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. 

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.

A Beginner’s Guide to Japan

Many of us know Japan as a land of cutting edge technologies but Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan is not concerned with that. Through observations and provocations – as the jacket of Iyer’s book says it offers – it shows the subtler side of Japan, its contradictions & ideosyncracies – and tries to trace them to Japan’s history, society and myths that make Japan so unique and strange.

It’s a book of random observations – mostly two sentences long – sometimes supporting a singular point or broadly moving in the same direction and sometimes disjointed. To give these observations a context, there are introductory notes.

I am not sure what led Iyer to adopt this style…but if you are trying to explain something as abstract as soul of a nation, this style helps you tell lot of things without having to shoulder the responsibility of explaining each one of them. After all, how can you explain something like this”…fashion is a way of concealing hurts and hopes you are too shy to show the world.”

Japan is less about brash confidence and more about diffidence and hesitation. Japan exports base ball players but imports managers. In a land of hesitation, leaders are rarely found; everyone preferes being a follower.

Japan’s past is a constant presence on almost everything Japan does including its modernization, which, according to Iyer, is only on the surface; deep down Japan hardly changes. Japan is also a conformist society where your role in a group – social, cultural and even professional – supersedes your individual identity. For example, if you are going to a party, dressing up rather than dressing down is considered appropriate – because dressing up will put you in harmony with your surrounding; dressing down will be considered an expression of individuality.

The position of women is inferior to that of men. There is an overwhelming support for capital punishment.

I liked the observations. Some of them make you stop reading, close the book , look up and reflect on them. And I liked Iyer’s lyrical prose.

“Old world cultures cherish grace in defeat because they know we all lose in the end; New world cultures remain confident they can keep destiny at bay, perhaps forever.”

Gun Island – More Non Fiction Than Fiction But a Beginning Anyway

Some years ago Amitava Ghosh published a non fiction book on climate change – The Great Derangement – where he blamed literary fiction for overlooking climate change concerns, not just in last few years, when climate change has become a common concern, but since the beginning of this art form. Ghosh observed that several centuries ago serious fiction had set itself apart from its humbler cousin, commercial fiction, on the ground that the former would deal with more ‘realistic’ and serene matters concerning life, leaving such incredulous occurrences as a gale flattening a township triggering a mass exodus to commercial fiction. As a reult, serious fiction (or literary fiction as it is known today) steered clear of issues related to climate change. A storm flattening a township was too ‘unreal’ for it, after all.

As if to compensate for this sinful omission, Ghosh packs his latest offering Gun Island with hitherto-unimaginable and insedious things that climate change is causing around the world. Ocanic dead zones, rising water levels, slowly drowning cities, changing habits and habitats of marine life, wild fire, he covers the entire range in scholarly details.

If how climate change is transforming our natural world – water bodies and landscape – forms one aspect of the story, the other is the impact it has on human lives – climate change induced migration of humans from poor, climate change affected countries like Bangladesh to affluent countries of the West. The risk illegal migrants take, the subhuman conditions they subsist in while in transit, the parasitic middlemen – the dalals – who facilitate these migrations in lieu of money, the right wing parties the migrants run up against on Western shores, everything is explored in detail.

Technology, another modern day reality which is transforming our lives as completely as climate change – is the third pillar of Ghosh’s latest novel. In a world where everything seems to be on an irreversible decline, technology seems to be the only bright spot, although as the book seems to suggest there may be too much of it and while technology has disproportionately empowered those who are tech savvy, for those who are not, the world has become a stranger place.

Amidst all these, there is a story…but the story is so weak and fuzzy that it seems to be an excuse to inform the reader about the other things…instead of the other things being props for the story. Having read several materpieces of Ghosh – The Shadow Lines & the trilogy series – edification is expected but not at the expense of the story.

Deen Dutta is a collector of antique books, who goes to Sundarbans, the border of Bengal, to unravel a century old mystry concering a saint patron, Maa Manasa at the behest of Piya, a dolphin expert. Tipu, a foster son of Piya, is helping Deen with the visit working as a guide and a local wit. Rafi is a fisherman, who doesn’t see a great future for himself in the profession his family has pursued for generations because, thanks to climate change, the fishes are changing their habitat and slowly the entire ecology is changing to the point of no return. Cinta a Venetian scholar is trying to come to terms with her daughter Lucia’s death in a car accident which also claimed the life of her husband. Deen Dutta goes to Vanice following the trail of a gun merchant who several centuries ago had fled Sundarban to escape the wrath of Maa Manasa and after going through a series of experiences and reached Vanice.

Gun Island is my first fiction book on climate change and migration. Amitava Ghosh has made a start. I hope there would be many more to follow suit. A new genre has emerged.

Thackeray Mansion – A Building with Many Tales

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Writing a book series is a rock and hard place situation for a writer. If each installment is too independent of the previous ones then the reader who read the prior versions may feel shortchanged – being denied the advantage he had over other readers having read the earlier versions and established a plot and character familiarity; if they are too connected, then the author has the responsibility to show changes or developments in his characters’ outlook, personality etc as they go through different phases of life and grow through each one of them departing little by little from the person the reader met in the characters’ first appearance in the first edition of the series. This is not an easy thing to achieve for the author – the greater the number of characters the higher the complexities.

In both of his prequels to Thackeray Mansion, Shankar has not had to deal with the challenge of character progression at such a humongous level – he closes all his characters in each edition carrying almost none to the next one – except himself, the narrator and the central character. And as much as I liked reading all the books in the series, including Thackeray Mansion, which I finished recently, this flaw constantly leaped out at me. The outlook of the narrator hardly seems to change: his views and beliefs seem to spring from the same callow belief system he had when he stepped into the big bad world that’s Calcutta’s professional world as a clerk to the last British barrister of India.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, I enjoyed the third installment Thackeray Manson, sequel to Chowringhee and The Great Unknown (Koto Ojana Re). Like its prequels, Thackeray Manson tells multiple stories unfolding in Shankar’s workplace where he has found an employment and shelter after being shooed out of The Shahjahan Hotel, in Chowringhee. The first book in the series, The Great Unknown, had taken the readers into the world of court. Chowringhee told the story of a hotel. In Thackeray Manson, a house built by an English man whose ownership has changed several times and which has now fallen into bad times,  Shankar takes the readers into the lives of its tenants, each one distinctly different from the other.

Just as the places in which the centers of actions – the court and the hotel – are located contribute to their atmosphere in the prequels, in Thackeray Manson, too, the location of the place plays an important role in the story.  Scudder Street and places around it, parts of Calcutta which still remind one of the city’s past (its life, decadence and opulence), thanks to its buildings, lanes and in no small measure to a receding presence of Anglo Indians (most of whom have migrated to the west) and people who were wealthy ones but are broke now . They together construct the world of the book.

But most importantly, in keeping with the tradition of the series, Thackeray Manson gives the reader a glimpse Calcutta’s real estate industry – and narrates its history starting from the time of the Raj to modern times.

The book delivers what you expect from Shankar. Numerous tales unfolding one after another with three things in common: the narrator; the setting within which either the characters currently operate or share some connection with; and a tragic ending to each one of the stories (almost without any exception). So much so that you feel these could be a bunch of short stories, completely disparate, with only three common dots joining them together.