“In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.” It’s a sentence typical of Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000. Soul Mountain, Gao’s prize-winning book, was first published in Chinese in 1989, with the title Lingshan. His other novel has been translated into English as One Man’s Bible. He has also written a number of plays, including Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983), Wild Man(1985), Absconding (1989), a novella, A Pigeon Called Red Beak, (all originally in Chinese) a play in French, Le Somnambule, as well as essays and literary criticism. His plays and novels explore political and personal themes, attempting to understand life against the background of his experiences in China.
Soul Mountain is a journey into China’s past. Escaping from Beijing at a time of political turmoil, Gao decides to visit Lingshan, a remote and small place, that he has heard about from a another traveller. As he travels through China, he records all he sees and learns, as well as his thoughts. The Cultural Revolution has ended, and the old China is beginning to re-emerge, a China steeped in customs and traditions, too strong to be destroyed by the overlay of communism. Its varied nature, the different languages and people he encounters, and the tragedies and absurdities of the past and the present, remind one at times of India. There are passages of beautiful writing, but Soul Mountain is not a novel with a single story, rather a collection of stories, narratives and dialogues with the author’s different selves, forming a base for Gao’s own emerging personal philosophy.
One Man’s Bible is a far more coherent work. Setting aside the distant past, here Gao reminiscences about the Cultural Revolution. Memory is too painful, and so a philosophy develops, of living in the present. To have meaning, life has to bring happiness and a sense of freedom – a freedom which comes from awareness, from the ability to observe, even in the midst of suffering and grief.
The first writer of Chinese origin to win the Nobel prize for literature, Gao’s works are steeped in China’s history and culture. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) he was not able to publish anything, and finally destroyed all that he wrote at that time, for fear of being labelled a dissident. In the 80s his work began to be published in China, but still lacking total freedom there, he moved to France and is now a French citizen. Gao continues to write mainly in Chinese, though he has begun to write in French as well. In One Man’s Bible, he explains what China means to him today. Referring to himself as ‘you’, he says: “You will not go back. Not even in future? Someone asks. No, it is not your country. It exists in your memory only, as a hidden spring gushing forth feelings that are hard to articulate. This China is possessed by you alone, and has nothing to do with the country.”
Gao’s intensity of feeling, along with his brilliant prose, and his detached observation, make his books worth reading. His sensitivity also expresses itself through art and over thirty exhibitions of his ink paintings have been held. His works have been translated into several languages.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Sue Grafton -- The Alphabet Series
(This was first published in Hindustantimes.com in 2003. Since then three more books have appeared, going up to T. R was a bit disappointing, as Kinsey's character seemes quite different there. S was good. I am still to read T.)
As readers eagerly await the publication of Sue Grafton’s latest novel in her alphabet series of murder mysteries, they learn to their disappointment that it has been postponed till next year. So far, Ms. Grafton has seventeen books in the series, beginning with A is for Alibi, and the most recent being Q is for Quarry. What is remarkable in her mysteries is not just her fast-paced plot, but her psychological insight into her characters, particularly the character of her detective, Kinsey Millhone. Twice divorced Kinsey is a private detective and a single woman, who likes being single. Kinsey doesn’t cook, eats largely junk food and loves burgers, fries and coke. She knows how to laugh at herself, when she gets into absurd situations, such as when she illegally enters a house by pushing her way in through a doggy door, only to be greeted by a dog who growls if she tries to stand up, so that Kinsey explores the house crawling on all fours. She is often inapproprately dressed and doesn’t really care. She rarely, if ever, gets involved in a relationship, and lives life on her own terms, with few possessions or ties.
Yet Kinsey is concerned and empathetic. She makes sure she gets paid, as she has to live, but at the same time she cares about those who employ her, about the victims and their families. In Q is for Quarry, an unsolved real murder of an unidentified seventeen year-old girl, forms the base for the fictional plot. Like Kinsey, Sue cares enough for the real-life victim to get involved in giving her a proper burial, and puts a reconstructed picture of her in the book, hoping that some day she would be identified.
