Literary bettors rejoice for the shortlist for the 2007 (Man) Booker prize is out. Last year, Kiran Desai won for Inheritance of Loss. This year there are two brown authors, both expats like Desai, on the shortlist: Mohsin Hamid for The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Indra Sinha for Animal’s People.
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My book is not recommended in-flight reading |
When the Man Booker longlist was announced last August, pundits were somewhat surprised that many of the year’s biggest authors – Sebastian Faulks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje – were left off. [Link]
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p>The remaining four books have sold an average of less than one thousand copies a piece in the UK, so they are hardly popular favorites. Other than On Chesil Beach, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has sold the most copies, with 1,519 books moved, and Animal’s People has sold the least, with only 231 copies sold in the UK, despite the sales boost from longlisting it. [Link]
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I once translated the Kama Sutra |
Both of the desi authors wrote books anchored in current / historical events that were major international tragedies:
The Reluctant Fundamentalist … explores the conflict experienced by a young Muslim who has been educated in the US, worked on Wall Street and fallen in love with an American woman, who finds himself treated with suspicion in the aftermath of 9/11. [Link]
Animal’s People … draws on the real-life events surrounding the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, seen through the eyes of Animal, a boy whose spine was twisted and so must walk on all fours. When an American, Ellie Barber, arrives to seek justice for the victims, he investigates her motives. [Link]
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p>Ian McEwan had been the favorite, but he has since been overtaken by the NZ author Lloyd Jones. Both of the desi authors’ books are currently long shots, which means that betting on brown in this case is a bet of heart over head:
2/1: Lloyd Jones – Mister Pip
5/2: Ian McEwan – On Chesil Beach
4/1: Nicola Barker – Darkmans
5/1: Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist
8/1: Anne Enright – The Gathering
8/1: Indra Sinha – Animal’s People [Link]
According to NaNoWriMo rules, the novel-novella cutoff is 50,000 words, which is 175 pages in usual print form. This Booker entry may have gone through just above the cutoff.
I’m surprised at the low sales numbers for The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In the U.S. it was prominently featured in several Barnes & Nobles earlier this year. I have a feeling it’s been doing better over here (maybe American readers have a bigger appetite for terrorism and so on).
It’s a flawed novel, but many of the things other people didn’t like about it (the unusual second-person voice; the general scenario of a novel as an extended monologue with a silent interlocutor) worked fine for me. What didn’t work quite as well was the idea that the novel has anything to do with “fundamentalism.” Disenchantment with an immigrant’s experience in the western world, yes; disinterest in finance/consulting, yes. But Hamid isn’t very interested in what makes a hardcore religious fanatic; the novel might have been better titled “The Reluctant Anti-Americanist.”
The Indra Sinha book isn’t even for sale here, as far as I can tell. I may try and special order it…
I haven’t read the book yet, but I understood that the phrase “fundamentalist” was a pun, referring to the analysis of financial fundamentals as well as religious ones.
I know many copywriters who worship God Indra. Check out his brilliant work on Metropolitan Police and Amnesty International. Interestingly, he burnt his portfolio after quitting advertising.
Could we add one or both to the SM Book Club list? 🙂 The latter looks especially interesting (to me, at least)
He seems like an amazing dude to me, what with his Bhopal activism and all. I couldn’t find “Animal’s People” either, but did score a used copy of “The Death of Mr. Love” online, which I’m reading now.
Amardeep has read the former, so if the Book Club can be passed like a baton at a relay, and Amardeep has time, I imagine something can be arranged. As for the latter book, we should wait until it is released in the USA …
Yes, a book club on The Reluctant Fundamentalist could be doable. It’s certainly a heck of a lot shorter than “A Suitable Boy”!
I also might want to do a book club event on the new book on the mathematician Ramanujam, “The Indian Clerk.” At some point…
Yes, he does not explore it much in the novel. He touched on group insecurity and tried to draw a parallel between hyper-nationalism and religious fanaticism in an interesting conversation with Jai Arjun Singh.
I also might want to do a book club event on the new book on the mathematician Ramanujam, “The Indian Clerk.”
Isn’t there also a recent, very well known book on Ramanujan, “The man who conquered infinity”…..or some title like that.
Correction:
It is “The man who knew infinity”
In some sense, Ramanujan along with Chandrasekar, and Gandhi* are the most brilliant Indians of 20th century, and have left the most profound effect on the mankind.
I would love to see Ramanujan discussed in a book club setting, and then Chandrashekar, especially his early tiff with his PhD advisor Lord Eddington.
I’d actually be totally down for the Ramanujan double whammy, as well.
