Tag: Transit Books

Of beggars and kings: The Abyss by Jeyamohan

This is not a novel that eases you in slowly, gradually revealing its excesses. Rather, the truth of the situation at hand is immediately on display. Grotesque and disturbing, the first few chapters can make for uncomfortable reading. It is not simply the event taking place, but the attitudes that surround it, the relationships and circumstances that are swiftly and bluntly made clear. In a hut above an expanse of rice paddies in Tamil Nadu, a woman is giving birth. She looks like a “strange life form,” a large misshapen creature with one good strong arm and leg on one side, shrivelled limbs on the other. Only one eye, holes for a nose, and a large mouth grace her bald, flattened head. This is Muthammai and the child, equally disfigured, will be her eighteenth, yet to Pothivelu Pandaram, her owner, she is nothing but an “item”—albeit an especially valuable one, a cash cow bred to produce offspring to add to the pool of beggars that are the staple of his trade. However, no matter how grim it may seem at the outset (and at some level always is), The Abyss by Tamil writer Jeyamohan is a profoundly human story filled with selfish motives , moral ambiguity,  and affectionate, if dark, humour.

Pandaram, the central protagonist projects the image of the successful middle class man. He has a devoted wife, three beautiful daughters, and is a faithful devotee of Murugan, the handsome Hindu God of war, patron of Tamil culture. But the unseemly source of his  income is an open secret—it rests in his stock of disfigured and disabled men, women, and children. It’s a business that places him in the company of some pretty disreputable characters, but his family, in so far as they are exposed to it, seem to be surprisingly at ease with it all. And when two of his friends joke with him at the local bathing pond he is quick to defend his trade on spiritual terms:

“Stop it, Kochu Pillai. It is no laughing matter. There are all kinds of souls, great and little. Now, we say Mahatma Gandhi, yes? What’s that? Maha-atma. A great soul. That’s because his atma was great. Ours, on the other hand, is a smaller soul, a smaller atma. We must respect other souls like ours. Love them. But there are souls even smaller than ours. Those we must protect. Look after. Now, take these crea­tures. These items. But for us, who do they have? The whole lot would be out on the streets, hungry and begging. They’d starve to death. But now they are under us, so they don’t need to worry about a thing. They get enough to eat, a roof over their heads, medicines if they are sick.” Pandaram took a dip in the pond and rose.

It sounds like a reasonable, if twisted, compassion at play, but it’s not. It’s a form of slavery. As he is shuffling his beggars off to a temple or festival, or deciding which one to sell or trade, Pandaram will remind himself—and others—that he is dealing with beings who have “no souls, no brains.” The question then becomes: Who are the “freaks” in this system? Whose humanity is deserving of consideration and value? As we witness the corruption, hypocrisy, and social demands of the world Pandaram frequents, while at the same time getting to know the beggars and the reality they create for themselves, it’s is not such a difficult matter to answer.

Although they vary in the extent of their infirmities and the degree to which they can engage and communicate, the beggars are no fools. And they are under no illusion about the precariousness of their existences, but they know how to “perform,” how to squirrel away coins to purchase snacks and beedis (thin, hand-rolled cigarettes), and even how to manipulate their minders when needed. Along with Muthammai and her infant son, there’s Mangandi Samy with his legless, one-armed body and small head who doesn’t speak but sings his own made-up songs of love and loss.  And there’s Ramappan, a Kannadiga leper, and Ahmedkutty, a literate Muslim with testicles grossly enlarged by elephantiasis, and an assorted cast of other fantastically distorted and disadvantaged folk. They spar with one another, joke, fret, and when one of them longs for a fancy feast, they conspire to arrange it for him. More than simply marginalized, the lives they live may be limited but their dreams are not, and they make the best of what they do have, commenting on their state—not to mention that of greater society—with wit and biting, black humour.

Away from the temple steps, cops seek bribes, priests and pilgrims play lip service to faith, and other dealers in the beggar breeding and bartering trade engage in unspeakable cruelty that far exceeds anything our protagonist will entertain. Yet, Pandaram is the complicated knot in this story. He is self-centred, caste conscious, proud, and dishonest, but there are anxieties that keep him on edge. His eldest daughter is overdue to be married, and the expenses and negotiations required to assure a suitable match (regardless of what the prospective bride and groom might want) are excessive. Meanwhile, his middle daughter is seeing a rebel on the sly. And his youngest, his favourite, demands favours he cannot refuse. His mood swings wildly from cocky confidence to tears of despair as he regularly runs to the temple to thank Murugan for his graces or beseech Him for relief. And as things start to really unravel, one can almost feel sorry for him. But not too much.

