Book Review

[Nonchalant]

The Other Hand
by Chris Cleave

Little bee is an African refugee who has escaped a potentially gruesome death in the Nigerian oil wars. She steals away to England where she spends 2 years in a detention centre, whiling away her time by practicing her English and trying to learn about the ways of England. She says, "Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come here to talk to you about the bright African colours." And so begins the story of two women, their fates irrevocably tied together, bound by one single act of violence. They must help each other to help themselves – if they can.

Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand has been getting rave reviews – it’s the book Madonna has been reading, if you need any further proof of its popularity. The book has dual narratives – one of the Ibo refugee girl who calls herself Little Bee, and the other of a trendy fashion magazine editor whose life has taken on a whole less meaning than she intended it to. She and her husband have grown apart, and she begins an absolutely pointless affair with a random Home Office official. The husband finds out and they attempt to fix their flagging relationship with a holiday to Nigeria, where, on a beach one night, they first meet Little Bee and a band of mercenaries with murder on their minds. What happens on this beach is described in a scene that left me quite cold – in that it was affective and resolute in its horror. While it leaps off the page in its horror, Cleave’s asks the question: if you could save the life of another human being by just giving up a single digit, a single finger – would you?

It is not a spoiler to talk about the fact that one of the 2 protagonists of The Other Hand lacks a middle finger on one hand. Early in the novel, the English protagonist, Sarah, says "It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop." And so the reader knows what has happened – or thinks they do, and it is enough to draw you in, and keep you there.

Cleave manages to write 2 very distinct narrative voices with great alacrity. I personally found both voices pretty believable – in fact, they were very authentic in their femaleness – so much so that I wasn’t even aware that Chris Cleave was a man. In fact the voices of the women are more believable to me than those of the men. I quite liked The Other Hand on the first reading – it is only on second thought that one sees any holes in the fabric of the novels believability, which, however, does not take away from this being a decently written book. My main contention with it is the lack of believability of the extra marital affair that results in the trip to Nigeria –I’d go as far as saying that any other reason to travel to Africa could have been stuck in there, and would work just as well. The affair itself is insipid and absolutely unnecessary. But then again, aren’t most affairs of the sort just that?
It is not highly introspective, it is not deeply philosophical, it is not very complex in language or structure, but rather, it is simply written, sensitive and effective. For those of you who do not want to be dragged into a great debate on the human condition, or an extended look at the torments of the tortured soul, The Other Hand is a good, steady read with the right amount of humour, candour and food for thought. If at all it seems melodramatic, as the Guardian review says, that is a fault Cleave shared with Dickens, and for the same reason. He means it.

[Nonchalant]

Between the Asssassinations by Aravind Adiga

Last year, Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize for his excellent first novel, The White Tiger, the story of a house servant in Delhi who decides that upward mobility can only be achieved by murdering his boss. This year, Adiga offers us Between the Assassinations, a collection of short stories connected by a small town in southern India called Kittur. The stories all take place between the years of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s deaths in 1984 and 1991, respectively.

Between the Assassinations is divided into stories and chapters from a fictitious local Kittur guidebook, with the chapter from the guidebook setting up the location of the story that follows. The stories are therefore connected – the reader is made to feel that he or she is walking through the town and at every landmark or point of local interest, Adiga steps aside to display a snapshot of live in that area – that of one particular character in one particular time. Adiga is not sentimental nor is he romantic. He writes clearly of the ‘violent, rotten, garbage strewn port’, and never shies from using a massive wealth of detail. There is a great a deal of realism in Adiga’s work, and while a lot of it may seem familiar to readers in the sub continent who themselves are no strangers to social and economic disparity, Between the Assassinations makes it clear that Adiga is a skilled contemporary literary talent.

While many readers may not find Adiga’s second offering as strong as his first, it is obvious that he presents his stories with great sensitivity and a very strong and consistant command over language. The collection is a pastiche of images from a city teeming with lost souls in beleagured bodies. So many of Adiga’s characters are only given centre stage by the writer – their own lives are lived out on the peripheries of others. A young boys who arrive from a village to look for work, a man who works for a despairingly few rupees hauling blocks of ice and furniture up hills for a seth, a lonely old cook sent from home to home to ‘fatten other people’s children’, a factory owner who continues to have clothes sewn for american buyers even though the detailed work is making his seamstresses blind – these are all people Adiga portrays with economic emotion and clarity.

Obvious comparisons to R.K.Narayan’s Malgudi Days will be made, but Adiga’s Between the Assassinations can hold its own stead. It’s a collection that’s easy to read, deceptively simple and even, to an extent, familiar to the sub continental reader. If there is a flaw in the stories, it is that they are sometimes without the incredibly arresting characterizations that were found in The White Tiger. Not to say that Adiga’s short stories don’t work as well as his longer narrative did – because they do, but some can leave a lingering sensation of being something akin to a reporter’s vignettes. Adiga was, after all, a journalist for Time.
These stories are without the great characterizations found in the white tiger. Not to say these stories don’t work, they do, and some very well. There is however, a feeling that these are a reporters vignettes – Adiga was, after all, a reporter for Time. But his language is not simple utilitarian prose – there is some great eloquence in these stories, an eloquence that often transcends from the language to the tone and the sentiment of the story. Adiga has presented the usual societal dualities – the rich and the poor, the oppressor and the oppressed…nothing new there, but it’s what he calls ‘that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy’ that make these stories so effective and interesting. As with the white tiger, Adiga manages succesfully to cast his writers eye across the diaspora that lies between the gutter and the stars… there is the complacency of the smug middle and upper classes, and then there is the anger, the filth and squalor of the underbelly of a small town.

