“Hot town, summer in the city/ Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty”, go the words of Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 hit song. Back then summer was still innocent, and every day might end well: “Cool town, evening in the city/ Dressing so fine and looking so pretty”. Something strange has happened in the world of books this year: the bubbling tumult of new books and gathering trends, so visible last year, seems to have faded a little. But there is plenty of urban grit this time around, and it looks as if “the city” has moved to the centre of the written world, in fiction, non-fiction or books for children. This year it’s all about variant experiences of the city and urban culture, direct or indirect, real or imagined, good and bad. Even the master Premchand, writing from rural India in the early 20th century and now in a fresh and promising translation, absorbed his subjects’ ambivalence towards the city, inevitably associated with their oppressors and somehow unreal. RRISHI RAOTE picks some books, new and old, to read “In the summer, in the city”.
JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI
Author: Geoff Dyer
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Jeff is a moribund arts journalist from London, in Venice for the Biennale. There he meets and has a short-lived but thunderous affair with Laura; then they go their separate ways. The second half of the novel, this time in the first person, concerns a Brit in Varanasi, possibly the same Jeff, so mesmerised, yet essentialised, by the utter filth and alienness of the city that he cannot leave. Dyer is such a gifted writer that one never feels shortchanged; his descriptions of the experience of Indian classical music are uniquely vivid and truthful.
WINTERGIRLS
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Viking
Price: $17.99
Lia’s anorexia began in her early teens. The book opens with Lia aged 18, having just lost her best friend, and on the brink of a terrible crisis. Unable to connect with her parents or anyone, she is ever more tightly bound in her dark world, obsessed with calories and never at peace. Salvation finally comes once old patterns have been broken and relationships begin to mend. “As difficult as reading this novel can be,” said Publishers Weekly, “it is more difficult to put down.” Ages 12 and up.
RANGBHUMI: The Arena of Life
Author: Munshi Premchand
Translator: Christopher R King
Publisher: OUP, forthcoming
A schoolteacher from small-town Uttar Pradesh who struggled to support an extended family on his salary, Premchand often wrote about the rural underdog, the peasant at the mercy of landowner or colonial authorities — but his characters are memorable. His prose is plain yet passionate and filled with pain. Premchand has been ill-served by many translators; this new translation of his novel Rangbhumi, set in the 1920s-30s and about “the tensions between the rulers and the ruled”, promises better.
WOLF HALL
Author: Hilary Mantel
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Price: £18.99
Tudor England, Henry VIII’s reign in particular, is well-travelled territory for all sorts of writers — from serious historians to popular novelists. Its themes and even its characters are well-established and familiar. But not so in the hands of Hilary Mantel, whose excellent Wolf Hall is the first of two historical novels on Henry’s reign. It’s told from the point of view of plebeian Thomas Cromwell, the sidekick of Cardinal Wolsey who outlasted his master. A brilliant and inquisitive man, he’s perfect for the role.
DREAD: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu
Author: Philip Alcabes
Publisher: Perseus
Price: £15.99
Every other year, it seems, the world faces a new and unprecedented health crisis. This year it’s swine flu. Although relatively few have died of these emergent diseases, they loom very large in our imagination and daily life. Why so? Philip Alcabes, a professor of urban public health, plunges into history for context, showing, with lots of examples, that our reactions reflect our current prejudices and anxieties (foreigners, animals, the unknown) — so it has always been. Alcabes is a spirited and sceptical storyteller.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANTR Author: Tarquin Hall
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 425
A detective story for teens. Vish Puri is a “Most Private Investigator” whose favourite targets are Delhi’s cheats, crooks and murderers — but most of his work involves screening prospective marriage partners. Finally an interesting case falls into his lap, of an honest man accused of killing his maid. Hall, a British journalist and writer who has spent years in India, takes his hero on a pan-national hunt for the missing maidservant. First book in a promised series.
