Billion Dollar Whale is an unbelievable story about businessman turned international financier Low Taek Jho or the Asian Gatsby. He was the mastermind at the centre of the extraordinary Malaysian IMDB financial scandal. The 1MDB fund was designed to boost Malaysia’s economy through strategic investments. Instead it turned into a fantastic embezzlement story. The stories told in this book of renting airport hangars to throw extravagant parties with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Hosting parties at presidential suites of hotels where Hollywood stars troop in and out to discuss film productions. The manner in which a country was swindled of billions of dollars is astounding. For it to happen because Low Taek Jho managed to convince people around him of his lies is truly mind boggling. This is the information age when much of the information can be verified, so to accept anything that this man said or offered as the truth is quite presposterous. Nevertheless Tom Wright and Bradley Hope interviewed many, many people for this book. It is an attempt at investigating the story.
For now investigation has begun into this financial scandal. Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Najib Razak has gone on trial for his role. He faces seven charges in the first of several criminal cases accusing him of pocketing $681m (£522m) from the sovereign wealth fund 1MDB. ( BBC News, 3 April 2019 “Najib 1MDB trial: Malaysia ex-PM faces court in global financial scandal“) Meanwhile Jho Low remains a fugitive and has been charged in absentia in Malaysia. He is probably in China now. According to the authors this book is really an indictement of the failure of Wall Street, of global finance to self-regulate.
Again that dark, piercing look, the shine in her pupils which made me
sense that she was smiling behind her veil, as she said, “Did you ever read
those books as a kid where you got the power to become invisible?”
I laughed. ‘Your veil draws more attention than a woman in a bikini.’
‘Yes, perhaps. But still. Inside, it’s my own little private world. No
one knows what I look like, what I wear, how I style my hair. . .”
‘So, are you saying it makes you feel powerful?’
Sabyn Javeri’s Hijabistan is a collection
of short stories exploring the idea of wearing a hijab / head scarf. It also
manages to open conversations whether real in the story or imagined in the
reader’s mind about the position of women in families and society. Somehow it
does not seem to matter which nation the protagonists reside in – whether Pakistan
or Britain – it is the mind sets that they carry with them that are critical
for defining their identity. The protagonists can choose to evolve or remain
where they are—caught as if in amber with a conservative outlook that literally
shackles them to a god-fearing life.
Years ago, The Guardian, published an article by a young journalist who opted to wear a hijab for one week. She did this in London and documented the reactions to her dress by people on the street and her friends. It also transformed into a diary of her changing outlook. One week is all that it took for her to question so much around her. (I have been trying to locate the link for you but failed to do so.) It would be an interesting article to share given how the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern had covered her head while meeting the relatives of those killed in the recent mosque attack or while attending the memorial meeting. Wearing the veil is a complicated topic that has been tackled by many writers, most notably Rafia Zakaria in her wonderful book Veil.
Hijabistan is fascinating for the fact that Sabyn Javeri chose to explore alternate viewpoints while respecting those who opt to wear the garment out of choice. The multiple perspectives the author offers from the young child (“Coach Annie”) to the young wife (“The Good Wife”) to the young office goer (“The Date”) are illuminating. Of course there is the accepted view that Islam demands it of women but Sabyn Javeri presents alternative options in her fiction as to why the women choose to wear the hijab. It is a great way of offering readers’ different viewpoints. More importantly what shines through her stories are that the women are strong individuals in their own right despite donning the hijab and looking the same outwardly– a “sea of burkhas” — as the younger brother grumbles to his Api in “The Date”. What is fascinating is that the women characters come across as strong women, radiating sexuality, are feisty and exercise their individual choice. “Fifty Shades at Fifty” is a fantastic example of this. It is a story about a middle-aged wife, bound to the house, looking after her bedridden mother-in-law but exercises her freedom in choosing to read what she desires much to the bewilderment of her husband. Lovely!