[Nonchalant]

Oryx & Crake
by Margaret Atwood

OK, so this is the book Never Let Me Go Reminds me of. Margaret Atwood is one of my favourite writers… if you asked me to choose one book to take with me on a desert island, it would be one of hers for sure… I just don’t know which one!

So, Oryx and Crake is Atwood’s vision of the future…the setting is our world, but a world ruined by bio hazards and global warming. The future lies in a race created by a man called Crake…a version of humanity that is immune to the state of the world. The story is told by the last of the original humans in a series of flashbacks, and while it is a dystopic new of the future, it’s also a story about 3 people who have been vital in the end of the world as we know it.

But even if you like a clear, linear narrative, this is far from irritating. Atwood often writes really introspectively and has so much control over the non-linear narrative that each time the time line shifts, you aren’t bored or annoyed, you are swept along with the new angle… and at the same time, a part of you is dying to get back to the other angle.

Here’s what I mean… I first read this book as soon as it was released in 2003 and I read it twice right away because there are so many layers you almost feel as if you can’t absorb everything in one go. And then I picked it up again last night, thinking I would skim through it to refresh my memory before this show…but I couldn’t just skim! I had to force myself to put it down just so I could sleep. But while it’s not a hard novel to read, it’s not a simple one either… you will have to think as all of Atwood’s novels are highly researched and multi-layered.

This one has a great deal to do with cloning and science… but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s a science fiction novel. Or would I? I don’t think I can categorise this book in a particular genre…but let’s just say that you don’t have to suspend your disbelief very far. Cloning is here… and we’ve been playing with nature for a while now… this novel is a frightening look at how things can go wrong… or right, depending on your perspective.

[Nonchalant]

Jinnah : India Partition Independence

By Jaswant Singh



Lord Mountbatten: I tried every trick I could play... to shake Jinnah's resolve.Nothing wouldmove him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan...The date I chose (for Independence) came out of the blue. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.

The partition of India, 1947, some call it vivisection as Gandhi had, has without doubt been the most wounding trauma of the twentieth century. It has seared the psyche of four plus generations of this subcontinent. Why did this partition take place at all? Who was/is responsible -- Jinnah? The Congress party? Or the British? Jaswant Singh attempts to find an answer, his answer, for there can perhaps not be a definitive answer, yet the author searches. Jinnah's political journey began as 'an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity' (Gopal Krishna Gokhale), yet ended with his becoming the 'sole spokesman' of Muslims in India; the creator of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam: How and why did this transformation take place?

No Indian or Pakistani politician/Member of Parliament has ventured an analytical, political biography of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, about whom views necessarily get divided as being either hagiographical or additional demonology. The book attempts an objective evaluation. Jaswant Singh's experience as a minister responsible for the conduct of India's foreign policy, managing the country's defence (concurrently), had been uniformly challenging (Lahore Peace Process; betrayed at Kargil; Kandahar; The Agra Peace Summit; the attack on Jammu and Kashmir Assembly and the Indian Parliament; coercive diplomacy of 2002; the peace overtures reinitiated in April 2003).

He asks where and when did this questionable thesis of 'Muslims as a separate nation' first originate and lead the Indian sub-continent to? And where did it drag Pakistan to? Why then a Bangladesh? Also what now of Pakistan? Where is it headed? This book is special; it stands apart, for it is authored by a practitioner of policy, an innovator of policies in search of definitive answers. Those burning 'whys' of the last sixty-two years, which bedevil us still. Jaswant Singh believes that for the return of lasting peace in South Asia there is no alternative but to first understand what made it 'abandon' us in the first place. Until we do that, a minimum, a must, we will never be able to persuade peace to return.

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[Nonchalant]

Sufism: A beginners Guides
by William C. Chittick



In a very succinct and insightful paragraph William C. Chittick, Professor of Comparative Studies at the State University of New York, writes: "In general, the Sufis have looked upon themselves as those Muslims who take seriously God's call to perceive His presence both in the world and in the self. They stress inwardness over outwardness, contemplation over action, spiritual development over legalism, and cultivation of the soul over social interaction." Yet even to this day, there are various strands of Sufism where one practice or ideal is emphasized over another.

Chittick presents cogent explications of the remembrance of God, the way of love, the never-ending dance, and the paradox of the veil. Sufi teachings and practices almost always contain elements pointing out the importance of faith, seeing with the heart, and dealing with the opposites or the two faces of all things.

"The Sufis often quote the Prophet as saying, 'Assume the character traits of God!' In other words, adopt as your own the properties and characteristics of God's names and attributes." The challenge here is to tap into the eternal source of beauty and love that resides in all of us. This sounds a lot like the early Christian mystics who wrote about the process of divinization. It is also emphasized by Eastern Orthodoxy.

One of the phrases Chittick uses to describe Sufis is their interest in "doing the beautiful." We could all take lessons on what this means. In the meantime, there is much to be gained from savoring Chittick's excellent introduction to this mystical path.

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