The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

For the longest time, I thought this book was about a Pakistani family in Britain and their terrorist-in-training son. This novel or fable which I think is a more appropriate term is narrated in the form of a monologue in a conversation between a Pakistani and an American at a café in the old Anarkali market in Lahore. It’s a study in the changing outlook and personality of one man in the backdrop of the WTC attack and the ensuing invasion of Afghanistan. It’s a cleverly written book, even cleverer as an allegory about contemporary geo-politics. But, I am little fatigued by Pakistani portrayals of their victimization and virtuousness. Call me a jingoistic Indian but despite its literary value, The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes off as a polemic against American imperialism in the face of genteel Pakistani incorruptibility. 

Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop but Never Get Off by Bishwanath Ghosh

A couple of weeks ago I read a travelogue by an Indian writer. Kavita Watsa’s Brahmins and Bungalows was erudite and engaging, the perfect antithesis of Chai, Chai. The premise of Ghosh’s first book is promising; an exploration of towns in the back of beyond known only for their monumental railway stations. Our British-bestowed railway lines often cross at places. At these junctions, the colonials built massive stations at what were formerly meagre settlements to serve the needs of passing trains. Towns like Guntakal, Itarsi, Mughal Sarai and Jhansi which you stop at en-route to Calcutta, Hyderabad and Madras, but never get off. This could have made for an interesting diversion.

Alas, the promising premise is lost in the murky waters of poor execution. As I see it, there are three reasons for this. Firstly, Ghosh is a traveller, not an explorer. He hardly ventures away from the stations themselves. His preoccupation in each town is finding a nearby hotel and subsequently a shady watering hole. In Jhansi, he offers us the local fort after which he makes away to Orchha and Khajuraho. Honestly, did he really imagine this to be cutting edge travel writing? You’d suppose that despite dwelling on well travelled paths, our Magellan of mofussil towns would do something more in Khajuraho than merely visit the main temple enclosure. Well, he doesn’t and this is the second reason why the book sucks – Ghosh’s personality. He could have named his book ‘Chota peg, bada peg: drinking in dumps across nondescript shit holes’ because this seems to be his predilection. He attempts to explain this by waffling on about how he gets to bum around with the natives and hear their stories, an activity he does perfunctorily and with little success. But, the most annoying bit in the book is its language with its dated expressions and stilted grammar. Where Watsa was quaint, Ghosh exasperates; I would have needed a good scream if I came across anymore clauses starting with “Being...” or “Be it...” At the very least, Tranquebar should have cleaned up the conspicuous grammatical errors and typos. Understandably, there’s little than can be done about Ghosh’s pearls of wisdom like this splendid inference after an attempted interaction with a part-time prostitute.

“This was a strange encounter: people usually spend an hour with a human being who had turned into a prostitute, but I had just spent an hour with a prostitute who was also a human being.”  

Chai, Chai is a book for which you should neither stop, nor get off.  

The 40 Rules of Love by Elif Şafak

“What were you thinking?” you might ask if you’d read what I’d written about my first rendezvous with the Turkish Isabel Allende. I borrowed the book from a colleague who told me that it was okay and I thought to myself let me give it a go.  

If there’s one’s thing Şafak’s done well, it is the comprehensive way in which she has offered a deadly dull boring reading experience. Ella is a plump, New England, Jewish, vegetarian-wannabe house-wife whose husband is bonking other women and whose children find her meddlesome and irritating. Despite possessing the personality of dried donkey dung, Ella manages gets a job with a publishing firm who ask her to review a novel set in 12th century Anatolia titled Sweet Blasphemy by a chap named Aziz. Ella’s story, dreary as it is, pales in comparison to Sweet Blasphemy, excerpts from which Şafak interweaves into her narrative. Şafak is extremely fond of jumping between characters and stories, a device she does in a remarkably poor way in this novel, by poor I mean poorer than The Bastard of Istanbul. But, the most vexing aspect of this book is its sickly sweet smorgasbord of spirituality and yes you guessed it, the Sufis - those wonderful, supposedly libertine, self-righteous counterpoints to our hideous misconceptions about a certain religion. It appears as if Şafak’s been reading far too much Paulo Coelho and just when you thought you’d hit the limits of the mind-numbing pseudo-spiritual, our bohemian writer adds Sufis to the mix, climbing new peaks of inanity.  

