to Gandhiji at least not in the same measure. Anne Basant, for example, had come to India in the late 19^th century long before Gandhiji joined Indian politics and was a mentor of sorts to Gandhiji in his early years in politics and a critic and an adversary in later years. BG Horniman was not quite a critic of Gandhiji, nor an ideological disciple; he was rather a friend, an admirer who was enthusiastic about Gandhiji’s politics but never wanted to join it or be in the Mahatma’s shadow. It was partly because Horniman was a concrete professional, a newspaper editor, who believed the conduit for his contribution to society was journalism and not politics.

The book contains biographical sketches of the rebels going all the way to their death. Each sketch is placed within a broader narrative framework of the unfolding independence struggle. The framework moves to post-impendence years to track the lives of the white rebels most of whom stayed back in India after 1947 to continue their Gandhian social work.

What makes it fascinating to read is Guha hasn’t presented the entire length of a character’s life at a stretch. The sketches are presented in an episodic manner – dropping one and moving on to a new character and then picking up the thread of the former one later and taking it to an end.

The book poignantly narrates how after independence Gandhian values and ideals were slowly eschewed in matters of governance and administration to the dismay of many of the former rebels against the Raj.

Post-independence, Mira Behn had written several letters to his former comrade Jawaharlal Nehru decrying industrialization that was taking over the country triumphing Gandhiji’s message of a village-based economy. Guha produces many of the letters in the book.

But even as Gandhiji’s ideals were jettisoned in favour of industrialisation, there was no let-up in venerating the Mahatma as an individual.

Rebels Against the Raj has two strands to its narrative – Gandhiji and the foreign rebels against British Empire. Guha’s craftmanship as a writer is borne out by the fact that he has managed to maintain a balance between the two. The two are sometimes inseparable – preventing the book from becoming about one and not the other at any point.

Hooghly: The Global History of a River: a Review

‘Hooghly: The Global History of a River’ by Robert Ivermee helps you truly appreciate how a river, the mere existence of a waterway, determines the fate and destiny of the people and places around it -by helping humans lives to subsist and even thrive through trade and commerce, by attracting people and regimes from far and near with mercantile as well as political intentions to its shores. The book narrates the rise and fall of small towns of Bengal that came up around Hooghly, as the river is known when it enters Bengal, each one with its distinct history. Growing up in Calcutta I knew about these places – Chandanagore, Sirampore, Murshidabad etc – but not that they were products of such rich history.

To know the history of these places and the characters who played active roles in scripting their rise and fall is to know the foundations of India’s colonial history.  Because these really were the beginnings of the British colonial rule which established itself by, of course, dismantling whatever little of Islamic rule was left in India in 18^th century but also by triumphing over other European colonial powers, like the Portuguese, French and Dutch, that had set themselves up in various parts of India, mainly south and east, and had designs to perpetuate and expand their rules in the subcontinent.   

These contests between great powers of the West and even their relationships during peace times (which were very few) were often influenced by how political equations between them were in Europe. For example, the Napoleonic wars, in Europe, had strained the relations between France and England in India. But what is more fascinating is how French rule in Chandanogore and some other parts of India brought them in touch with ideas of French Revolution. By bringing in how ideas travelled from faraway Europe to India through colonizers Robert Ivermee has expanded the scope of the narrative showing that the colonial enterprise may have been only about avarice to start with but it ended up being much more and else.

One of the characteristics of this book is Robert writes about colonialization without hitting it with a sledgehammer, gently criticizing it where it is due (for example how the East India Company had handled Bengal famine in the 18th century) and mostly recording it as a piece of history.

Many of these places, particularly Chandanogore, were host to clashes between other colonial powers like France and Portugal, and Britain for dominance. The power balance constantly shifted between them.

Tentative foundation for modern education and social consciousness was first laid in some of these places.  In Srirampore the first printing press in India was set up for dissemination of missionary literature. Characters like William Carey now almost forgotten in India had come for missionary work but contributed immensely to society. Carey was among the first opponents of Sati.

The book informs that missionary work wasn’t very successful in India all but managing a few converts and had largely folded up in the 18^th century the original missionaries, including Carey, having died or left India or becoming too old by then. In England cognizance was taken of its negligible success in India. This brings into question the popularly held belief that the revolt of 1857 was caused by a growing insecurity among Hindus and Muslims about their religions being in trouble due to evangelism carried out by Christian missionaries in India.

