(This story is part of The Hindu on Books newsletter that comes to you with book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.)
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Three debut novels, six previously listed writers, six Americans, eight women and a wide range of themes, “exile, displacement, identity, belonging”, make up the Booker Prize Longlist of 13 books for 2024. At least two books on the list were widely expected to be on it – Percival Everett’s James (Pan Macmillan), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told through the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim, and Hisham Matar’s My Friends (Viking), a story of two friends from Libya whose lives change after they join a demonstration in London, which has just won the Orwell Fiction Prize. Though some probables like Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (about aboriginal history) or Andrew O’Hagan (Caledonian Road), or Sally Rooney (Intermezzo) failed to make the list, the books that have been picked are diverse and interesting. Two of the books will be published next month – Richard Powers’ Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann) and Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape), and both writers have been on the Booker lists before. While the debut novel of Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape), is a story of two outsiders in a small Irish town and a kidnapping, Wandering Stars (Harvill Secker) by Tommy Orange traces two centuries of the history of horrors of Native Americans; Headshot (Daunt Books) by Rita Bullwinkel follows teenaged girl boxers as they participate at a championship in Nevada. British writer Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Jonathan Cape) takes readers to space to reflect on earth, and Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape) tells the story of two friends in pursuit of love and astronomy. If Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History (Fleet) tells the story of generations of Gaston Cassar’s family who have to escape from France when Paris falls to the Germans in 1940, Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel The Safekeep (Viking) is about the devastating consequences of the Second World War; Anne Michaels’ Held (Bloomsbury) is a narrative set around the First World War. The only Australian on the list, Charlotte Wood, tells the story of a middle-aged woman in search of peace and how the past comes knocking in Stone Yard Devotional (Spectre). Edmund de Waal, Chair of Judges, told bookerprizes.com that the “books [on the longlist] navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return.” Happy reading. The shortlist of six will be announced on September 16, and the winner on November 12.
In reviews, we read a book on earthquakes, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel-style essays on Iran, a tribute to the Albanian great, Ismael Kadare; and we talk to Hari Kunzru about his new book and more.
Books of the week
The Rumbling Earth: The Story of Indian Earthquakes (Vintage) by C.P. Rajendran and Kusala Rajendran attempts to demystify earthquakes by answering questions like what makes them hard to predict? Or why are some regions more likely to be jolted than others? Is the loss of life and property inevitable in the wake of a tremblor? Can knowing the history of earthquakes in a region make forecasts of future ones more accurate? In his review, Jacob Koshy writes that answers to these questions are the meat of the book, dispelling some of the intrigue surrounding earthquakes. “The earth sciences are mysterious because the action is underground and invisible and involves gargantuan bodies moving incrementally over aeons and prodding cataclysmic changes.”
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, came out in 2000, taking readers behind the scenes of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Her new anthology of graphic essays, Woman, Life, Freedom takes its title from the protest chant, ‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’, of the 2022 feminist uprising in Iran following the beating to death of Mahsa ‘Jina’ Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for wearing her headscarf “improperly”. In his review, Joshua Muyiwa says the 24 graphic narratives, written by 20 writers and laid out by artists, at times, feels like there are too many voices in the choir. It parries a bit too much to the West, and doesn’t, for example, fight to marry the calligraphic, geometric aesthetic of Islamic art with the modern graphic novel. “The accompanying text is too explanatory, and doesn’t always match the energy of the drawings either.” For martyrs of the future, Muyiwa hopes both drawings and the discourse are sharper.
With the Niti Aayog pushing an ambitious infrastructure project in the biodiversity-rich Great Nicobar island, Pankaj Sekhsaria curates The Great Nicobar Betrayal, a Frontline publication, in which writers explain various aspects of the project and the island’s biodiversity, in 13 essays with tables and annexures. In his review, Shekar Dattatri writes that the ‘betrayal’ refers to the undermining of all environmental regulations to ram the project through. “Inexplicably, the massive infrastructure will come up in one of the most seismically active regions on earth, which was pummelled by the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.” A UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2013, it is host to many rare species of flora and fauna.
Spotlight
Hari Kunzru’s new novel Blue Ruin (Simon&Schuster) is the last of a loose trilogy preceded by White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2019), all connected thematically. Set during the pandemic, Blue Ruin explores the world of contemporary art and the conflicting pursuit of art for money versus art for passion. In an interview with Stanley Carvalho, Kunzru says he wanted to write a novel that had a particular kind of shape and a particular set of concerns. “I use the word romance for it sometimes not just because there’s a love story in there, but more because of the traditional form of the romance, this European form where people are taken out of their normal worlds and thrown into a kind of situation which can be sometimes magical and, in some ways, it is out of their normal life.” Asked as an author if he was worried about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over content creation, he quipped: “I am much more worried about electricity. I’m less bothered about AI immediately coming for novelists. The most worrying aspect is the enormous amount of power it uses; it immediately led companies like Google to abandon their carbon neutrality goals, their energy goals, for the next few years. We are still in the climate crisis; nothing has changed, and yet this great new strain on power generation and energy hungry models is what makes me most nervous; they’ll just accelerate the ongoing climate crisis.”
The File on H, says Gautam Bhatia in a tribute essay, is one outstanding example of the work of Ismail Kadare, who passed away on July 1 at 88. It takes as its basis a real-life narrative – Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s actual trip to the Balkans – and weaves out of it a story about epic poetry and the construction of nationalism, the many faces of authoritarianism, the disruption of the outsider’s gaze, the pathologies of modernity, and so much more. These are themes that occur and recur in Kadare’s work. In all of his work (Broken April, The Siege, The Palace of Dreams) Kadare – who came of age in a climate of Cold War censorship – was keenly aware of the power of myth in constructing an idea of nationhood, for better and for worse, writes Bhatia.
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- Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege (OUP) by Vijayashri Sripati explores international and national perspectives on globalisation. It addresses issues like UN peacebuilding, sustainable development, climate change, global war on terrorism, women’s rights and poverty reduction.
- Malavika Rajkotia’s Unpartioned Time: A Daughter’s Story (Speaking Tiger) tells the story of Sardar Jitinder Singh, the author’s father, who was uprooted from Gujranwala (now in Pakistan) and began life afresh in Karnal (now in Haryana). Rajkotia weaves her memoir around her father, to map the family’s past and present.
- Elik Shafak’s new novel, There are Rivers in the Sky (Penguin), takes the reader to times and places far apart yet connected through the Epic of Gilgamesh and the ancient city of Mesopotamia.
- Our Bones in Your Throat (Simon & Schuster) by Megha Rao navigates the quiet truths of life, the fragility of friendships and the aftermath of passion in a sweeping tale set in a college campus.
