The Booker longlist, Agyeya’s poetry, works of Tamil writers, catching the ‘pulse’ of the RSS and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. 

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. 

Last week, the Booker Prize longlist was announced, with 13 titles making it to the ‘Booker Dozen’ . Historical fiction, stories inspired from real life, parables, mystery, fantasy are part of the oeuvre, with the youngest nominated being 20-year-old Leila Mottley for Nightcrawling (Bloomsbury), about a 17-year-old who walks the mean streets of Oakland after dark and faces a terrible choice after assault by policemen, and the oldest Alan Garner, 87, for Treacle Walker (4th Estate), a young boy’s encounters and philosophical discussions on life and death with the eponymous wanderer and healer. For our neck of the woods, the excitement is around the nomination of Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books), published in India as Chats with the Dead(Hamish Hamilton). Set in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the protagonist, a renegade war photographer, Maali Almeida, is tasked with finding out who killed him. Facing ethical dilemmas, red tape, and contrasting memories of war, Almeida struggles to solve the whodunit – a noisy bunch of dead people confuse him further.

Karunatilaka’s debut novel, Chinaman, on a dying journalist’s quest to trace a cricketer, a spinning great who has gone missing, was picked by Wisden in 2019 as one of the greatest books of cricket ever written. Of the 13 books, Glory (Vintage) by the Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo, who now lives in the U.S., is narrated by a bevy of animal voices who talk about a revolution; and Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of our Spectacular Bodies (Picador) is narrated, in part, by a malevolent cancer travelling through the body of Lia, the protagonist. Historical figures, from Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, R.D. Laing to Emmett Till, a young black lynched in Mississippi decades back, shadow four books on the list – Percival Everett’s The Trees (Influx), Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth (Serpent’s Tale), Selby Wynn Shwartz’s After Sappho (Galley Beggar Press) and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study (Saraband). Also on the longlist is Irish writer Claire Keegan’s slim novel Small Things Like These (Faber), which has just bagged the Orwell Prize for political fiction, for its “beautifully written evocation of Ireland in the 1980s.” Neil MacGregor, chair of the Booker Prize 2022 judges, said, in proposing the 13 books among the 169 works of fiction they read, the main criterion was to consider the skill with which the writers shaped and sustained “variously imagined worlds, and allow others to inhabit them.” The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 6 and the winner of the £50,000 Booker Prize will be announced on October 17. 

In reviews, we read a biography of renowned Hindi poet and iconoclast Agyeya, Anirudh Suri’s observations on the global contest for technological, economic and geopolitical dominance, the world of Tamil writers Jeyamohan and Sujatha and more. We also interview Devanuru Mahadeva whose new book on the RSS has sold more than one lakh copies in less than a month. 

The Hindi poet, Agyeya (1911-1987), left an inedible mark on Hindi poetry, fiction, criticism and travelogue, but being an iconoclast and his innumerable innovations and provocations, he earned a host of bouquets and brickbats en route. In his biography, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin), Akshaya Mukul highlights Agyeya’s personal and literary life, family, loves and friendships in rich detail. In his review, Purushottam Agrawal writes that the creative milestones (some of which like the novel, Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, became landmarks in modern Indian literature) and their personal and political contexts have been handled with empathy and understanding. “Describing the controversies and debates, rifts and bridge-buildings with friends, Mukul is neither elusive nor partisan to his ‘subject’. Detailing Agyeya’s relationship with his first wife Santosh, the biographer’s sympathy is with her, not with him, as she was the helpless victim of her celebrity husband’s elusive withdrawals and insensitive silences. Not only of Santosh, Mukul’s treatment of other women in Agyeya’s life—Indumati, Kripa, Kapila and Ila—is equally sensitive and nuanced, but being in the continued thrall of ‘Shekhar…’ since my adolescence, I was left wondering, was Agyeya not obsessively in search of validation from women? Was this search not connected with the apparent ‘absence’ of his mother in his emotional universe (duly noted by Mukul)? This aspect deserved a closer scrutiny.” Mukul concludes that Agyeya is a complicated icon; and the reviewer finds the biography unputdownable because it shines a light not only into the corners of Agyeya’s individual history but also on various aspects of the cultural history of 20th century India. 

Review of Akshaya Mukul’s Writer. Rebel. Soldier. Lover — The Many Lives of Agyeya: A complicated icon

Reviewing the works of Tamil writers Jeyamohan ( Stories of the True, translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar/Juggernaut) and Sujatha (Dream Factory/HarperCollins), translated by Madhavan Narayanan, Sudha G. Tilak says that they offer different milieus but that both speak of the beauty and horror of the human condition. She writes that Jeyamohan’s collection of stories about 12 extraordinary men is a perfect introduction for a wider audience, standing as they do at the “intersection of truth and righteousness, depicting the life of men battling poverty, oppression, messianic zeal, dejection and death.” As for Sujatha, nom de plume of S. Rangarajan, his work leads the genre of pulp fiction. Set in the Madras of the 1980s, Dream Factory “is a hard gaze at the ugly beauty of the Tamil film industry.” It was a world, says the reviewer, that Sujatha was familiar with, having seen many of his stories turned into films by top hats such as Kamal Haasan, Mani Ratnam and Rajinikanth.