Beneath the horrendous headline “Gangsta Raj,” New York Times reviewer Paul Gray opens his treatment of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games with the kind of snark that will dissuade anyone who only reads the first paragraph from buying the book:
This immense, demanding novel can be recommended, with scarcely a cavil, to well-educated Indians who have lots of free time, are fluent in (at the very least) English and Hindi, and have a thorough knowledge of South Asian politics; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious practices; and the stars and story lines of hundreds of Bollywood films. Longtime Bombay residents will have an extra advantage, since they will know, without consulting a gazeteer or Google, why the city is now called Mumbai. Prospective readers who donÂ’t fit this profile will have some catching up to do.
In the end, it’s a positive review, though the term “damning with faint praise” sure came to my mind several times as I went through it. And do the Gray Lady’s editors know they just printed the words sisterfucker and motherfucker?
So it goes here. Those who plunge into the novel soon find themselves thrashing in a sea of words (“nullah,” “ganwars,” “bigha,” “lodu,” “bhenchod,” “tapori,” “maderchod”) and sentences (“On Maganchand Road the thela-wallahs already had their fruit piled high, and the fishsellers were laying out bangda and bombil and paaplet on their slabs”) unencumbered by italics or explication.
Seriously though, I still haven’t read the book (the US edition comes out this week, hence the review) but one thing I appreciated about Chandra’s last book, the amazing collection Love and Longing in Bombay, is precisely how he manages to introduce large amounts of local color and vocabulary in ways that connect even if you don’t know what exactly every term means. Surely the review could have taken a more productive approach than to lead with this literalist harping?
I ran into Vikram Chandra about seven years ago in the Port Authority bus terminal in the city. He was unpretentious and exceedingly nice – shook my hand, practically hugged me – and I got all sorts of props from my then girlfriend for recognizing “random writers” in bus terminals.
Also, I find the review encouraging for Indian writing in English. It tells me Chandra is setting his own course, and not writing for the ‘establishment’ or the western public inclined to read literary fiction – glossary notwithstanding.
I was reading Love and Longing last week.. Pretty good read. highly recommended.
“Picasso kahan hai maderchod”
Exactly! That whole scene is one of the most hilarious passages I’ve ever read!
O Siddhartha, how can you expect a fair review of a book like this from a gora?
What, no immigrants trying to assimilate into ‘phoren’ cultures? No nostalgic memories of colonial periods? And…no possibility of a booker or a pulitzer? A book set in India by an Indian uses Indian slang? How outrageous!!!!
I know! I found that very amusing. In that story, there is a part where Chandra describes the house and family of Rajesh (the guy who goes missing.. i think it is Rajesh), and he describes how his mom slept in the corridor, and how that his brother and his wife had the bedroom since they were now married. I felt a sense of great sadness when I read that passage..
I have not read the review as yet. But I think it is important the VC stuck to his language guns. After, if America can learn to admire to Trainspotting dialog and D.B.C. Pierre writing, why not Mumbiaya jive? Oh, yes, there is always the Dave Eggers who will jump the gun to write THE book about Africa.
And what about the book’s final two paragraphs? Chills up my spine just remembering…
I am always happy to see unadulterated Taporese making it’s way in books. Totally agree w/ Neale re: Trainspotting. Marathi writers like Namdeo Dhasal and Bhau Padhye have been working this beat for years. Unfortunately translations are not available.
Oh, I don’t know boss. Gray’s book review was actually pretty fair-minded. Of the hundreds of words I’ve consumed willingly or otherwise over the past few months on the subject of “Sacred Games,” this is the one review that’s made me say: damn, I have to read this book.
It sounds, frankly, amazing. It sounds like the book equivalent of the cool uncle with side-burns and leather jackets when you were ten-years old who would let you have a puff of his cigarettes when your parents weren’t around…er….never mind.
Where was I? Oh yes. The book. You can tell Gray’s awed by it. James Joyce meets Ian Fleming? Come on now. I’m ordering my copy.
I also think it’s going to do some very healthy business in the shops. Just wait and see.
