How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

By Mohsin Hamid

I am not a fan of Mohsin Hamid. I didn’t quite get the character of the Reluctant Fundamentalist and so couldn’t quite believe in its plot (Nagarkar’s God’s Little Soldier was a more credible and affecting exposition of a liberal Muslim turning fundamentalist, even though it wasn’t Nagarkar’s best work). And I could not get past the first fifty pages of Moth Smoke.

The title of Hamid’s latest though, was intriguing. And it does turn out to be the best of his three books, in my opinion. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is not a story that’s not been told before. In fact, it so totally recalls Adiga’s White Tiger that you can’t but help compare the two. Both have protagonists that feed off South Asia’s liberalized economies and climb out of debilitating poverty to a measure of wealth unbelievable a generation ago. Both use forms of storytelling a tad too clever, but which make an already engaging story even more so. But it’s been a few years since we read Adiga. And so it comes to pass that Hamid’s latest has a certain freshness that takes you by surprise and a momentum that has you racing to the finish of its relatively short length.

The protagonist is unnamed. As is the country. It could as easily be India as Pakistan, New Delhi as Islamabad, Mumbai as Karachi. The story is told in the form of a self-help book, a parody of the innumerable ‘How to’ books that are so ubiquitous in bookshops today. And amazingly, Hamid manages to sustain a second person narrative through the entire book, without disconcerting the reader even a little bit. But what made the book for me, were nuggets of real insights into what makes for success or failure in our nations today. “There are forks on the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter’s assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree,” or “Meeting the gaze of a landlord has been a risky business in these parts for centuries, perhaps since the beginning of history. Recently some men have begun to do it. But they have beards and earn their keep in the seminaries.”

The story moves on predictably but interestingly. The protagonist joins the buzzing beehive that the country is now, becomes an entrepreneur, falls in love, keeps the love in abeyance, marries, befriends bureaucrats and politicians, uses a little help from the local mafia along the way, reaches the zenith and then slowly, inevitably begins the slide back down again. Yet however much he falls, Rising Asia ensures he never falls back into that penury from which he began. It is a narrative that despite the cruelty and occasional crudity of poverty, struggle and strife, has a certain gentleness to it. There is real love and tenderness, between parents and children, brother and sister, boy and girl, even between estranged husband and wife.

And that is where this book irrevocably diverges from Adiga’s White Tiger. The brutality and abiding anger of Balram Halwai is absent and so is the discomfort an average middle class Indian felt while reading White Tiger. This is a gentler book. And that perhaps is also the reason ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’ won’t stay with me as long as White Tiger did. It still is, however, a very good read.

Wide Sargasso Sea

By Jean Rhys

Antoinette Cosway is a Creole, meaning a person of French descent, in the West Indies. She comes from a stock of slave-owning European settlers, who are left quite high and dry, when slavery is abolished. Her father dies, leaving her, a mentally incapacitated younger brother and her mother Annette, the Coulibri Estate, near Spanish Town in Jamaica. It is an impoverished existence they live; fearful of the resentful freed slaves, never completely belonging to the land that has become suddenly hostile, yet not knowing of any other place to go. But her mother is young and pretty and manages to marry a rich Englishman Mason, who is willing to lavish her and her children with his wealth and love. But when the Coulibri Estate is burned down by former slaves, and her brother dies, her mother goes insane. The effect of all this on Antoinette is quite devastating. The only thing constant for her is her sense of the place; it is a sense that even the hostility of the locals does not manage to displace. “I love it more than anywhere in the world. As if it were a person. More than a person.”, she says.

Mason manages to get Antoinette married off. To an Englishman in search of a fortune. And so begins the second part of the book, narrated from the point of view of the husband. He is out of place in the West Indies. He sees the beauty of it, yet knows that the place has secrets he will never guess at. It is in a sense a metaphor for his impression of his wife as well – he sees her beauty, but he is suspicious of her past, of the secrets she will never let him into. “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, “What I see is nothing – I want what it hides – that is not nothing.”