Translator Sucharita Ramachandran’s Note which closes out the novel—but probably would be best read first—sheds light on aspects of Jeymohan’s storytelling in this rich, multi-faceted tale that do not easily make the transition into English. The original, she tells us:

is a novel with a remarkable degree of polyphony. While the novel itself was written in a register that straddled Tamil and Malayalam, it uses other languages, registers and dialects to differentiate between various char­acters. For example, Ahmedkutty speaks a Tamil–Malayalam peculiar to Muslims. A minor character speaks only Kannada. Many of the characters lapse into English when they become class conscious. The characters liberally use puns, proverbs and film songs to communicate their thoughts and feelings, and sometimes switch between languages to make a point.

She tries to preserve as much of the linguistic nuances as possible through a variety of means that read unobtrusively in translation and I was pleased to note that, apart from some very specific terms included in a brief glossary, South Indian place names, food items, and other customary features were not unnecessarily explained. This enhances the very distinctive atmosphere of this exceptional novel (and, of course, there’s always Google if you’re curious).

The Abyss by Jeyamohan is translated from the Tamil by Sucharita Ramachandran and published by Transit Books.

 

 

The disquieting terrain of loss: Grove by Esther Kinsky

I arrived in Olevano in January, two months and a day after M.’s funeral. The journey was long and led through dingy winter landscapes, which clung indecisively to grey vestiges of snow. In the Bohemian Forest, freshly fallen, wet snow dripped from the trees, clouding the view through the Stifteresque underbrush to the young Vltava River, which not had even a thin border of jagged ice.

As the landscape past the cliffs stretched into the Friulian plains, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had forgotten what it is like to encounter the light that lies behind the Alps and understood, suddenly, the distant euphoria my father experienced every time we descended the Alps.

The unnamed narrator of Grove arrives in Italy, fresh from the loss of her long-time partner, planning to spend three months contemplating the possibility of forcing her life “into a new order that would let me survive the unexpected unknown.” As she travels down from Germany, she stops in Ferrara, a town she had and M. had planned to visit on the Italian trip they would never manage to take together. But the literary landscape of Georgio Bassani will have to wait, at this time her destination is further south, a small village south-east of Rome. There she will walk the streets and roadways of the rolling landscape, orienting herself in relation to the house where she rents an apartment, the nearby cemetery and grove of trees. An anchor for an unanchored time.

German author and translator Esther Kinsky’s books cannot be rushed. They unfold slowly and linger in the imagination. Like her acclaimed novel, River, this meditation on grief offers an intimation of autofiction but I prefer to see her work as fiction bound to real-life experience and location that conceals as much as it reveals. Intimate yet not overtly confessional in nature. The focus is on immediate response to encounters, observations and memories, while autobiographical details tend to be limited, leaving both the author and her protagonist in the shadows. The narrator has recently lost her husband after a serious illness; Kinsky’s husband, Scottish-born German translator Martin Chalmers, died in October, 2014. The grief, the loss, is palpable, yet still too recent to be fully articulated, not only in the first section chronicling those early months alone, but in the third part set exactly one year later. M.’s memory haunts the narrator’s dreams, her attachment to an article of his clothing, his image. However, we learn very little of anything about him or their life together. Likewise, what the narrator is looking for and what she finds is unclear—as in River, it is the journey, or rather journeys, not the destination that guides the narrative.

In the first part of Grove, “Olevano,” one has the sense that the narrator is attempting to find herself in the landscape of a place where death is never far away. Cemeteries, the sellers of fresh and plastic flowers to mark graves, the sight of a body being removed from a house, memories of the Etruscan tombs her father loved, even trees being felled to combat the spread of disease all summon thoughts of morti, followed by sounds of vii—bird song, children’s voices, the daily ordinary routines of life. It’s a slow unfolding, gradual emergence from winter to the early signs of spring, that accompany the narrator’s wandering through the village, the countryside, to Rome, to the sea and back to her temporary refuge on the hillside. She is learning how to live again, awaking in an alien place, a stranger to each new day:

When after sweeping the landscape my gaze fell to my hands on the window ledge, I thought I saw M.’s hands beneath them, in the space between my fingers – white and delicate and long, his dying hands, which were so different from his living hands, and they lay beneath mine as if on a double exposed photograph. Then the coffee maker hissed, and the coffee boiled over, and my living hands had to break away from M.’s white hands in order to turn off the stove and remove the pot, but I inevitably burned myself, and this pain made me aware that I hadn’t relearned anything yet.