There is a clueless arrogance at work in American and British literary circles, which is probably a reflection of the respective societies, an arrogance of assumption of centrality, a boorishness of assumption of relevance. It is much less marked in the UK. Sixty years of former colonial immigrant irrigation and perspective have provided British readers with an intimacy for India, Carribean and African literature in tune with the ‘White Teeth’ society that Britain has become. But America is still masturbating and in love with herself, still masturbating in front of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and acting perplexed when any literture comes along that references and breathes outside the confines of New England, New York, or post-modern Pynchon monomaniacal narcissism (the ultimate literary symbol of a nation and super-power with its head so far up its own backside it cannot even register the rest of the world)
You down with OPP?
I’m not sure I agree with this–the literary culture here is actually quite sophisticated–but I have to say, I was strangely turned on by this paragraph.
Come again?
(And folks, don’t take Siddhartha’s word for it. Read Gray’s review for yourself. It really really isn’t that bad.)
Wow, that’s four posts in a row. Siddhartha really is on speed. Btw Siddhartha, how much Hindi do you speak? This post and the last one (video and all) suggest you can at least understand quite a bit.
Do you want to meet up?
Yeah — forty years now of Vietnam and My Lai and Halabja, and you would think at least one or two writers might have emerged to try and explain the dissonance between America and the rest of the world. What do we get though? Updike fingering and describing in microscopic details middle American New England clitoris’s and cocks, and Jonathan Franzen writing satires of Philadelphian nouvelle cuisine and restaurants and why his Kansas mummy and daddy were really square and embarassed him when he was in his twenties. For fucks sake.
Virtually none, my friend. I can recognize key phrases and utter a few too, but that’s about it. I would love to hunker down and learn properly sometime. I need to learn to properly speak Bangla too.
You Know Me, intent on proving you wrong, especially your assertion about the alleged “New York/New England” masturbatory obsession of American writing, intent of flinging, as they say, the FACTS into your face, I went and pulled up the list of the last ten winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The point was to see what they dealt with, where they were based. Here it is, with my off the cuff notes:
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks–New England 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson –Midwest 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones –African American- Washington, DC 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides– Androgyny, Detroit, Greece 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo –Upstate New York (?) 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon –New York City 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri —New England, Bengal 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham –New York City, England 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth –New Jersey 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser –New York City 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford –New Jersey
DAMN! You were right.
Ok, I checked. Empire Falls was set in Maine.
That still gives us eight of the last ten Pulitzer Fiction winners being set in NY/New England/DC. Sad. I wonder what the National Book Critics Circle looks like, and the National Book Awards. Better, I’d bet, since they’re not awarded by the Columbia/Pulitzer mafia.
Kobayishi. Can you name one great American writer of the last one hundred years? Maybe Saul Bellow for equalising Jewish Europe with the new world. Nabokov was an implant. Hemingway was a macho prick and apart from The Old Man and the Sea and the Mount Kilimanjaro story was indifferent. Even Britain at the height of its Empire had Forster and Conrad to interrogate what was going on, and had Joyce to kick against it. Bloated and obese — American literature sucks.
Toni Morrison.
What Siddhartha said.
And Philip Roth. And David Mamet. And John Updike. And Elizabeth Bishop. And Auden/Eliot (take your pick, you can’t disqualify both). And, goddammit, Nabokov: he considered himself American, and I consider him one too.
Those, and a dozen others.
I fear Toni Morrison is just America (and the Nobel commitees) guilty conscience. But I am glad she exists. Every time some Manhattan Ivy Leaguer writes a novel about their angst and the pills they can take to relieve it (Benjamin Kunkel and assorted nothings), I groan so much you could hear me on Mars.
Also: Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion… shit, You Know Me, if you focus on women writers, African-American writers, Southern writers, and so on, there’s endless great stuff to read.
And James Baldwin, and Arthur Miller, and Faulkner.
Interrogators to the core, all. Your anger is understandable, You Know Me, but quite a ways off base.
Auden was English, born in Yorkshire. Eliot was as English as Nabokov was American. Updike — blegh. As a recorder of how Americans in the mid-west screwed whilst they dropped napalm on children in Vietnam, yeah I suppose so. Philip Roth? OK maybe. But only maybe.