The book’s biggest strength is amidst this sweeping historical narrative Robert Ivermee has not lost sight of his central topic – the Hooghly – and has maintained its centrality. He discusses British efforts to understand the river creating for the first time its map, studying its depth, which varies at different places, the dangers it poses to one navigating it and so on. Many projects were commissioned to understand the river, an indication of its significance to British trade and commerce. The book informs Hooghly is one of the most difficult rivers in the world to navigate. Steamers and ships that worked in rivers in other parts of the world failed in Hooghly. Navigators customized to Hooghly conditions had to be built.

As railways came up the importance of Hooghly as a medium of trade and commerce dropped. The book details the early private enthusiasts of railways in India, the teething problems it suffered in its early years. The book dedicates separate chapters to each one of the towns that came up around Hooghly dealing with Sagar Island (the Sunderbon stretch) at last. And this is where Ivermee connects Hooghly with its future. Here the narrative sweep is a bit longer than the other chapters as Ivermee takes us back to pre-British times to trace some of the superstations practiced at Ganga Sagar back in time. He expresses concern about the future of the river. His recurring refrain is the river has been exploited for profit.  

A plea to think differently in the digital age – a Review

‘A plea to think differently in the digital world: reflections on digitization and society’ by Peter Hagedoorn is a collection of essays written over last 10 years about issues facing the world today – large scale migrations, changing nature of nation states, cybercrimes etc.

When I read Peter’s credentials, I was tempted to check his views on these matters, one of the reasons why I chose to review this book. Peter Hagedoorn a physics engineer has mainly worked as a CIO and on digital transformation alternately for the public and private sector. And I must admit I have mixed feelings after reading the book.

The essays don’t particularly say anything that those of us familiar with current affairs already don’t know, but where the essays differ from pieces on the same subjects we come across in media is they provide solutions to the problems instead of just whining. The solutions are based on the ideas the author seems to be passionate about.

He says the world must be a globalized place without any space for the ‘we and they’ ideas that have taken over in the last few years. However, Hagedoorn is not a big fan of people from poorer migrating to West and believes in the age of digitization, it is possible for rich countries to distribute knowhow information to people staying in poorer countries helping them to improve their lives staying wherever they are. The smartphone, which almost everyone has now, has made it possible to disseminate information like never before, he believes.

Technical people’s ideas about human development tend to have a technology bias making them too optimistic about the potential of technology to overcome all problems overlooking the challenges brought in by diversity of human conditions which may make it difficult to apply technological solutions in a uniform manner (or to apply at all). Given Hagedoorn’s background, it is easy to understand that there is bias for digitization.

Rich countries sharing knowhow with poorer countries to help them improve their possibilities may seem very easy to do on the surface but may run into challenges in several undemocratic countries and societies which may be skeptical about seamless flow of information from Western democracies influencing the behavior of their citizens. Also, the assumption that everyone has a smartphone may be a little far-fetched in some countries, in different parts of the developing world, where an internet connection and a smartphone may still be a luxury for certain parts of the population.

It’s not as if this disparity in human conditions can’t be worked around but telling how to overcome situations outside Western homogeneity would have made the solutions more complete.

One of his essays is about the sinister side of the information fluidity brought by digitization. According to Peter, cybercrime has made perpetrating a crime an easy thing to do. Cyber criminals are hardest to catch because cybercrime gives complete anonymity to the cybercriminal. It also involves very low investment and risks. Cybercrime portals which operate with complete impunity make this form of crime easily accessible. For example, Ransomware as a Service (RaaS), the commonest way to introduce malwares into a computer or network, is freely available on these websites.

Peter blames it on callousness of governments about data security. Thankfully this callousness is slowly ebbing – now there are strong data protection laws like GDPR. Peter’s essay, being slightly dated, doesn’t account for the current developments in the world of data protection. But that’s understandable as he sets the expectation in the prologue by saying the essays have been written over a period of a decade.  

The essays reveal the interest of the author in the issues but lack personal touch, reading like academic journals – cold and distant. The same pieces would have acquired human warmth if Peter had thrown in bits and pieces of his personal experience with these issues. I am sure coming from the professional background he does he would have plenty of them. And if he had done that, the same pieces would have been transformed into takes of a physics engineer who has worked on digital transformation for years on how digitization is changing the world.  

Visit the review on Readsy: A plea to think differently in the digital age

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Gold by Thomas Greenbank

Gold by Thomas Greenbank has all the ingredients of a page turner. It has a straight forward plot, characters that are tied to the main plot and help further it rather than creating their own sub plots, a well defined villain whose villainy runs like a spine through the whole story, setting the tone for other characters and events. The plot has almost all the top current affair issues – misogyny, drug abuse and exploitation of aboriginals by a mining company.

If you have started feeling I am accusing the novel of being trite, you may be right. But Gold hardly pretends to be anything else.