The other books have purely fictional characters. In some, the focus is mainly on the plot, with Kinsey’s life being secondary, while in most there is a parallel focus on Kinsey and the mysteries she solves. G is for Gumshoe is one of those with long passages on Kinsey, and on her newly reconstructed apartment, which was blown up by a bomb, an incident that is described in the previous book, F is for Fugitive. Ms. Grafton’s descriptive passages and attention to small details, enable one to picture what she describes. “The entire apartment had the feel of a ship’s interior. The walls were highly polished teak and oak, with shelves and cubbyholes on every side….. In the ceiling above the bed, there was a round shaft extending through the roof, capped by a clear Plexiglass skylight that seemed to fling light down on the blue-and-white patchwork coverlet. Loft windows looked out to the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other….”.
Sue Grafton’s books have been published in twenty-eight countries in twenty-six different languages. In her introduction to her books,she writes, “ For months I lay in bed and plotted how to kill my ex-husband. But I knew I’d bungle it and get caught, so I wrote it in a book instead.” Whether this is true or not, it certainly adds interest to her books!
As readers eagerly await the publication of Sue Grafton’s latest novel in her alphabet series of murder mysteries, they learn to their disappointment that it has been postponed till next year. So far, Ms. Grafton has seventeen books in the series, beginning with A is for Alibi, and the most recent being Q is for Quarry. What is remarkable in her mysteries is not just her fast-paced plot, but her psychological insight into her characters, particularly the character of her detective, Kinsey Millhone. Twice divorced Kinsey is a private detective and a single woman, who likes being single. Kinsey doesn’t cook, eats largely junk food and loves burgers, fries and coke. She knows how to laugh at herself, when she gets into absurd situations, such as when she illegally enters a house by pushing her way in through a doggy door, only to be greeted by a dog who growls if she tries to stand up, so that Kinsey explores the house crawling on all fours. She is often inapproprately dressed and doesn’t really care. She rarely, if ever, gets involved in a relationship, and lives life on her own terms, with few possessions or ties.
Yet Kinsey is concerned and empathetic. She makes sure she gets paid, as she has to live, but at the same time she cares about those who employ her, about the victims and their families. In Q is for Quarry, an unsolved real murder of an unidentified seventeen year-old girl, forms the base for the fictional plot. Like Kinsey, Sue cares enough for the real-life victim to get involved in giving her a proper burial, and puts a reconstructed picture of her in the book, hoping that some day she would be identified.
The other books have purely fictional characters. In some, the focus is mainly on the plot, with Kinsey’s life being secondary, while in most there is a parallel focus on Kinsey and the mysteries she solves. G is for Gumshoe is one of those with long passages on Kinsey, and on her newly reconstructed apartment, which was blown up by a bomb, an incident that is described in the previous book, F is for Fugitive. Ms. Grafton’s descriptive passages and attention to small details, enable one to picture what she describes. “The entire apartment had the feel of a ship’s interior. The walls were highly polished teak and oak, with shelves and cubbyholes on every side….. In the ceiling above the bed, there was a round shaft extending through the roof, capped by a clear Plexiglass skylight that seemed to fling light down on the blue-and-white patchwork coverlet. Loft windows looked out to the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other….”.
Sue Grafton’s books have been published in twenty-eight countries in twenty-six different languages. In her introduction to her books,she writes, “ For months I lay in bed and plotted how to kill my ex-husband. But I knew I’d bungle it and get caught, so I wrote it in a book instead.” Whether this is true or not, it certainly adds interest to her books!
Monday, November 3, 2008
Revisiting Soviet Literature
by Roshen Dalal
(First published in Hindustantimes.com in 2003).
“In everything I want to reach
The innermost kernel
In work, in life’s constant quest
In the heart’s trouble;”
(Boris Pasternak)
Literature of the former Soviet Union was once popular in India, but has now largely been forgotten. Though ‘Soviet literature’ is perhaps too wide a term, the great writers of the USSR, had something in common – like Boris Pasternak in his poem above, their writing had a certain intensity, reflecting that ‘constant quest’ to reach ‘the innermost kernel’ of everything. Their greatness was recognised in the West, and some of them-- Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Josef Brodsky-- were Nobel Prize winners. Other brilliant writers included Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Sinyavsky, and many more.