Many times the stories take one’s breath away as with “Radha”, “The World without Men”, “Full Stop” and “Malady of the Heart”. Somehow the reader gets the sense that the twists will come but when they do, they are sharp. At such moments in the stories I marvelled at how much the author must have observed, heard, recorded, remembered and written down probably as she heard/witnessed it. If it was pure fiction, there would be a dull edge to it since in fiction one tends to smoothen the edges. Reality is cruel. A fine example of this is the evocative “Only in London” where Sabyn Javeri encapsulates so brilliantly the sights and sounds of Tooting, “this forgotten SW17 ghetto that doesn’t even have the novelty value of a China Town or the East End”. The tiny details about the protagonist being a desi and called out as “sister” by the locals although she really does not feel a part of the crowd. She is a desi and yet not. So confusing, so lonesome.
But truly the tour de force is “Coach Annie” and its last few lines. What a superb story! It is as if it belongs to the later batch of Sabyn Javeri’s writing, so her skills as a short story writer have been honed. There is much, much more in the story than the previous ones. “Coach Annie” has layers to it, it has details, in a few lines she captures the hostility of the boys to the head scarf to the change in attitude and their protection of their coach when the newcomers try and tease her. It is a triumph!
Hijabistan is bound to get visceral reactions to this book. Some readers would
love it for the writing, many others would be either mildly amused or shocked
to see mirrors of their lives in your stories and yet others would be appalled
at giving women a voice, an identity and their individuality, even to go so far
as exploring sexual freedom, all the while wearing the hijab — a sacrosanct
symbol of Islam and its connotations of a “good” woman.
The anger at the injustice Sabyn Javeri perceives, witnesses and perhaps has even experienced has been channelled brilliantly to write these stories. It would be worthwhile to see what she crafts in future. It would also be fascinating to watch how in her future stories she sharpens her literary skills to use her words sparingly but deliver quite a punch. “Coach Annie” shows the beginnings of that skill.
Hijabistan will always have a shelf life. The issues raised are so relevant. So topical. They will never go out of fashion. Sometimes fiction achieves that which no other form of literature or conversation can ever achieve. These are thought provoking stories.
Hijabistan is an utterly
stupendous book. It is! Short stories are amongst the toughest literary prose
form to create. So much to pack in such few words. And yet Sabyn Javeri achieves
it.
Bridge of Clayby Markus Zusak is an extraordinary book. It
is a story about a family of five brothers and their parents. Penelope
Lesciuszko, and then Penny Dunbar, the mother is an immigrant who is dearly
loved by her second husband, Michael Dunbar, and father of the boys. One fine
day it all falls apart with the discovery that the mother has cancer. It is a
slow death. A grief so searing that it tears the family apart. The father
drifts away, abandoning the boys, expecting them to fend for themselves. It is
a story told slowly, flipping back and forth in time, by one of the sons –
Michael Dubar. Bridge of Clay is
about the Dunbar family, Michael returning to the boys seeking their help to
build his dream bridge and the younger son, Clay, offering to help.
Bridge of Clay is quite unlike Markus Zusak’s previous novel, The Book Thief. Yet, Bridge of Clay is a fabulous novel for
its craftsmanship, its unique form of storytelling, its pacing, its brilliant unexpectedness.
It builds upon expectations of the readers of The Book Thief but as Markus Zusak says in the interview, “the
challenge was always to write this book the way it needed to be written,
despite The Book Thief’s success, and
readers wanting the same experience. And that’s something I know I fought for.”
I met Markus Zusak at the Jaipur
Literature Festival where he was a part of the delegation of writers and publishers
brought across by the Australian High Commission. It was then he kindly agreed
to do an interview for my blog.
Here is an edited version of the interview
conducted via email.
****
Markus Zusak, Jaipur Literature Festival 2019 Picture by: Jaya Bhattacharji Rose
JBR: Bridge of
Clay can only be read if one places oneself in that fog which comes
with grief and numbness of sorrow. What prompted this story? How do
you work out the voices of the characters?
MZ: I had this story in my mind since I
was twenty years old…I was walking around my neighbourhood back then, in
Sydney, and I had this vision of a boy who was building a bridge and he wanted
it to be perfect – one beautiful, perfect, great thing.
