The prodigal son who returns but may not stay, the troubled, dying salesman on the road with his young son, negotiating with the censor to write a love story in Iran, depressurising in Ladakh: a to-read list for today.
A healing love
Reverend Boughton is dying. His wife is no more, his eight children have moved away. Then Glory returns with her guilty secrets, to care for her father. Soon after, the prodigal Jack, the errant black sheep of the family and an alcoholic, comes seeking sanctuary, 20 years after he left home.
As a child, and later as a grown up, Jack has always been in trouble, reason enough for people in Gilead, in 1960s America, to point fingers at the reverend, but he has always had a special place in his heart. Now he’s back but is he home? As Glory tends to her father and her brother’s broken spirit, old bitternesses bubble up but are forced down as much to keep the peace as to keep Jack at home.
The reverend’s mind wanders, oscillating between his overt fondness for the truant son and his despair that he might yet abandon them. Jack, conscious of the shadows he brings with him, works to share Glory’s burden, pitching in also with the gardening and the mending and repairing, and as an acceptance builds up between the two, secrets keep them apart.
Glory’s sins of illicit love, Jack’s of failing his black wife Della, haunt them both, even as their father’s health fails. As Glory summons the family, Jack packs his bags to leave — he does not have the courage to face them now or ever again. Movingly told, this story moves gently across a tapestry of emotions, revealing as much courage as affection, even, though this is implied, never said, deep love. Writer Marilynne Robinson has a gift for words that seems almost to belong to another generation. If ever a book could be said to be like music, this would be a hymn.
— Kishore Singh
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Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Virago Press
Pages: viii + 344
Price: Rs 395
Under the censor’s nose
Few people think of censorship as enabling. Rather the opposite — it is supposed to have a stifling effect on life and the imagination.
The truth, as usual, is a little more complicated: censorship does impose limits, but in doing so in at least some cases it forces both artist and audience to exercise their wits to bypass the censor and find each other. The best works of Iranian art, cinema and literature since the Islamic Revolution are not less subtle or hard-hitting for having passed under the noses of government censors.
Shahriar Mandanipour is an Iranian novelist well-known in his native country even though he was forbidden to publish there between 1992 and 1997. He wrote this novel in the USA, where he has lived since 2006. Written in Farsi, but not expected to be available in Iran, this book will be read more in its English translation than in the original language. That’s just one of the multiple displacements around and within the book.
There are four chief characters: Dara and Sara, two students of Tehran University who love each other but are forced to find ways to circumvent Iran’s strict laws governing contact between the sexes; the author himself in an alter ego (with the same name), who shows himself in the process of writing the book; and the censor, whose pervasive and malign presence is visible in the many crossed-out passages and phrases. You can still read them, so you get an idea of how censorship in Iran works, and a sense of the entire atmosphere in which not just youth and authority clash but culture clashes with itself.
It’s a tricky game, but Mandanipour manages to pull it off. This may not be a conventional, linear narrative, but it makes a human and absorbing story nonetheless.
— Rrishi Raote
CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY
A NOVEL
Author: Shahriar Mandanipour
Publisher: Little, Brown
Pages: viii + 294
Price: Rs 550
Every page a new story
There’s a lot to Ladakh and author-cum-photographer Ajay Jain captures its essence beautifully in his book Postcards from Ladakh. His earlier book, Peep Peep Don’t Sleep — despite being published in limited numbers — did surprisingly well, and this time around the author has once again worked to create a book that he describes as following “the postcard format”. It’s a “travel handbook”, the sort of book you’d definitely want to carry on your own trip to Ladakh and, in the author’s own words, “a collection of frames, frozen circa 2009, when I drove for over 10,000 km in and around Ladakh”.
The book is written “as if I were writing postcards… from the scene” and what works well is that you can begin reading this book from any page. The book is a page-turner and a shift from the regular Ladakh landscapes that one has — without getting bored at all, of course — seen time and again. One of my favourite “postcard” entries is about this amazing sanctuary for donkeys — yes, brilliant, isn’t it? — tucked away in Leh, started by photojournalist Joanne Lefson in 2008. In another vignette, Jain tells us about his encounter with a Rajasthani local in Ladakh who comes to collect shilajit (desi Viagra) and other medicinal herbs, which “ooze from some rocks in Ladakh”.
Jain describes Ladakh as a place where “no moment repeats itself”. That’s the experience one has while reading Postcards from Ladakh, too, where every page offers a new story, a new experience, a new beginning.
— Abhilasha Ojha
POSTCARDS FROM LADAKH
Author: Ajay Jain
Publisher: Kunzum
Pages: 179
Price: Rs 395
Disgustingly dark
As lead singer for the band Bad Seeds, Nick Cave’s songs have always been dark, about death and obsessions. In his latest book, The Death of Bunny Munro, Cave follows the same path. The book is about Bunny Munro, a door-to-door salesman who is obsessed with sex. Be it driving around, sitting in a restaurant, whenever he lays his eyes on a woman, that’s all he can think about.
There is no way that anyone would genuinely like the character of Bunny but there is a sense of sympathy that starts to build up by the end of the book. However, his lecherous ways throughout the book temper that sympathy as quickly as it rises.
The book traces the journey of Bunny and his nine-year-old son after his wife commits suicide and Bunny suddenly finds himself facing a life full of uncertainties.
He tries to escape his troubles by hitting the road with his son but, rather than change his ways, Munro sinks deeper and deeper. To add to his woes, his ailing, psychotic father doesn’t get along with him. His son, Bunny Jr, is crazy about his father and Cave portrays the child’s love for the father pretty well in certain passages.
Still, quite a few passages of the book are downright disgusting. I guess that is the way Cave wanted to portray the character of Bunny Munro. In that sense, he captures the character spot-on. This is not a book to read unless you are a fan of dark humour and have been a fan of Cave and his music.
— Aabhas Sharma
THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO
Author: Nick Cave
Publisher: Random House India
Pages: 333
Price: Rs 195