Several of the Soviet writers were imprisoned or faced problems of some kind with the authorities in their country. Boris Pasternak, famous for his book Dr. Zhivago, was not allowed to accept the Nobel, awarded to him in 1958. He found a champion in Jawaharlal Nehru, who not only wrote to Khrushchev about him, but remembered his birthday, and sent him the gift of a clock!
Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970, spent long years in labour camps, and among his books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and The First Circle are fictionalised accounts of his life there. The Gulag Archipelago, is a comprehensive record of the Soviet prison system. Cancer Ward, and other books and short stories, reflect some of the absurdities of life in the USSR, but also record the lives of ordinary people. His most recent work is Two Hundred Years Together, the story of Russia’s Jewish minority.
Brodsky, Nobel Prize winner in 1987, was exiled from the USSR after eighteen months in a labour camp, and went to the US. He is well known for his sensitive poetry. In his poem The Fly, he watches, records and philosophises on the life of one fly, who had hovered around his cell for months, and finally faltered and died. It begins with the lines:
“While you were singing, fall arrived.
A splinter set the stove alight.
While you were singing, while you flew,
The cold wind blew.
And now you crawl the flat expanse
Of my greasy stovetop, never glancing
Back to whence you arrived last April
Slow, barely able….”
Voznesensky has been called Russia’s first modern poet, and was inspired by Pasternak. His poems are often philosophical and detached, yet sometimes passionate and intense. One can compare his Autumn in Sigulda, which has the gentle lines, “I know that we will live again, As friends, girlfriends or blades of grass… ,” with Sketch for a Poem:
“Forgive me dearest, it happened this way:
The deadend seemed deader
Than ever today
The deepest sadness, sadder.
I know the end will come
In the dark shaft where I lie
Where those who love, love not enough
And no one hears you scream….”
Khrushchev called him a ‘bourgeois formalist’, but later his work was accepted in Russia, and he received the State Prize for Poetry in 1979.
Sinyavsky, another protégé of Pasternak, wrote novels, short stories, and poems on life under Stalin, initially under the name Abram Tertz. In 1965 he was arrested and spent six years in a labour camp. Finally he was allowed to leave the USSR for France. Though his work is varied and often allegorical, his despair in prison is reflected in this poem:
“ For spring my child you’ll wait, it will not come
You’ll call out for the sun to rise, it will not rise
And when you begin to cry, your cries will sink like lead
Then be content with life today
Stiller than water, lower than grass…”.
Yevtushenko wrote long poems, and is best known for Babi Yar, condemning anti-semitism, and the autobiographical Zima Junction, the place in Siberia where he was born:
“And the voice of Zima Junction spoke to me
And this is what it said
‘I live quietly and crack nuts.
I gently steam with engines.
But not without reflection on these times, these modern times…”
Of course there were many other writers, both despairing and hopeful, philosophical and amusing— Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Zabolotsky, Tarkovsky, Gorbanevskaya, Kazakov, Turbin, Shukshin, Ginzburg, who was one of the first to start samizdat or underground publishing – the list is long, and they are all worth reading. Perhaps one will find their work at the Book Fair, though as Voznesensky wrote:
“It is rare in our polluted skies
To hear the crane’s lonely cries
While every bookstore’s lined with stacks
Of monolithic published hacks.”
(First published in Hindustantimes.com in 2003).
“In everything I want to reach
The innermost kernel
In work, in life’s constant quest
In the heart’s trouble;”
(Boris Pasternak)
Literature of the former Soviet Union was once popular in India, but has now largely been forgotten. Though ‘Soviet literature’ is perhaps too wide a term, the great writers of the USSR, had something in common – like Boris Pasternak in his poem above, their writing had a certain intensity, reflecting that ‘constant quest’ to reach ‘the innermost kernel’ of everything. Their greatness was recognised in the West, and some of them-- Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Josef Brodsky-- were Nobel Prize winners. Other brilliant writers included Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Sinyavsky, and many more.
Several of the Soviet writers were imprisoned or faced problems of some kind with the authorities in their country. Boris Pasternak, famous for his book Dr. Zhivago, was not allowed to accept the Nobel, awarded to him in 1958. He found a champion in Jawaharlal Nehru, who not only wrote to Khrushchev about him, but remembered his birthday, and sent him the gift of a clock!
Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970, spent long years in labour camps, and among his books, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and The First Circle are fictionalised accounts of his life there. The Gulag Archipelago, is a comprehensive record of the Soviet prison system. Cancer Ward, and other books and short stories, reflect some of the absurdities of life in the USSR, but also record the lives of ordinary people. His most recent work is Two Hundred Years Together, the story of Russia’s Jewish minority.
Brodsky, Nobel Prize winner in 1987, was exiled from the USSR after eighteen months in a labour camp, and went to the US. He is well known for his sensitive poetry. In his poem The Fly, he watches, records and philosophises on the life of one fly, who had hovered around his cell for months, and finally faltered and died. It begins with the lines:
“While you were singing, fall arrived.
A splinter set the stove alight.
While you were singing, while you flew,
The cold wind blew.
And now you crawl the flat expanse
Of my greasy stovetop, never glancing
Back to whence you arrived last April
Slow, barely able….”
Voznesensky has been called Russia’s first modern poet, and was inspired by Pasternak. His poems are often philosophical and detached, yet sometimes passionate and intense. One can compare his Autumn in Sigulda, which has the gentle lines, “I know that we will live again, As friends, girlfriends or blades of grass… ,” with Sketch for a Poem:
“Forgive me dearest, it happened this way:
The deadend seemed deader
Than ever today
The deepest sadness, sadder.
I know the end will come
In the dark shaft where I lie
Where those who love, love not enough
And no one hears you scream….”
Khrushchev called him a ‘bourgeois formalist’, but later his work was accepted in Russia, and he received the State Prize for Poetry in 1979.
Sinyavsky, another protégé of Pasternak, wrote novels, short stories, and poems on life under Stalin, initially under the name Abram Tertz. In 1965 he was arrested and spent six years in a labour camp. Finally he was allowed to leave the USSR for France. Though his work is varied and often allegorical, his despair in prison is reflected in this poem:
“ For spring my child you’ll wait, it will not come
You’ll call out for the sun to rise, it will not rise
And when you begin to cry, your cries will sink like lead
Then be content with life today
Stiller than water, lower than grass…”.
Yevtushenko wrote long poems, and is best known for Babi Yar, condemning anti-semitism, and the autobiographical Zima Junction, the place in Siberia where he was born:
“And the voice of Zima Junction spoke to me
And this is what it said
‘I live quietly and crack nuts.
I gently steam with engines.
But not without reflection on these times, these modern times…”
Of course there were many other writers, both despairing and hopeful, philosophical and amusing— Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Zabolotsky, Tarkovsky, Gorbanevskaya, Kazakov, Turbin, Shukshin, Ginzburg, who was one of the first to start samizdat or underground publishing – the list is long, and they are all worth reading. Perhaps one will find their work at the Book Fair, though as Voznesensky wrote:
“It is rare in our polluted skies
To hear the crane’s lonely cries
While every bookstore’s lined with stacks
Of monolithic published hacks.”
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Castalia
Castalia (or Kastalia) is the name of a Greek nymph, but it is also the name of a world of elite education, created by Hermann Hesse in his book Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), which won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
The world of Castalia was not perfect. There was a hierarchical order, superiors who had to be obeyed, and a somewhat monastic lifestyle. Those who completed their education from the elite schools, became members of the order, many continuing within it as teachers. There were others who could carry on doing research, on any topic, with the freedom to study throughout their lives, supported by the state.
Among the select elite, were those who played the Glass Bead Game.
The Glass Bead Game and the ascetic world of Castalia still attracts me- particularly the world of the scholars, who read and studied whatever they liked!
I’m attracted too, to the Game, to its precision, symbolism and brilliance. I think the ideas in this book are relevant even today.
The world of Castalia was not perfect. There was a hierarchical order, superiors who had to be obeyed, and a somewhat monastic lifestyle. Those who completed their education from the elite schools, became members of the order, many continuing within it as teachers. There were others who could carry on doing research, on any topic, with the freedom to study throughout their lives, supported by the state.
Among the select elite, were those who played the Glass Bead Game.
The Glass Bead Game and the ascetic world of Castalia still attracts me- particularly the world of the scholars, who read and studied whatever they liked!
I’m attracted too, to the Game, to its precision, symbolism and brilliance. I think the ideas in this book are relevant even today.
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