Gold is an unpretentious genre novel narrating the story of two generations of the Kincaid family. Malcolm and Jamie, two brothers, start a mining company. They have hardly anything in common. Malcolm is an aggressive go-getter who doesn’t hesitate to resort to unethical practices to meet his ends, whereas Jamie is a sensitive and considerate human being.

Racheal is Malcolm’s girlfriend. Jarred by Malcolm’s psychotically aggressive personality, Racheal eventually gravitates towards the sensitive Jamie. However, in a twist of events, one day, Malcolm and Racheal find themselves alone. Malcolm violates her. Racheal gives birth to Lachie and Jamie dies in a road accident.

Lachie is more like Jamie, sensitive and idealistic, than his biological father Malcolm. They coexist despite their differences – their paths crossing and diverging again – until an incident related to mining brings them into conflict.

The novel is lengthy – at 590 plus pages – but Thomas has managed to maintain the tautness of its narrative.

It picks up at the beginning, then it slows down a bit, only to pick up again at the end to deliver a conclusive and a bit unexpected denouement. However, there are subplots Thomas doesn’t conclude. Lachie never comes to know that Malcolm was his biological father. A promising subplot concerning Racheal’s mother receives a short shrift. I am not sure if they were deliberately overlooked as they were not part of the main storyline or were oversights.  

Gold took me back to Sidney Sheldon and Jeffery Archer warts and all. The characters are a bit one-dimensional, but you identify with them. The chapters are short – you can race through several of them in one sitting. It’s an easy read – the hours spent reading it will not leave you stressed. It’s absorbing – and you will crave to return to it, to know what happens next.

The novel has a strange aspect to it: a made-for-the-youth feel. Its world is mostly occupied by young characters (college goers or fresh graduates just starting their lives). The first half of the novel is mostly inhabited by Malcolm, Jamie and Racheal when they are young and the second Lachie, his wife and friends when they are young.

The old get very little of the plot space. So the dialogues exchanged between the characters, their concerns, challenges and worldview, everything has a very youthful feeling to it. I am not sure whether it was deliberate, or it just happened. But I enjoyed reading Gold and if you like fast-paced narrative and a book you can live with for a while without feeling tired, you will like it too.

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/gold-thomas-greenbank#review

The Last Resort – Kay Tobler Liss

Kay Tobler Liss’s The Last Resort deals with an issue with global resonance in our times: how the needs of modern development encroaching on old ways of life drive them to a slow extinction. The Last Resort is about the conflict between the two sides involved in this narrative: the oppressors – states and corporations, and the tribal groups inhabiting ancient lands that have fallen prey to the insatiable needs of development.

The Last Resort

Paul Collins, a city-based corporate attorney, comes to Montauk, a village town, to escape his decaying marriage and his professional life which doesn’t motivate him anymore.  In Montauk, he has a chance meeting with a beautiful woman, Oshanta. Oshanta belongs to a Native American group which has been driven away from its ancestral land by state and corporate backed development. So much so that even its existence as a people was denied by the judiciary about a hundred years ago. And against this background a conflict is brewing. A group is trying to develop a golf course on the strip of land that Montauketts have inhabited for centuries.

Oshanta slowly opens the window of the Montauk world and its natives to Paul. And the latter slowly discovers a renewed interest in life – a cause to throw himself into, a place to find refuge in, and a love to live for. Trying to prevent the land from being used for a golf course, he decides to use his lawyerly skills and contacts to fight on the side of the beleaguered.

Kay Tobler Liss has dealt with the novel’s technical aspects deftly. Written in the first person with Paul Collins as the narrator, the narrative slowly widens its scope as it progresses, taking into its sweep the complete history of the land and its people, down to its fauna and flora. (Some of the descriptions of the place are simply breathtaking.)

And then the narrative gradually narrows its scope to zero in on the crisis of the golf course, bringing the two opposing groups together in a microcosm of a century-long conflict between the two groups.

The characters – Paul, Oshanta, Bertrand – have been developed well by having outlined their past and thereby bringing their motives into focus. The book doesn’t have too many characters which helps it stick to its point without unnecessary digressions.

Kay Tobler Liss presents a lot of conflicting perspectives – some direct, others abstract – from various stalwarts of philosophy to make her point about injustice caused to Native Americans and similar groups across the world.

It would have been easier to get reader sympathy by throwing in graphic scenes of violence against the natives or situations showing the natives being mortified. But Kay Tobler Liss chooses to appeal to the reader’s intellect rather than baser emotions. But I also believe doing so could have put more vigour into the narrative which at times slows down a bit and gets a little monotonous.  

https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/the-last-resort-kay-tobler-liss