The flowing language, poetic, careful and observant, traces a slow burning existential pilgrimage. Kinsky paints a rich portrait, not only of the landscape and urban areas, but of the people—from the reticent village population to the groups of African migrants who cluster around marketplaces and bus stations, barely surviving on the outskirts of society, unable to leave, with no home to return to. As in River, a novel set on the edge of London along the Lea River, her narrator here similarly is attentive to the character and quality of place; she does not simply see, she feels her way through the misty months of early disorienting grief and necessary solitude.

I became dizzy looking at this unfurled country which was laid so bare yet remained so incomprehensible to me. A rugged terrain with a restless appearance – it presented itself differently from each side. On each side the routes drew a different script, the mountains cast different shadows, and the plains, foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds shifted. A terrain that left traces in me, without a recognizable trace of myself remaining in it. Something about the relationship between seeing and being seen – between  the significance of seeing and being or becoming seen, as a comforting conformation of your existence – suddenly appeared to me as a burning question, which defied all names and acts of naming. If on that hillside some had told me that I might die from the inability to answer or simply even phrase this question, I would have believed them.

It is clear from the beginning that she is no stranger to Italy. Her father spoke Italian, was fascinated with the history of the Etruscans, and year after year family holidays were spent exploring the country. The second section of Grove begins with her father’s death, then revisits memories of trips taken over the years. Grief, through the lens of time and distance becomes an attempt to understand a somewhat elusive man against the backdrop of his knowledge of architectural sites, landscapes and bird calls, his tendency to disappear for hours and his penchant for outings that often led to the family getting lost. In the end though, this fascinating and recognizable account of lengthy family car trips reminds anyone with a similarly enigmatic parent that we can ever fully know them when so much of our experience rests deeply in childhood. Loss and mourning is perhaps always incomplete.

So we come to the third and final part of the novel which finds our narrator returning to Italy exactly one year after her stay in Olevano. Again it is January when a certain colourlessness and frosty otherness mutes the land. She travels first to Ferrara, orienting herself by the landmarks of the life and characters of Georgio Bassani, haunted more by the fictional environs of the Finzi Continis. From there she moves to Comacchio, on the Adriatic, where she spends her days walking through the stark salt pans, observing flamingos and other shore birds, and seeking out the site of a fabled necropolis. It’s a sad and lonely time to be wandering this place devoid as it is of tourist activity, but she seems to be approaching a new, peaceful meditative relationship with loss. If she set out to consider how she might force her life into a new order one year earlier, the apparent bleakness of this last stop in Italy carries the quiet promise of moving forward anew even if where she is heading and what she has learned is not clear, or not for sharing.

Grove by Esther Kinsky is translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and as Grove: A Field Novel by Transit Books in North America.

A deep and abiding melancholy: Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa

There is a moment in our earliest years, if we are lucky, when the outside world with all its attendant ills and hardships cannot yet touch us, but it is simultaneously a vulnerable space, fleeting, ephemeral—even more so when we look back and remember how quickly it passed:

It was the middle of the dry season but each time her lips parted I found myself in an oasis in which I wanted for nothing; I had no need to look to the horizon but if I did, it would have gone on and on, a hungerlessness that might well be called paradise. The wind was blowing from the coast, a salt wind from the Atlantic which I would feel against me as a phantom presence even when it was not there any more. The sun was not shining and its not shining was neither here nor there; I was not waiting for the sun to reveal itself to me . . . Although I was old enough – three years, perhaps four – I seldom spoke at this time. No one really remarked on this fact nor how I hung off every one of my mother’s words. Indeed, I could have continued in this same vein for an aeon or more, unaware of the peril of what might lie ahead.

Set in Angola during the years leading up to Independence from Portugal in 1975, Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa, an Australian author of Goan heritage, is a young woman’s account of childhood and youth during a time of increasing political unrest and instability. As she remembers the magic of her early, loving bond with her mother, in an idyllic setting secure in the comforts wealth affords, the truths she is not yet able to understand linger in the air. From the beginning, a tentativeness, a sense of an impending ending runs through the narrative, beneath the protection of a child’s innocence and an adolescent self-absorption, until it becomes evident that the last remnants of the colonial social structure must either face unfortunate dissolution or exile.