THE HINDUS: An Alternative History
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Penguin
Price: $35
Anything novel with the word “Hindu” in it is guaranteed to raise strong opinions. Professor Doniger, a Sanskrit expert in Chicago, is no stranger to that. In this book, with its provocative subtitle, she traces the story of Hinduism from Harappan times onwards, following in particular the role of women, lower castes and classes and animals like horse, cows and dogs. A lot of her work involves close re-readings of texts, so this is an academic work — albeit an accessible and thought-provoking one.
THE CURIOUS GARDEN
Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: Little, Brown
Price: $16.99
Urban planning, of which there has been precious little in India, is beginning to attract more interest around the world. In New York, thanks to citizen activism, a disused elevated train track was recently rededicated as a park. In this book, young Liam, who lives in a dystopian city where everybody stays indoors, finds a staircase up to the old track. He learns how to care for the few plants which have set down roots there, and slowly transforms his neighbourhood. For young children.
BROOKLYN
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Viking
Price: £17.99
Able to compose pages of patiently undemonstrative prose, the Irish Tóibín is nevertheless (or thereby) a profound and powerful writer. In this book, which opens in poor, provincial 1950s Ireland, Eilis leaves behind her mother and sister to move to Brooklyn to slowly make a life there. But rather than an immigrant story (there are so many) this in an emigrant’s tale; eventually Eilis returns to Ireland, where she finds herself suddenly something of a catch, and has to choose whether to remain or return.
THE HOTEL AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Author: Parismita Singh
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 350
In her hotel at the end of the world, where India meets China, Pema and her husband serve food to two travellers; one, Kona, blind but far-seeing; the other, Kuja, with stumps for legs. In this graphic novel, Parismita Singh has them exchange their tales, which draw upon local folklore as well as history (the Japanese during World War II) and fantasy, while the rain pours down: especially the story of the “floating island”, a promised land of plenty.
PLASTIC FANTASTIC
Author: Eugenie Samuel Reich
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Price: £15.99
We’re all familiar with financial fraud — but here is the story of a real-life scientific fraud which shook the scientific world. A young German physicist named Jan Hendrik Schön had the best minds in his field convinced, between 1997 and 2002, that he was able to make electronic devices from organic rather than silicon crystals, and, moreover, use those devices to do unprecented things. The oddest thing in the story is Schön himself, a quiet and modest man despite all the acclaim.
BIRDS
Authors: Kevin Henkes, Laura Dronzek
Publisher: Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins
Price: $17.99
My father, who travels more than I do, tells me that outside the cities there are very few birds in India. It’s the urban environment, abundant in food and dotted with parks, which suits a great many kinds of birds. So, justly, here is a beautiful and imaginative book by a husband-wife pair (Henkes writes, Dronzek illustrates) for very young children in the city. To be read near an open window when the birds are out and about.
TILISM-E HOSHRUBA
Authors: Syed Muhammad Husain Jah, Ahmed Husain Qamar
Translator: Musharraf Ali Farooqi
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 495
In 2007 Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s virtuoso translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Ghalib Lakhnavi was published to great acclaim. This time, his appointed task is much more ambitious — all 8,000 pages of this Urdu fantasy, supposed to be part of the Amir Hamza epic but set in India, and composed in 1883-93 by two rival storytellers in Lucknow. The first of 24 volumes is due in June.
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
Author: A S Byatt
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Price: £18.99
Her first novel in seven years, The Children’s Book is being received by A S Byatt’s readers with joy. Byatt is a cerebral novelist, and one reads her novels (her great hit was Possession in 1990) for their intellectually daring scope. In this one the heroine is a writer whose children suffer for her craft — but it is also blessed with a story, following the fortunes of four families between 1895 and the aftermath of World War I, and a host of characters, some, like Oscar Wilde, from real life.
THE FIRST TYCOON: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Author: T J Stiles
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
Price: $37.50
Cornelius Vanderbilt is the man for whom the term “robber baron” was first used in modern times. Totally self-made, when he died in 1877 this New York-based railroad and steamship magnate was worth a staggering $100 million. Vanderbilt founded the corporation as we know it today. Stiles says he “was a man of action — decisive, dramatic, and always interesting. He courted physical danger, fought high-stakes financial battles, and always set the terms of his existence”. A terrific subject for a dense but satisfying book.