Ahh, details 🙂
“I also might want to do a book club event on the new book on the mathematician Ramanujam, “The Indian Clerk.” At some point…”
a family member is reading it right now and is quite taken with it. i hope to get it after they finish and read it in time for your book club event.
Kush Tandon, wasn’t Chandrasekhar advised by Ralph Fowler, who also advised Arthur Eddington? Also, Eddington was knighted but I don’t think he ever became a Lord Eddington. Eddington and Chandrasekhar did have a major professional disagreement over the existence of the Chandrasekhar limit, and the general behavior of massive stars, but as far as I know they remained friends.
If you guys are looking for some in-depth discussion of The Indian Clerk (it’s a new fiction release based on the friendship between Ramanujam and Hardy), check this out.
TEV is a fun literary blog and Mark Sarvas devoted a whole week to the book recently.
Indra has been active for many years with the Bhopal campaign and was running http://www.bhopal.net for a long time. He was one of the first people to start the campaign in the UK and has been an asset to the campaign. Portion of the sales for the book on Amazon UK will be going to the running of the hospital (Sambhavana Clinic) which the campaign runs for the victims and so please do buy the book now on the UK site. This is great that the book is receiving attention, it will help keep the plight of the Bhopalis in the media and hopefully put more pressure on Dow as it tries to make investments in India. The accompanying site for the book is http://www.khaufpur.com
To the extent, of course, that Chandra was ‘friends’ with anybody. But more than whether they were ‘friends’ is the issue of the impact his tiff with Eddington had on Chandra’s work, self-confidence, and overall disposition throughout his life. On this there are two views, both well-argued.
Empire of the Stars by Arthur Miller, argues that the impact was profound, that Eddington may have been acting with a racist mindset, that Chandra was so thoroughly shaken by the public humiliation that he never regained the mental equilibrium he had prior to the Eddinton encounter.
The other book, ‘Chandra’ by Prof. Kameshwar Wali, argues that the impact, while not insignificant, was also not particularly profound and that Chandra not only recovered, but remained ‘friends’ with Eddington, and also wrote a biography – Eddington: The Most Distinguished Astrophysicist of his Time.
The interesting thing here is that it is Miller, an Englishman, who argues that Eddington might have been racist, while Wali, an Indian argues that he wasn’t (among other points of contention along that axis between the two).
I’ve read both books, and they would be fascinating to discuss here. My view is that reality lies closer to the way Miller sees it, which incidentally is not how Chandra himself ever publicly implied. Wali knew him personally for several decades, while Miller never knew him personally but pieced together his view with a lot of reading between the lines.
Kush Tandon, wasn’t Chandrasekhar advised by Ralph Fowler, who also advised Arthur Eddington? Also, Eddington was knighted but I don’t think he ever became a Lord Eddington. Eddington and Chandrasekhar did have a major professional disagreement over the existence of the Chandrasekhar limit, and the general behavior of massive stars, but as far as I know they remained friends.
Yes, Ralph Fowler was his advisor.
Yes, Eddington and Chandrashekar later put the whole showdown behind, and stayed friends but after a complete showdown ……..
PS: My quotes above are written by no other than Hans Bethe, another genius.
Even in Chanra’s words, the whole controversy had under currents of racialness.
Maybe, Eddington never became lord, but was only knighted.
It was Sir Arthur Eddington, not Lord Eddington
This is what Hans Bethe wrote about Chandra:
Chachaji, I think in one of his letters to his mother (who herself was very educated), Chandra did mention being an Indian may have played a part in the showdown. Otherwise, Chandra bore no ill will.
Chachaji, I think in one of his letters to his mother (who herself was very educated), Chandra did mention being an Indian may have played a part in the showdown. Otherwise, Chandra bore no ill will.
When he first arrived at the University of Chicago, the Dean of the Physics Department very openly stated he had no intention of working with a black scientist. He thought the very idea preposterous.
The voice of the narrator in “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” was absolutely ridiculous. He sounded like a 19th century Englishman!
Just got an email from Indra and he says that the partial proceed donation to the clinic in Bhopal happens only if Animal is bought from this link. So if you are planning to buy the book, please use this link instead of going directly to Amazon UK and buying.. something to do with Amazons referral policy.
How very Indian!
Although Chandra faced resistance from the Department faculty at UChicago on account of his ethnic origin, he did have a very supportive university President, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who accomodated him at UChicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, about a hundred miles away, for roughly the first twenty years of his career. It was only sometime in the fifties that Chandra finally moved to UChicago’s downtown campus – he had first come to the US in 1937. The irony is he came to the US hoping to get away from what Miller clearly feels was a racist rejection from all major British universities for a faculty position.