Named for the Portuguese expression meaning an unbearable longing or melancholy, Saudade is a novella of displacement. Narrator Maria-Christina’s parents, Indians from Brahmin backgrounds, their marriage arranged, had immigrated to Angola in the dying days of Portuguese rule in Goa. Africa was seen as a place of promise and hope for the future. At first they settled into a comfortable existence, and started a family. But their colonial experience, as such, has two sides. They have a certain status, hire African servants, and yet, to many Portuguese they are still bound to the reality that Portugal had once subdued and ruled their homeland. When, at school, Maria-Christina refers to explorer Bartolomeu Dias as an “invader,” her indignant teacher reminds her of her place:

Her voice tremulous, she declared that Bartolomeu Dias had been commissioned by João II and Isabel; she said that he had battled storm and shipwreck and cannibalism to claim Angola for Portugal. Bartolomeu Dias, she said, was responsible for civilising the people of Angola and was part of that long line of fidalgos who had cultivated my own loinclothed and mud-thatched and blue-godded people! When she had made this speech, the teacher from Coimbra was standing close to me and yet it seemed I could not see her; her face was blur. When she spoke, her breath smelt stale – as of onions and salt pork sitting in a pot too long. Not a day went by without one girl or other being humiliated by her, so I tried not to take the humiliation to heart.

After an initial period of prosperity, unrest begins to grow and threaten the security of the non-Angolan residents. As the fight for independence escalates, Maria Christina’s father is caught up secretive, risky activities, while her mother becomes increasingly stressed and homesick. Meanwhile, their daughter must navigate the mysteries and challenges of childhood and adolescence against a shifting social, political and domestic landscape.

The success of any Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, for me, depends on a certain recognizable authenticity of voice. Here the spare, wistful melancholy of the protagonist’s early memories, filtered through the lens of acquired understanding, carries just the right tone. Trusting and deeply attached to her mother when she is young, she gradually gains a more defiant edge as puberty arrives and the tensions at home and in the country intensify. Her relationships with her parents become strained as friendships and her first romance start to define her move toward an independent engagement with the world. That is, until political upheaval begins to draw her friends away from Angola, often to places and relatives they barely know. Yet, as much as this is a story of a family living through the final years of colonial power and privilege, the nostalgia for India is deep and  abiding—a loss that haunts the mother and leaves the daughter rootless.  Independence exacts huge costs for all and, of course, for the Angolans themselves, there will be many bloody years yet to come.

Saudade by Suneeta Peres Da Costa is published by Giramondo in Australia and Transit Books in the US.

Neither here nor there: Esther Kinsky’s River and a link to my review at Music & Literature

Since I finished Esther Kinsky’s magnificent novel River, it has been difficult for me to contain my enthusiasm for this work, and yet, with a major review on the way, I wanted to refrain from talking at length about my reading of this languid, mesmerizing meditation on the relationships we have with place—those we live in, pass through, or linger in uncertainly during points of transition.  That review is now live, and yet Kinsky’s book is still working its way through my system.

River is a slow read; immersive, poetic, attentive to detail. It creates an atmosphere of intimacy with the spaces the unnamed narrator traverses during a time of restless displacement in a community on the edge of London; a time of gathering and preparation for leaving the city where she has lived for a number of years. Some of these spaces are immediate, defined by the course of the river Lea. Others exist in the distance, temporally and physically. And yet, although there are clear parallels between Kinsky’s own life history and the locations her narrator visits, River occupies an intentionally indistinct borderland between fiction and memoir, focusing on experience in the moment over biographical background and detail, resulting in a narrative that flows, organically, like the rivers than run through it.

My review of River can be found at the online site of the singular journal Music& Literature. The opening passages are reproduced below, you can read the rest of it here.

A mood, an atmosphere, rises up from the opening pages of Esther Kinsky’s River—a melancholy that unfolds so softly, so insistently that I repeatedly had to remind myself that I was reading words that originally existed in German. I found myself wondering: What would the German feel like in my hands? How would its texture taste, guttural tones against the back of my throat? These are questions that, in their asking, underscore how River is a text to linger in, to touch, to absorb, and recognize one’s self in. We follow the narrator as she temporarily suspends her life, settling for a time in a marginal community on the edge of London, so she can slowly disengage herself from a number of years spent in the city, and prepare, mentally and emotionally, to take her final leave. The process she details seems to be one we, too, undergo in reading River.

Under a pale sun and in the whitish, shadowless light peculiar to this place and these seasons, I took to following tracks which, time and again, led me back through the alder grove. This partly mutilated wetland wood with its childhood flowers and wild birds secretly appealing to my memory was my gateway to the lower reaches, to the path downstream that gradually taught me, during the final months of my stay, to find my own names for a city I had already spent many years labouring to decipher—names only walking and looking could force me to extract and reassemble from a web of trickling memories, a debris of stored images and sounds, a tissue of tangled words.

 

River by Esther Kinsky is translated from the German by Iain Galbraith and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Transit Books in North America.