The voices of the characters came the way
all ideas do – from spending time with the book, getting to know it. After I’d
written The Book Thief, I realised it
was finally time to take on the boy and his bridge. And as soon as I did that,
I thought, ‘Well, you can try to write a smaller, quieter book…or you can bet
everything.’ I decided to bet everything, and the first part of that was seeing
Clay, the protagonist, as one of five brothers. Next came the
multi-generational story, and I took it from there.
JBR: This kind of fluid writing, languid, placid,
calming tone of the narrator, all the while creating a disruptive
narrative is very emotionally draining to craft. Yet it feels special
in Bridge of Clay. Did it
take many revisions to achieve? What was your routine to write this book?
Did it differ from your other books?
MZ: Routine is everything. I actually have
a friend whose first question to me when we meet is, ‘How’s your routine
going?’ The idea of the writing in Bridge of Clay was very exact. Matthew is
trying to make order of the chaos in the epic, sprawling and sometimes shambolic
history of the Dunbar family, and I was trying to write in the spirit of Clay’s
bridge-building. I feel like that was one of the reasons it took thirteen years
to write this book. I was writing for the world championship of myself.
JBR: Did this book involve research?
MZ: It took a lot of time researching this
book – not only bridge building and the artworks of Michelangelo, and
horseracing, and details of Eastern Europe during communism, but also the
biggest research of all – which is getting to know the characters themselves.
Being with the characters and working for them is what gets a book over the
line, I think. In the end you’re not writing for the audience anymore – you’re
writing for them – the characters
inside the book. In this case I was writing for Clay and all the Dunbar boys,
and the animals in their household, and for Michael…but especially for Penny
Dunbar, who is the true heart of the book.
JBR: Why jumble the sequence of events?
MZ: The structure of this book works in two ways: one is that it continually builds, which
is why each part is still titled with the previous part. For example, Part Two
is called Cities + Waters, rather
than just Waters. Part three is Cities + Waters + Criminals. I did this
because it replicated the building of the bridge, but also because we don’t
just live things and leave them behind. We carry our stories with us.
The second part of the structure is tidal – where
the past and present come back and forth like the tide coming in and going out.
I like the idea that we start becoming who we are long before we’re even born.
Our parents’ stories are embedded in us, and so are their journeys and
sacrifices, their failures and moments of heroism. I wanted to recognize those
stories. I wanted to write a book about a boy in search of his greatest story
whilst recognizing the stories that got him to that point.
As Clay is makes his way outwards in the world, the
history of the Dunbar family is coming in…and I think that’s how our memories
work. We are always caught in the current between looking forward and behind
us.
JBR: Pall of death looms large. It is not discussed
easily in families. Yet a nickname soon takes on a proper noun —
“Murderer”, a terrible reminder of Death. Why choose this horrific
literary technique?
MZ: Matthew Dunbar names Michael, his
father, the Murderer because he left the family after their mother, Penelope,
died. He claims that he killed their family by doing this, so it’s really a
play on words. I also used it because I think we all know when we see a
nickname like that, that there must
be more to it. Is he really a murderer? Or is he taking the blame for someone
else – and in what capacity has a crime been committed?
We spend this entire novel getting to know
its characters (and especially Clay), and when we finally understand the irony
of the nickname, we have one of the last pieces to understanding its
protagonist.
JBR: Why have such a slow paced novel at a time when
every else is writing fast paced detailed novels? Is this novel about the
creation of art, creating something unique? How did you decide upon the chapter
titles? A piece of artwork that is only completed with the complete
engagement of the reader otherwise the story glides past.
MZ: Why follow a trend of continually
making this easier, faster, and too easily known? We live in a world now where
we feel like we deserve to know everything right
now – and I see the role of novels as a saving grace where we can still
say, ‘Come on – do some work. Think a little bit. I promise you’ll be
rewarded.’ Maybe novels are one of the last frontiers where the pay-offs aren’t
instant. You can be offered a whole world, but it also demands your attention.
They’re the sort of books that have always become my favourites.
JBR: What came first — the story or the
narrator?