Whatever do you mean?
Not a statement about Chandrashekar, but you’ve never heard anybody Indian complain about having to work with a black person?
Not a statement about Chandrashekar, but you’ve never heard anybody Indian complain about having to work with a black person?
If you had read anything about Chandra, he was known for his decency, tough-mindedness, and love for Shakespeare and English literature. He would spend enormous time with his students.
He had a seminar class at the campus, and he would drive from the observatory/ home to teach to that class early in the morning in Chicago winter. That class had only two students – from China – they both went to win Nobel Prizes themselves.
He had an Indian student from whom he found out Himachal Pradesh University (Simla) did not have the most of the journals. He donated all his journal collection to the HP University.
He would work on a topic for 5-10 years, and create a magnus opus on that topic – be it black holes, hydrodynamics – 6 books on different topics, and they are considered classics in their topics.
He spent quite a few time at IISc (Bangalore) founded by his own uncle, CV Raman.
One thing Chandra’s own initial life in the US does illustrate is the statement attributed to Martin Luther King about who a black person with a PhD is – a ‘nigg*r’. Here was a person who had already done by the time he was 20 the work that would later be mentioned in his Nobel Prize citation (which itself came 50 years later – a related but separate issue). But even a Nobel caliber physicist was subject to many racial indignities in the 1930s-1950s US. Things have changed in some ways since then, but not by nearly as much as some people think.
In later life, Chandra did take on African graduate students – including a student from Nigeria he specifically recalls in the Wali book, who was subsequently quite active in relativity research. This was quite pioneering in its own way. So I’m pretty sure his own experience sensitized him considerably, and he did his bit, or more than a little bit, against racial prejudice, which his own stunning excellence did a lot by itself to help dissipate.
I said “Not a statement about Chandrashekar“
I’d be up for a book club discussion of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I did my own brief review here. I thought Jabberwock’s review was also interesting.
these are the only things that i liked about The Reluctant Fundamentalist are:
If the story were not complete fiction, with some fair bit of editing, this could have been shrunk into a Time magazine article.
IMHO, this is a very ordinary book with precious little up for serious discussion, and certainly is a ridiculous title to be considered for a Booker. Now they can always give it away to whoever they like, but it will be a slap to other notable Booker-ees such as Rushdie, Naipaul and other brown writers.
I think The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of those books that a lot of us have seen in bookshops and probably dismissed and walked past, just because it’s another globalisation-meets-East-meets-West-meets-McDonalds-meets-Starbucks-meets-Islam-meets-looks-like-a-movie-script-meets… etc. with the obligatory brightly coloured book cover…
Obvs. will now pick it up and read just because it’s been nominated, but have to see I’m wroting for Llyod Jones’s Mister Pip! People go out and read it! There hasn’t been a NZ winner sice 1988’s The Bone People, aka the most unreadable book ever.
The Fundamentalist guy will have many an Outlook article written about his ‘diasporic’ writings and probably a Mira Nair movie made from the book…he’ll live without the Booker.
nice name…is that reffering to that song by Radiohead?
A little off-topic perhaps …
And this I believe is the difference between Indians and Chinese (culled from my own long, direct and sometimes painful experiences with them in a variety of situations and settings). Chinese professors (or bosses) or lab directors hire Chinese only. Sometimes a whitey or two is thrown in. Now Indian professors take on students of many nationalities–including the Chinese. Of course, as with all generalizations, there will be exceptions. But with my statistically valid sample size, I am comfortable making this statement. The Chinese I have noticed, only encourage, mentor and give freely to their own.
Check out for instance this department at UCLA: http://directory.stat.ucla.edu/
Ker-Chau Li (100% Chinese lab) Yingnian Wu (ditto–co-adivises one Caucasian) Hongquan Xu (China only) Song-chun Zhu (gets Chinese students every year– also has a few Caucasians because he is high profile–told an Indian student (non-muslim) he didn’t want muslims in his lab) Qing Zhou (the new hire– now with so many Chinese professors, the new hires are bound to be Chinese)
There is only that much xenophobia I will put up with. These days I have a 100% boycott on the Chinese. And since it is not so easy to manage that in Califorina, I have moved to France.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist was so very silly. It wasn’t terrible, and it kept me reading, but — as risible pointed out — the narrator is absurd. Predictably, American reviewers were shocked, scandalized, etc by some references to the WTC, which might have accounted for some sales in the US. The narrator bugged me because he had some particularly South Asian irritating traits. Maybe the sign of a good writer, but it doesn’t make for a very pleasurable read.