And consider what we get from the UK? Nick Hornby and an endless flow of Fionas and Jemmas with their seventh-rate Bridget Jones knock-offs. Come on, there’s plenty of self-regarding shit everywhere. It’s what the industry likes, and publishes, and exports. From us to you, and from you to us.
Ralph Ellison, Don Delilo, Phiilip Roth, Faulkner, TS Elliot, Wallace Stevens.
I told you you couldn’t disqualify both. You can’t slice the world into only the sliced that please you. If Auden was English for being born in America, then people born in India can’t be American either. Respect citizenship.
That just sounds like race-baiting bullshit to me. Do you have any substantive criticisms of those of her works that you’ve attended to? And whose guilty conscience was Kenzaburo Oe? Dario Fo? Elfride Jelinek? Gao Xingjian?
I hear you, You Know Me, really I do, about the pathetic state of a lot of what passes for literature today. I’m no fan of the “Jonathans” (as we like to call them).
But this kind of criticism is more powerful when it’s a bit more measured. Saying there are no great recent American writers is like saying there are no great recent American movie directors. People will laugh at you.
Zora Neale Hurston. August Wilson. Langston Hughes. Ntozake Shange. John Steinbeck. Arthur Miller. Sinclair Lewis. Come on!!!!!
Faulkner! Now you’re talking. Yes, he was good, for what he was. I confess his influence. But Faulkner to me has always seemed a third world writer, an accident of America. I also confess Britain produces shite by the bucket load. But my feeling is that American literature is bloated and self satisfied. In the last century the great writers came from the marginal literatures, Kafka, Joyce, Proust (alright Proust less so, but still….)
In the 21st Century America will be the fat, obese Disneyworld literature, admiring it’s own big belly, how cool the internet is, how cool this is, how cool that is, against which literatures will flourish around the world, explaining the globalised comedy and tragedies, the writers from the margins which will take the novel, play and poem forward. And I reckon India will be at the forefront of that, strangely enough.
cough
Ntozake Shange and Sinclair Lewis are good writers. I don’t know if they’re great…
You know, great is great.
Faulkner = accident of America, Morrison = Nobel committee guilty conscience. You can’t have an exception and loophole for everything. If Faulkner seems a third world writer, it’s in part because America has a third world of its own. It’s called the South, and the inner-cities nationwide. The South and the ‘hood have produced immense amounts of fine writing. And if those writers weren’t spending enough time to your liking criticising the Vietnam war, it’s because they had other fights closer to them, often immediately threatening to their own livelihoods, sometimes lives. To refer to another great writer, America is large: it contains multitudes. When you come visit I’ll show you.
The most we can say about where the next great writers will come from is that we don’t know where the next great writers will come from. If I look around today, and ask the question of who’s truly great (and still alive) in the world of literature, there’s no rhyme of reason to where they are from: Colombia, Ireland, USA, Sweden, South Africa, England, Poland, St Lucia. There’s no logic to it. Good writers emerge because of. Great writers emerge in spite of. They’re such strikes of lightning. The next one could be a trust-fund East-Coast Jewish Ivy-Leaguer. Or the son of a shoe-shiner from a Rio de Janeiro favella. There’s simply no telling.
Kobayishi, Auden was born in England and took American citizenship in 1946. Arthur Miller? Apart from the Crucible I don’t rate him.
Looking through the literary pages recently, I noticed that 9/11 appears in another novel, this time by Clair Messud, who uses it as a backdrop against which she can tell a tale of spoilt sons and daughters of Manhattan millionaire parents and how it dreadfully inconvenienced them. Someone get writing and tell the tale of the Muslim shopkeeper or the Sikh doctor who had the shit kicked out of them in the aftermath of 9/11 and what that means for the American dream. The whole world is waiting for the literature that deals with what is going on in the world right now, the world in which America squats over continents and defecates. How many more self-aggrandising books about ‘American innocence’ apropos ‘The Great Gatsby’ can the world take?
======
Time Out: I know I am being provocative. But at least to start a debate. Forgive me.