The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell

This is the last instalment of Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy and it predictably has more exotic fauna and family capers. The pattern of the stories is similar to its predecessor. Durrell brings animals into the family villa, vexing his siblings and his brother Larry invites strange visitors to stay. There were many funny moments but I couldn’t help but feel that much of it is sheer hyperbole. The conversations between family members are too neatly comic to be real. He’s surely done a lot of embellishing particularly since Larry didn’t live with the family and he’s the one dropping all the sarcastic one-liners. In The Garden of the Gods, Durrell refers to the family’s India background for the first time and an eccentric turbaned Indian named Prince Jeejeebuoy (Prince is his Christian name and not his title) comes to stay, breaking several bones in an attempt to levitate. On a second visit, Jeejee agrees to charm a water snake as a part of cabaret show at a party (held in honour of his own birthday), only to have said serpent lunge and bite his loincloth at the ‘crutch’, all very believable.

Regardless of the authenticity of the accounts in this book, it’s left me with a craving for an Ionian island.   The book is no longer available on its own and is published along with its siblings in a tome titled The Corfu Trilogy.

Room by Emma Donoghue

A couple of years ago, newspapers and TV channels were awash with the sensational story of an Austrian father who imprisoned his daughter in his basement for 24 years and had seven children with her, three of whom had never left the confines of this dungeon. One would imagine that a novel inspired by this incident would be opportunistic and exploitative. But, Donoghue is very canny and she narrates her story from the perspective of a five year old boy, also inspired by the youngest of the Fritzl children, unexpectedly lending it both originality and credibility.  

A young woman, kidnapped at 19, has spent seven years as the sex slave of a callous old loner. He keeps her locked away in a tiny room inside a garden shed with soundproofed walls and a single skylight. Her only companion is her son, Jack, who at the very beginning of the book turns five. They live in constant fear of Old Nick, so named because he brings ‘presents’ on Sunday. Jack’s Ma is compliant with the sole goal of protecting Jack, who she hides away in the wardrobe when her tormentor visits. In the wardrobe, Jack counts to pass the time. He counts his teeth and sometimes he just counts - “I always have to count till he makes that gaspy sound and stops."  

The most intriguing part of the Room is the culture that evolves between mother and son. A culture marked by routine, absolutes and recast truths. Jack believes that the world is only their room and the outside doesn’t exist and the people and places he sees on TV aren’t real. As a consequence, items within the room become personas. There’s Wardrobe, Rub, Bed, Lamp, Plant, Meltedy Spoon, Mouse and Tooth, all of whom are addressed, spoken to and spoken about as characters. This private culture contains its own language, one that Donoghue has constructed carefully and lovingly. A lexicon that marks time by Sundaytreats, beep beep, the opening of Door and 9 PM, all meaningless to us but at the very heart of existence for Jack and Ma.  

The story loses some its engrossing quality after Jack and Ma escape to the Outside. However, it’s still interesting how Jack comes to terms with the world which is a lot bigger than his 12 foot room and has way more people than just his Ma who’s the only person he’s ever talked to. The ‘child-talk’ in which the book is written, is endearing at first but I must confess it becomes tiring after a while. Nonetheless, Room is inventive and absorbing.  

Sapphique by Katherine Fisher

At the end of Incarceron, Finn, purported to be a kidnapped prince escapes the world of the sentient prison. But, in the land outside he becomes trapped in a web of elaborate intrigues and facades. Claudia declares him the missing prince but Sia, the cunning queen of the realm puts forward a lookalike, proclaiming Finn an imposter. With no memory of his former life, Finn faces an uphill struggle to prove that he is the late prince Giles. His thoughts, however, are occupied by his still incarcerated friends. Keiro, Finn’s oath-brother believes that he has abandoned him. He and the former slave, Attia long to escape, seeking an artefact that can help them do this. But, their quest is challenged by the master of their dark world. The prison too is interested in the artefact. The prison also wants to escape. It hungers to see the world outside.