MZ: The story was always there. I had
several different attempts at narrators, and settled on Matthew about seven
years into writing the book…In the end he deserved it – he does so much to keep
the Dunbar family together, and he’s telling the story to understand and
realise just how much he loves his brother, and how much he wants him to come
home.
JBR: How did it feel to create the character of Clay?
MZ: Clay was always there. He was always
there, attempting to be great. He kept me honest writing the book. I wrote this
book to measure up to him.
JBR: Who is Penelope modelled upon? Why does it seem
that she is not necessarily based on her namesake from the epic?
MZ: All characters become completely
themselves from the first time you fictionalise something about them. In the case
of Penelope, she was based on my parents-in-law, who came to Australia from
Poland. When they got here they were shocked by the heat. They’d never seen a
cockroach before. They were horrified…but they had made this epic journey to
start a new life – and that was the first seed for Penelope’s story – but from
the moment I saw her practising the piano and being read to from The Iliad, she was only ever Penelope
Lesciuszko, and then Penny Dunbar.
As for not being a based on the exact
template of Penelope in The Odyssey,
she’s certainly patient, and determined – but I also wanted her to be more. All
of the characters in this novel are heroic in their own way. Penelope, as I
said, is the heart of the book, and I wanted her to be stoic, and deceptively
strong. She’s perennial – a survivor and mother, and certainly a formidable
opponent in the Piano Wars with her sons
JBR: Which edition of the Odyssey and Illiad did
you read? When did your love for the epic start? What prompted you to reimagine
it?
MZ: My editions are the Penguin classics,
translated by E.V. Rieu. I never studied them at school or university, but I
decided one day that I needed to read The
Iliad. I always loved the bigness of them – the larger-than life characters
and language…the overwroughtness of it!
As for it’s thread in Bridge of Clay, it came to me when all of the characters started
having nicknames, and when Clay is training – the start of the novel is like the Games in Ancient Greece. Then, when
I thought of Penelope being called The Mistake Maker, I immediately saw her
practising the piano in Eastern Europe, which I called a ‘watery wilderness’,
which was a direct quote from Homer’s description of the sea. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what Bridge of Clay is. It’s a suburban
epic that pays tribute to the bigness of our everyday lives.’ We all think we
have dull, drab existences, but we all fall in love, We all have people die on
us. We all fight for what we want sometimes. It all just seemed to fit, and
then I thought of Penelope being sent to Australia with a copy of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I never doubted that part of the story.
JBR: What was it like to interact with readers in
India when you visited the country in January?
MZ: To be in India with a book is like
being with your fiercest friends. Indian readers are special in that they love
showing you how much they love you, and as a reading culture it is like no
other place in the world. I loved every minute.
JBR: Why release the book for two types of readers
across the world particularly in an important book market like USA where it has
been labelled as #yalit?
MZ: I’ll often answer this question by saying it
really doesn’t matter because a book will find its true audience. I had a
choice to release this book with a different publisher to place it firmly in
adult territory, but I love the people I work with, and I wanted to stay with
them. That’s the only reason it was released as a young adult novel there. I
think that was possibly an easier proposition with The Book Thief, because it’s an easy book to love – but I think Bridge of Clay does makegreater demands of its reader. It’s a
tougher book to read. Liesel is given to you on a plate; she’s easy to love –
orphaned, in a book about loving books – but Clay is a character to fight for.
You almost have to prove that you can withstand all he goes through to fully
understand him.
In short, a reader almost has to earn the right to
love him – and so maybe it’s more a novel for true believers in my writing,
which makes it a harder book to market for teenagers.
Either way, the challenge was always to write this
book the way it needed to be written, despite The Book Thief’s success, and readers wanting the same experience.
And that’s something I know I fought for. Every decision was made to make the
book exactly what it needed to be, and follow its vision completely.
Every week I post some of the books I have received recently. In today’s Book Post 31 included are some of the titles I have received in the past few weeks.