Siddhartha
Yes I know, you win that one, I’m just being mischievous! Look, to be honest, I don’t rate Morrison at all, not at all, but that’s just me. Faulkner is something else altogether, he is a great writer.
OK, time out. The AMERICAN football playoff started a few minutes ago anyway. Gotta watch TV now.
This is actually interesting. Faulkner was a virtual God to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When Gabo read him as a young failed lawyer in Baranquilla, his life was changed forever. He quite literally worshipped him, he saw that, yes, this is the way forward.
And, to bring the thing full-circle, I saw a TV interview with Toni Morrison (it was Charlie Rose) and the name Garcia-Marquez came up, and she was simply lost for words, stuttering, awed into gibbering.
And, no doubt, Morrison herself similarly awes others.
You do it. Don’t laugh. Literature takes, in equal measure, guts, obsessiveness, and literary skill. Even if you don’t have the literary skill yet, start with the guts and obsessiveness. Get it going. Put it out there. Four pages this week, four pages next week, little by little the little beastie grows. What are you waiting for?
Mario Vargas Llosa too. He seemed to have electrified a whole generation of Latin American writers. Llosa’s ‘The Feast of the Goat’ is a fantastic novel by the way, I reccomend it highly.
I am not American. You are. You do it. It needs to be done.
Oooh cop-out. Well, I bet there are ill stories where you are too. Don’t make the mistake of thinking great literature is about “great subjects.” Why don’t you write a story about the mullah who runs the chippie down the road? And about how his life became hell afer 7/7? Or about how he became an informer? Or about how he lost his faith but didn’t know how to tell his family? (well, don’t do that last one, I think Hanif already had a go at it). My point is…
I don’t think Faulkner made excuses. “I don’t live in London, I don’t live in Paris. No one cares about Mississippi.” No. Hell no. What he said was, “Pass the damn whisky.” And he drank till he passed out.
And when he woke up, he. Started. To. Type.
No excuses mate.
Oh, YKM, Arthur Miller is fantastic, as is John Steinbeck (already mentioned). Maybe I am naive, but I also love Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Tennessee Williams, June Jordan, and Carson McCullers.
Aside from the sexualized literary descriptions, I think it’s a bit arrogant to write off all American lit. Perhaps the focus on the canon makes it easier to exclude all the other writers that have been mentioned?
Kobayishi, I just don’t have the knowledge of local conditions to write about America. It’s not a cop-out, it’s a statement of truth, everything would be coloured by an outsiders gaze, and whilst that may be valuable, or interesting, the truth and truest testament will only really come from the intimate insider.
I don’t have the talent, or inclination, to be a writer. Too old, too jaded, too mortgaged to do that. I am a reader though, and just shooting the breeze, and I think any reader has the right to talk about literature, even if half of what he talks is bollocks, because at least the other half might have some sense in it.
Stop misspelling my name dammit. It ain’t Kobayishi, it’s Kobayashi.
And who asked you to write about America? You’re presumably somewhere on planet earth. And wherever it is, it’s hugely interesting. If it’s happens not to be America, that’s all for the good. Where are you, Madna?
From the place where they spell ‘Kobayashi’ Kobayishi
But seriously though, that’s a nonsense reply. It asserts that in order to have an opinion on literature you have to be a writer or an aspiring writer yourself. Forget that, I feel free to talk about literature as I please as a member of the plebian crowd. If that’s the criteria, who can enter the debate that is not a conspiring novelist? Help us from those schemes!
No Faulkner no Cambrian explosion in Latin American literature- Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, etc.Marquez openly acknowledges his debt to Faulkner.
Oh, bless. Someone’s just been visited by the cranky-fairy.
Look, as a first-class bullshitter myself (if I may be so vain), I’m all for literary repartee. But if you’re going to talk smack about my kin Phil “West Orange in the House” Roth and Toni “Tony Tone” Morrison, you betta bring your skills, playa.
Please don’t be pathetic. You’re scaring the children.
Oh brother, put the fatwa on me! Don’t take it personal —> lesson one —> NEVER take literary prejudice or joust-about personally. I don’t rate Morrison, that’s my opinion, and Roth is good, Operation Shylock is good, Sabbaths Theatre too.