Sapphique is almost as exciting as its predecessor. The fervour with which you read on to know whether Finn and his mates would escape in Incarceron is repeated with the stragglers Keiro and Attia. But, in the last third of Sapphique, the thrill is somehow lost and the ending is somewhat flaccid. Scratch that, I’m judging the book too harshly. It did keep me engaged during the hottest hours of the day and it was nothing less than a page turner. If you smirk at the thought of reading YA fiction, Incarceron and Sapphique may just about convert you.

Chinese Whiskers by Pallavi Aiyar

Pallavi Aiyar spent 6 years living in a hutong (courtyard house) in old Beijing, a time when she adopted two Chinese kittens. From this sliver of her life story, Aiyar has developed a novel, one that she calls a modern fable, told from the perspective of two cats. Soyabean is the only son of a hutong cat, much loved by his human family’s nai nai or grandmother. Tofu is the third and only female kitten of a litter of five born to a dustbin cat in the yard of a compassionate old man. Both cats are adopted by a wai guo ren couple (foreigners), Mr. and Mrs. A. For some time, they lead quiet, pampered lives in the courtyard of their hutong house. Soyabean’s original owner’s grandson convinces Mr. and Mrs. A to let him use this handsome cat in a commercial for Chinese made cat food. This idyll is soon disturbed by the outbreak of the SARS virus and roving gangs of vigilantes who kidnap and kill pets. And there’s something suspicious about the cat food that Soyabean’s become an ambassador for. All this in the countdown to the Beijing Olympics where the city authorities pull down the old and put up the spanking new.  

Chinese Whiskers is cute if a little shallow. It isn’t very strong as an allegorical tale or fable about the pace of change in China. Its weakness lies not in its feline protagonists but in Aiyar's decision to pack it in with far too many overreaching issues from the SARS epidemic to the melamine adulteration. Perhaps, if she’d stuck to the hutongs, their unique culture and their demise, the concept may have worked better.  

Aiyar's website has a couple of pictures of one of the cats who's inspired this work.  He really is a handsome cat.  

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Incarceron is set in a post-apocalyptic world where all forms of progress are banned and citizens are bound by ‘protocol’ to stay faithful to the ‘era’, an imagined feudal time of peace and stability. Claudia is the privileged daughter of an aristocrat who happens to be the warden of Incarceron, a mysterious prison where half the world’s population deemed criminal, deviant or dissent were imprisoned several centuries earlier. The prison was an experiment in creating a utopian world and outsiders think it a paradise.  

The real Incarceron is a bleak and terrible place. It’s an enormous world situated in what seems like the bowels of the earth. There is no sun or sky. Day and night are marked by lightson and lightsoff, controlled by a sentient machine. The prison is alive. It constantly forms and reforms, tormenting its inmates, pitting them against each other. A young man named Finn finds himself in this hellhole. He has no memory of how he got there, no memory of anything – only strange visions. He is adopted by a gang of murderous roughnecks who call him cell-born, created by the prison. A chance ambush places in Finn’s hands a crystal key which leads him ultimately to the truth behind his origins and the prison world that holds him.  

This is a terribly absorbing book and I finished it in one reading over one afternoon. My only complaint is that it’s a little predictable, especially the fact that Finn is a crown prince from the outside world thought to have died in a boating accident. But, then again maybe it isn’t as predictable for the book’s target population. Now, on to book 2! 

Brahmins and Bungalows by Kavita Watsa

At crumbling ruins across this country, I perpetually want to know who, what and why and I wonder whether others ask the same questions. I suppose the answer is no because it seems like most don’t even give history a passing glance, let alone an unnecessary ponder, which is perhaps why I really liked Kavita Watsa. She’s a woman after my own heart. In Brahmins and Bungalows, she scampers around the deep south of India exploring the places and people who have shaped the unique identity of South India.  