Antoinette is never able to shake off her husband’s suspicions about her mental normalcy, once he discovers her mother’s insanity. He begins to distance himself from her and the effect of that begins affecting her mentally. In desperation, she tries ‘obeah’, the West Indian version of voodoo, but all that results in is a further alienation, when her husband guesses at the truth. As a reader, you root for Antoinette and want to tell her, like her beloved Christophene does, Christophene, her father’s black mistress, that she should go away from her husband, that he is not the man for her, that “ ..this is not a man who will help you when he sees you break up. Only the best can do that. The best – and sometimes the worst.”But Antoinette never does that. Instead she goes to England with him. A place that to her, a Creole girl who has the sun in her, seems like cardboard – “It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it.” And he locks her up, his Bertha, as he calls her, insane beyond redemption, secreted away from the world with Grace Poole for company. And Antoinette, longing for “the smell of vetivert and frangipani, of cinnamon and dust and lime trees when they are flowering – the smell of the sun and the smell of the rain” does what we know she will do – burn down the house and jump to her death.

We know she will do that, because somewhere in the book, the knowledge creeps up on us that we know Antoinette. We know her because we have seen her before as the mad Mrs. Rochester, the one who prevents Jane, lovely sweet Jane’s wedding to her beloved Mr. Rochester. So that is really what this story is about. A prequel to Jane Eyre, the story of the woman locked up in Thornfield Hall, the woman who causes Jane so much grief, the one who we always knew had a story to tell.

Jean Rhys tells that story and tells it so beautifully. She brings alive the vivid lushness and colour of the Caribbean as also its strangely gothic horror. She fleshes out the Bertha of Jane Eyre, creating a fragile beautiful woman who somehow ends up as the crazed wife of a man who never really knows how to love her. It is a haunting book; and if you have at some point read Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea will resonate that much more. Jean Rhys is quite a story-teller.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers

By Paolo Giordano (Translated from Italian by Shaun Whiteside)

 

A prime number is of course indivisible by anything other than one and itself. Giordano describes them as numbers standing aloof and apart from the rest, their tracks running parallel to but never meeting the other prime numbers.  And in his debut novel, he creates two characters, Alice and Mattia, investing in them the same characteristics of prime numbers – the apartness, the solitude, the parallel tracks.

Alice and Mattia are severely damaged people. Alice, who never gets over a skiing accident as a child that leaves her scarred and limping, grows up anorexic and unable to fit into a normal world. Mattia, who leaves his retarded identical twin sister in a park, out of a childhood fear of embarrassment, loses her forever. He is a mathematical genius, but this childhood trauma never leaves him, and he grows up hurting himself with knives and burns, unable to fit into any semblance of a normal life.

Alice and Mattia find each other in adolescence and they recognize in each other the similarities of damage. Similarities that ensure a connection that stays with them through their lives. Yet, they spend their lives on parallel tracks, never able to take that special connection towards anything more meaningful than friendship. They grow up, people fall in love with them, people they are never able to love back enough as they attempt to lead lives like other people. Yet it only results in each of them hurting everyone who attempts to get close, never able to let go of their aloofness in the universe.

It is a savagely bleak book. But there is a searing, haunting quality to it that keeps you turning the pages, desperately wanting redemption for Alice and Mattia, even though you know they are too far gone for it to really happen. The language is spare, yet has a lyrical quality to it. “Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, two twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough really to touch one another.” Or describing Mattia’s strangeness, Giordano writes, “He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it on your own, because all the things you study are already dead, cold and chewed-over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they leave you time to choose, that they never hurt you and that you can’t hurt them either. But he said nothing.” Straightforward writing, yet it leaves a mark.

Paolo Giordano is a mathematician, who wrote this very successful book before he turned 30. And he turns out to be gorgeous; in the way Italian men are meant to be. Some people seem to have all the luck. But if it’s luck that churns out such a gem of a book, I am not complaining.

The Heart of the Matter 

Graham Greene

I visited Greeneland after years. And I am struck by how much an outdated religious sensibility still has the power to affect.