Get Off That Camel is a delightful tale about little Meena who is obsessed by her pet camel and refuses to get off it’s back. She attends school sitting atop her camel, she visits the library where fortunately the height at which she is perched enables her to search for books placed in the topmost bookshelves, she goes jogging in the park with her father but all the time astride her pet, accompanies her mother to the supermarket with her camel creating havoc among the aisles and so on. Her love for camels began as an infant when she was given a stuffed camel toy to cuddle with in bed. Her parents did it innocently enough little realising the unfortunate sequence of events it would unleash. It was only when the doctor examined the camel declaring “This poor animal is exhausted”, did Meena agree to climb down and let the camel live in a stable. After all Meena was a kind girl. Get Off The Camel! is an adorable picture book with beautifully designed clear illustrations. Apart from the sweet story it works marvellously well in teaching little readers about empathy and to be a little less self-centred. The only reservation about the storytelling are the roles of the parents with the mother being responsible for the grocery shopping while the father is focused on jogging and teaching his daughter about leading a healthy life. While it may be quite a simple representation of what is often seen in reality, it is still a little disconcerting as it seems to enforce well-known narratives rather than offering little readers alternative role models.
Cat’s Egg is a modern day Easter tale about a cat who is convinced she has laid an egg which will soon hatch. Cat is adamant the egg she found in her bed. So she sits atop it in the hope it will soon hatch her kittens. Despite the Dog, Crow, Magpie, and Turtle telling her otherwise, Cat refuses to listen. It is only when it is pointed out to her gently by the Turtle that the egg is turning damp, does the Cat realise there is something truly amiss with the soggy egg. It is then that Dog and Cat figure out the truth. The Cat has mistaken a chocolate Easter egg for an egg. A truly mixed-up cat if there was one! Warm and sweetly told tale introducing multiple concepts of birth, nurturing, friendships and the Christian tradition of celebrating Easter. Of course the tale is focused on the commercial aspect of how Easter is celebrated with plenty of confectionary particularly Easter eggs rather than the concept of Christians celebrating the festival in commemoration of the resurrection of Christ, a new beginning, a new life — a fact that the egg symbolises. A slightly mixed-up tale like the Cat but it does not take away from the pure joy of storytelling.
Get Off The Camel! and Cat’s Egg are marvellous picture books. Wonderful additions to any book collection.
A. H. Benjamin Get Off That Camel! Illustrated by Krishna Bala Shenoi. Karadi Tale, Chennai, 2019. Hb. pp. 32. Rs. 399
Aparna Karthikeyan Cat’s Egg Illustrated by Christine Kastl. Karadi Tale, Chennai, 2019. Hb. pp. 32. Rs. 399
India is a sub-continent. In terms of the book market there are many markets that reside within it. The vast variety of literature that exists in the Indian regional languages is a testament to this fact. For some years now translations from various regional lanaguages into English has been growing. Three of the recently published translations are from Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada. These are Outcaste by Matampu Kunjukuttam ( translated from Malalayam by Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan), Kalpakam and Other Storiesby K. Savitri Ammal (translated from Tamil by Sudha Ratnam) and No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories by Jayant Kaikini ( translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana).
Outcaste ( Brushte) is an extraordinary story recounting the sensational excommunication of the high-born Namboodiri Brahmin Kuriyedathu Thatri and a large number of her lovers ( some say 64!) from the Hindu kingdom of Kochi. It is a true incident that rattled the aristocracy as well as the Brahmins. Although this incident occured in 1905, more than a century later it continues to haunt the imagination of Malayalis. Interestingly Thatri’s lovers belonged not only to the most powerful families of the Malayali Brahmin aristocracy but also were Nair and Sudra men. It was a scandal that was written about in the papers such as Malayala Manorama.
Mayampu Kunhukuttan wrote the novel in Sanskritized Malayalam. According to the translator Vasanthi Sankaranaryanan this encapsulated the grandeur of lifestyle of the Namboodiris and the practices that prevailed amongst them and the Nairs while also lacing it with the acerbic wit of the Namboodiris. While the story itself is fascinating for it evokes a historical moment when attitudes towards women were conservative despite the Namboodiris and Nairs following some matrilineal customs. The novel was first published in Malayalam in 1969 and translated in to English for the first time by Palgrave Macmillan in 1997. At the time the formidable editor Mini Krishnan was responsible for the list. In fact the novel was also adapted for theatre. Now that list is defunct but fortunately select titles from the Palgrave Macmillan backlist such as Outcaste have been resurrected. Aleph’s publication of it is timely. The issues raised in the story as well as the depiction of the strong women characters and the revenge wrought on her paramours by Thatri do not in any way seem dated. In fact the astounding events gain relevance in modern times with the conversations revolving around women and of course the #MeToo movement. While the story itself is gripping the presence of detailed footnotes while explaining the context/customs to the reader can also prove to be very disruptive to a smooth reading experience. Nevertheless Outcaste will be talked about for a long, long time to come.