She begins in Mysore, her hometown and describes its genteel culture and svelte architecture, and the peculiarities of her own multicultural family descended from Anglo-Indians, Portuguese, Malayalis and a Tulu Brahmin from Mangalore. She then marches on to Srirangapatnam, Bangalore, Kerala, Goa, Madras, Pondicherry, Tranquebar, Hampi, Mahabalipuram, Tanjore and finally ends her journey in Kodaikanal. She describes these places with great warmth and love, even oppressive Madras, liberally quoting from Ibn Battutu to later European travellers.  

Frequently, she selects a single monument or incident and narrates stories around it, stories which within them contain stories, each a window onto another, such that even something as drab Fort St. George in Madras becomes a prism of individuals and events from older times. The blurb describes her language as “Victorian sensibility for bends in the road and turns of phrase”. Whilst Watsa has a fondness for adjectives and somewhat dated construction, the language seems perfectly suited and indeed helps set the atmosphere of the old South.  

Although she regrets the bulldozing of heritage (so elegantly represented by the disappearance of both Brahmins and bungalows), she thankfully doesn’t rant. Her focus is on capturing stories that are on the brink of being forgotten.  

An outstanding pre-read for travellers or even for someone who just wants to sit back and dream about gentler times.  

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With generous helpings of jollof rice, atavism and simple personal stories, Adichie proves that she’s perhaps the best contemporary writer of African English fiction. I admired her storytelling in The Purple Hibiscus and became completely besotted after I read Half of a Yellow Sun. But I approached The Thing Around Your Neck with some trepidation. Would Adichie replicate the incredible skill she displayed in her two novels in these short stories?

The twelve stories, set in different epochs, and are roughly divided between the US and Nigeria. What unites them is that they all revolve around the lives of ordinary Nigerian women. In The Headstrong Historian, set in colonial times, Nwamgba deals with her early widowhood and the pain of her son who rejects her for being a heathen. In The American Embassy, a mother must deal with a different sort of pain; the loss of a son, killed by armed men in search of her husband, the editor of an inflammatory newspaper in the dangerous times of Abacha’s Nigeria. A noble sort of pain mixed with the humiliation of proving asylum worthiness to barricaded visa officials.

But, these aren’t women you feel sorry for. Adichie isn’t that kind of a writer. There is a quiet dignity in their lives of having to deal with being exiles from their real selves. No one told Chinaza in The Arranged Marriage that she would have to become Agatha after moving to the States. Or that pizza is the one thing that she would have to like in America. Or that her husband was already married in America in what he claims was a marriage of convenience for the acquisition of a green card. When Chinaza asks Ofodile or Dave as he corrects her why he married her, he says “I wanted a Nigerian wife and my mother said you were a good girl, quiet. She said you might even be a virgin... “I was happy when I saw your picture... You were light-skinned. I had to think about my children’s looks. Light-skinned blacks fare better in America.”

You cheer Chinaza on as she packs her suitcase to leave and you curse her pragmatism when she returns, knowing fully that she is better off fighting it out in America than she ever will be in Nigeria. It’s the same sentiment in the titular story told in the second person where its main character returns to Nigeria five months after her father’s death, fully knowing that she would never return to her wealthy, white, bohemian boyfriend in New England. You want to heckle her for her stupidity. But, it seems that these are women who deal with their lives on their own terms, a theme that is perhaps at the heart of Adichie’s work, not just in these stories but in her novels as well. What amazes me is how she achieves such superlative storytelling with such ease. These stories are moving without being suffocated by fatalism and pathos. Each cascades into the next and offers us an authentic peek into a world we know so little of.

Besides being very articulate, Chimamanda (I just love her name) is also gorgeous. You can catch her on Ted.com talking about the danger of a single story.