Scobie is a police officer in an obscure African colony during the war. The Vichy French are neighbours and a clandestine trade in industrial diamonds means an air of suspicion hangs around the colony. Colonial Africa is a character as much as any of the others – the heat, the colonials with their ‘boys’ and pink gin and the club and the gossip and their deference to hierarchy. Scobie is a good man, an honest police officer, with a faded wife and a genuine love of the land and people he has governed for over 15 years. He is also a converted Catholic and that proves the defining characteristic taking the story forward.

Pity and sympathy are Scobie’s routes to love. He loves his wife Louise best when he is able to pity her disappointment at his not getting a promotion (something that does not really bother him). So, to accommodate her wish to get away from the local bitchiness, he borrows money from an under-suspicion Syrian trader, to buy her a passage to South Africa. When she is gone, he falls in love (or should we say, falls in pity again) with a ship-wrecked young widow who has lost everything. When Louise is back, he forces himself to go to communion, without confessing – again, engendering more guilt in his Catholic heart. The affair and the borrowed money prove to be a heady cocktail that spiral Scobie towards that most un-Catholic of emotions – despair

 Wilson proves to be Scobie’s counterpoint. The clerk is actually a spy sent to investigate the trade in diamonds. He is the colonial who visits the whorehouses, has no pity for the locals in their petty larceny, whose rigid sense of right and wrong has no place for Scobie’s tolerance. It is a point-counterpoint that is often present in Greene’s novels. The good man driven to wrong-doing by his inherent ‘goodness’ and the bad man with his rigid correctness ending up doing wrong.

Nobody does Catholic guilt and despair better than Greene. When Scobie chooses his own damnation in order to stop hurting others, Greene asks that question that must haunt Catholics at some time or the other – what is a good Catholic? Is that rigid sense of sin more Catholic than a sense of sympathy and humanity for the other? Father Rank, the Catholic priest has truly the last word in Scobie’s case. As he tells Louise at the end of the book, when she despairs over the state of Scobie’s soul, “It may seem an odd thing to say – when a man’s as wrong as he was – but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.”

It is easy to find silliness in this Catholic sense of sin. And it is easy to get impatient with a character like Scobie. As Orwell in a damning critique of the book says, “Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women. And one might add that if he were the kind of man we are told he is - that is, a man whose chief characteristic is a horror of causing pain - he would not be an officer in a colonial police force.”

But it is a testament to Greene’s masterful storytelling that even if you agree with Orwell on a rational level, you still feel a deep sense of liking and sympathy for Scobie. You live his pain and his despair. The Heart of the Matter is not my favourite Greene novel, but it has enough in it to let me rank it as one of my better reads in recent times.

Joseph Anton

 By Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has in some ways, become something more than a novelist. Khomeini’s fatwa ensured that. History will judge him not just for the overblown, over-rich, over-everything style of writing he brought into being, but also for being the polarising Galileo figure of the last few decades of the twentieth century.

I am a fan and I read Joseph Anton as one. Even if I could never finish his Satanic Verses, the book at the heart of all the controversy, having lost interest in it midway, I loved some of his others – Midnight’s Children, The Enchantress of Florence, Haroun, Fury.  I suppose it makes a difference. I can forgive almost anything of anyone, if he or she can tell me a good story. Rushdie can most certainly do that.

Joseph Anton is the name Rushdie went by in his years of hiding – a coming together of the names of two writers he admired – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. And this is an engrossing memoir, written surprisingly in third person, of all those years of dodging a bullet or a knife, a story told only the way Rushdie can –no holds barred, candid, humourous at times, starkly cruel at others. There is name-dropping of the highest degree – Thatcher, Blair, McEwan, Pinter, Hitchens, Clinton, Styron, Pynchon, Roy, Le Carre among others. There is intensely personal stuff – his four marriages and their coming apart, his love-hate relationships with his father and sisters, his love for his children and his fear for them, his own cowardice at times of great fear and stress. And then there is his sense of himself as standing for something more than himself, standing for a principle, representing the good fight, the fight against tyranny and fundamentalism, the fight for human heterogeneity and multiple identities, and the right to tell stories any way we want.