Kalpakam and Other Stories by K. Savitri Ammal was first published in Tamil in 1958. While the primary focus of the stories is on upper-caste households in the early part of the twentieth century, it is the women characters that are unforgettable. Many of the situations, the predicaments depicted such as conversations about marriage ( “Sarasu’s Marriage”), finding the appropriate bridegroom (“Kalpakam” and “Remarriage”), the social pressures of being a childless woman (“Parvati’s Decision”), balancing career and love at a time when the concept of working women was considered unusual (“An End Unforseen”), treating single women irrespective of age as free labour ( “Dilemma in Kindness”), the idea of love and freedom of choosing one’s partner (“A Journey to Rangoon” and “Kalpakam”). Many of the situations described are very similar to scenarios women of today find themselves in. Take for instance the social attitudes towards single women of perceiving them as commodities rather as individuals with their own free will, barbed comments towards childless women and the insistence on getting married at the appropriate age. The gentleness of K. Savitri Ammal’s writing, with its even tenor of tone while sharing a story, however disturbing it may be, is conveyed beautifully in the translation by her grand-niece Sudha Ratnam. Not being familiar with the original language of Tamil in no way hinders the fine reading experience of the stories translated smoothly in to English. The translation seems to retain the flavour of the period when the stories were first written as evident in tiny details of using “Chennai” and “Madras” interchangeably without in any way being adamant about transfering phrases in Tamil in to English as is — a characteristic trait often found in translations of Indian regional language texts into English. The emphasis in this translation seems to be on the pure joy of reading about another culture through its stories in a more-than-competent English translation — it is a translation imbued with love.
Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories won the DSC Prize 2018. It is a collection of his short stories written in Kannada over the past few decades. They begin in the 1980s and some are as recent as a few years ago. These are stories of ordinary folk, ordinary situations, every day predicaments that exist in the vast melting point of Mumbai. It is a vast metropolis where the vast gap between the haves and have nots are stark. Mumbai is associated with vast crowds, masses of humanity moving from one place to the next. Whereas in Jayant Kaikini’s expert hands even the ordinary nameless person has a distinctive personality and identity. Some of the stories are moving, some are haunting, some are full of kindness and warmth, some are disturbing but the one common feature they all have — the stories are unforgettable. The stories were jointly selected by the translator and author. There is an essay included in the book about the translation process. It is insightful for the snippets of conversation shared between the author and translator particularly in translating “the flavour of speech, the hybrid Hindi-Urdu-Dakhani speech which is the cultural vernacular of Bombay and is signalled prominently in all the stories.” Tejaswini Niranjana continues “In the flow of plain Kannada writing, these hybrid phrases are signposts that function in such a way as to mark, in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s phrase, a sort of territorial realism. Jayant an I argued about how much of this to translate into English. After he complained about my frugality, I put back some of the phrases I’d removed or translated out. But I also worried about the book what we were setting adrfit in the world, away from Bombay, and the fact it would acquire readers without proficiency in Hindustani. I solved the problem by doing parallel translations — leaving in the Hindustani word but giving the meaning in English either close by or elsewhere in the sentence so that the attentive reader eventually understands the meaning. This way, nothing goes completely unexplained, even as the public language of the city makes itself heard in the sentences.”
The Indian book market is also known for its vast variety of original literature in English as well as for many international titles. It is a market that is growing at a phenomenal pace with a growing number of readers, particularly many young people, but it is also a price sensitive market. So for publishers to offer good literature while being acutely conscious of the pricing structures will always be challenging but it does not deter them from creating it.
At the beginning of the week I post some of the books I have received recently. In today’s Book Post 30 included are some of the titles I have received in the past few weeks.
At the beginning of the week I post some of the books I have received recently. In today’s Book Post 29 included are some of the titles I have received in the past few weeks.
“We must support our country, especially now, in time of war, and that means supporting our leaders.”
So goes the conversation between teenager Helmut Hubner and his stepfather, a Nazi. Helmut Hubner is a Mormon like his mother and is horrified at the transformation of Germany. He also listens to the BBC on an illegal short-wave radio and with the help of two of his friends circulates pamphlets trying to counter the propoganda in Nazi Germany. He fights for free speech and is against the injustice being perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews. He is also against the gagging of free press, indoctrination, the concentration camps etc. Unfortunately he is captured by the Gestapo and executed.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti has taken one episode from her Newbery Honor Book, Hitler Youth, to create The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth. For this book the author spoke to relatives like Helmut’s half-brother Gerhard Kunkel and other friends and acquaintances who knew the boy. Though this book is historical fiction, it is done so for the ease of writing the narrative, but the author has a detailed bibliography, photographs and a Third Reich time line. The Boy Who Dared can easily be used as a study text in schools. Although this book was first published in 2008 it continues to be in circulation.
It is a must read.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti The Boy Who Dared: A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth Scholastic Press, New York, 2008, rpt 2019. Hb. pp. 210. Rs 495.
Basanti is an Odia novel written decades ago. It is also a fascinating exercise in literary experimentation. Well ahead of its times. The following extract is from the introduction written by translator Himansu S. Mohapatra and is reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press India
Imagine the inner world of an Odia novel, published in 1931 and set in the conservative Odia society of that time. The eponymous heroine seems to be a misfi t in this society thanks to her unconventional choices. She is friend to a Christian woman. She reads, writes, plays music, sews, and dispenses homeopathic medicine. It also happens that she marries for love. After marriage she comes to her husband’s village in Balasore to take up her new role as the daughter-in-law of a zamindar household, managed by her widowed mother-in-law. A life of petty domesticity and social conformity stretches out before her now. She does not, however, give up on her attempts at replenishing her mental and intellectual wardrobe. To that end she leafs through the pages of a Bengali monthly, writes articles for an Odia literary periodical (Nababani), and reads Tagore’s novel Gora multiple times, not to mention her locking horns with her husband and his male friends over the issue of emancipation of women. She even runs a school for the little girls in the village.
This aspiration on the part of a young woman for a higher mental plane does not evoke any response from the family. On the contrary, it invites opposition from her mother-in-law and even her husband. The element of surprise is not due to the fact that the novel depicts the agony and the sense of suffocation of a woman seeking emancipation from her narrow domestic confi nes. Surprise is in the fact that the novel does for the fi rst time posit activism for women in Odia literature, breaking with the earlier tradition of portraying a woman as a glamorous, adorable object. Yes, in Odia fictional literature Basanti is the fi rst ever woman character to have boldly staked a claim to emancipation of women, presented the means of that emancipation and mapped the pathway to it. The blazing presence of Nababani, Gora, Romain Rolland, and W.B. Yeats in the discourse of the novel is an eloquent testimony to that. Odia prose fiction, admittedly not of long ancestry in the 1920s and 30s, had not imagined such an intellectually vibrant inner world and that too as part of a character’s repertoire until the appearance of the novel Basanti.
I
Basanti is a landmark attempt at writing a new kind of novel in Odisha in the early decades of the twentieth century. Like all new literary offerings of the time in Odisha, it was published in the journal Utkala Sahitya in instalments starting from issue no. 2 of volume 28 for May 1924 to issue no. 8 of volume 30 for November 1926. The work of nine authors, six men and three women, Basanti is a fine gift to Odia fiction from the ‘Sabuja Age’ in literature. This literature was given to exploring new horizons —the Odia word ‘sabuja’, like the word basanti ‘green’ in English, is a symbol of youth, novelty, freshness, and so on—during its all too brief life span of 10 to 15 years. The novel was definitely a new undertaking. The newness existed at least at three levels. First, it was a product of a well-thoughtout plan for collaborative writing. Second, it was a novel with a focus on women. Last, but not least, it was a novel of ideas. The three levels were, of course, closely intertwined. When a group of writers come together for the express purpose of engaging in an act of writing, one can be sure that a new creative impulse, at once social and literary, is in the air. Was the late 1920s in Odisha, which saw the emergence of Basanti, such a time? Did it witness a new creative impulse?
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III
In the 1920s English education and a wider world mediated by English books had begun to seep into the consciousness of the educated Odias, transforming it from within. The books they read and the ideas they conceived found their way into their Odia writing for which the journals and magazines of the time acted as both receptacles and triggers. Utkala Dipika, founded in 1866 by Gouri Shankar Ray, provided an outlet for their restless journalistic minds eager to explore their environs and shine the light into the areas of darkness. From 1897 onwards it was Utkala Sahitya, a monthly literary journal published under the editorship of the erudite and cultured Biswanath Kar, which set out to create a national literature for Odisha. It may be no exaggeration to say that the Renaissance of Odia letters was scripted in its pages. It was here that Chha Mana Atha Guntha by Senapati was serialized from 1897 to 1899 before being published in book form in 1902. It was here that the serialization of Basanti began in May 1924 and ended in November 1926 before being issued as a book in 1931 by a literary organization named Sabuja Sahitya Samiti formed by the ‘Sabuja’ group of writers. A revised and expanded edition of the novel, used as the source text for this English translation, was published in 1968 by the New Students’ Store, Cuttack.
IV
The passage from a single author to multiple authors was a significant aspect of Basanti. The novel saw the convergence of two new forces. One was a new writing strategy which the initiators of the novel referred to as a ‘collective composition method’. The other was the collective imagining of the new woman. This concerted effort at writing a novel was of course an extension of the other concerted efforts that were being seen in the social and political spheres in Odisha. While Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation with the colonial government had galvanized hearts and minds of every Indian, in Odisha it was the regional issue of the reunifi cation of a dismembered Odisha which struck a chord among Odia intellectuals and writers. The important thing was that the Odia nationalism of the 1920s, having co-existed with an internationalist and cosmopolitan outlook, was not insular. The Odia mind was like a sponge, which absorbed new ideas and new trends such as the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the mysticism of Swedenborg, the modernism of the Yeats–Eliot–Pound–Joyce generation as well as socialist ideas that reached the Odishan shores both directly through people like Frieda Hauswirth Das and via Bengali literature. As one prominent member of the ‘Sabuja’ group of Odia writers put it in a journal article, published in 1933, their effort was to create a new and fresh—and hence green—literature which, in tune with the international trends, would ‘celebrate the romance of a new reality by extending the frontiers of the everyday reality and reaching down to the unconscious’ (Baikuntha Nath Patnaik, Juga-Bina, 1933, p. 67).
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It is worth pointing out here that the collaborative writing of the kind seen in Basanti was first to appear in Bengali literature in the Indian context. In fact in the ‘appeal’ published in volume 28 of Sahitya, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi called for a replication of this Bengali experiment with the ‘collective worship of the word’, evinced in the case of Baroyari (written by twelve authors), Bhager Puja (the work of sixteen authors), and Chatuskona (the work of four authors) in Odia literature. The Bengali experiment was obviously not the first. The Spectator, an influential periodical paper in eighteenth-century England, was the creation of many hands. Sir Roger De Coverley, its central character, though first imagined by Richard Steele, is taken over fondly by Joseph Addison, much in the same way in which the contours of the new woman in the titular Basanti are drawn fi rst by the male authors and then taken over and extended by the female authors.
Basanti: Writing the New Woman ( Nine Authors, One Novel) Ananda Shankar Ray, Baishnab Charan Das, Harihar Mahapatra, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, Muralidhar Mahanti, Prativa Devi, Sarala Devi, Sarat Chandra Mukherjee, and Suprava Devi. Translated from Odia by Himansu S. Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019. Pb. Pp. 246 Rs 550