Rushdie makes that fight the base storyline that runs through the book. And anyone who stands on the other side of the line- Le Carre, Cat Stevens, The Telegraph, the British Government - come in for contempt and criticism. And that is as it should be. For Rushdie, as a story teller, there is nothing more fearsome than attempts to block the wellspring from which the stories spring – the myths of our race, the ability to see reality through different perspectives, the flexibility to twist our stories into whatever shape that is most interesting. Any religion’s or any ideology’s wont to suppress this is what he believes the world of art should fight against. Some people see this as another example of a rigid ideology too – an inability to see the side of people with faith, who believe in the absolutism of the One True God. And there have been not-so-flattering reviews of the book in this light.

But it is a good fight that Rushdie fights. There can be no two ways about it, in my book. The moment we agree to let someone else censor our words, we let ourselves create an Orwellian world. Joseph Anton should be read if only to keep that fight alive.

But there are other reasons to read it too. Prurience, for example. Salman Rushdie writes of his encounter with William Styron – “His main memory of that trip would be of William Styrons genitalia. Elizabeth and he visited the Styrons at their Vineyard Haven home and there on the porch was the great writer in khakhi shorts, sitting with his legs splayed and wearing no pants, his treasures generously and fully on display. This was more than he had ever hoped to know about the author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, but all information was useful, he supposed, and he duly filed it away for later use.” Or the insight it gives into the writer’s craft – “”You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.” Or prurience again, the instinct for gossip all of us carry in our hearts. Here is Rushdie talking of Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife “…and as he watched her pose and pirouette for the human wall of screaming photographers, burning with the bright flame of her youth and beauty, he looked at the expression on her face and suddenly thought, She’s having sex, sex with hundreds of men at the same time, and they don’t even get to touch her, there’s no way any actual man can compete with that.”

But beyond it all – the gossip, the encounters with famous people, the flaws in his own personality - Joseph Anton needs to be read for the passionate defence of free speech that it truly is. “Compromise destroyed the compromiser and did not placate the uncompromising foe… The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect.” It is a thought worth remembering, especially for us liberal sorts, who can be quite apologetic about individual responsibility in the face of religion and the rage against America.

Joseph Anton is more than a memoir of a famous man.

Disappointment

It’s a funny life. A year back, I was stressed out, convinced I was burnt out, convinced my 24x7 advertising career was the stumbling block to my prospective writing career. There were so many things I wanted to do – learn Spanish, travel the world, write stories, read tons of books, blog. And all were at a stand-still because I couldn’t take time out of my job.



Today I have a job that gives me weekends. That is definitely not 24x7. That does not turn me into an anxious, frazzled wreck. Now I truly have the time to do all the things I really want to do. And what do I do?


Spend my mornings on Facebook and Pinterest, evenings on comedy central, my weekends watching movies I have watched a hundred times before. I used to be more regular at the gym a year back. A year back my blog had double the number of posts in the same time. I met my friends more often (I had more friends) and had more interesting conversations.


If I ask myself why this is so, I have no real answer. Maybe all this time on my hands rattles me. It might be that my innate laziness takes over and I would rather vegetate than work at something, even if that something should excite me. Or maybe, just maybe, hard work has a self-feeding mechanism – it makes you work even harder. A stressed out advertising executive makes time to pen that poem or get up an hour earlier to go to the gym because she feels compelled to make the little time she has count! Who knows why?


All I know is, I disappoint myself. The past year, I have found myself slipping back, not pushing myself enough, not being hungry enough. I need to wake myself up from this inertia. I need to get serious about my hobbies.

The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach

The last time a book consumed me so much was Franzen’s Freedom. And there is a connection. Franzen is on the book blurb, announcing, “It’s left a little hole in my life the way a really good book will.” High praise indeed, from possibly the best American writer today.

It is a campus novel, a love story, a baseball story. A story of out-sized talent and the pressure that comes with it. A story of friendship and all the strains it can be put to. A story of love, ageless and almost deathless. I compare it to another celebrated campus novel, Eugenides’ Marriage Plot, and realize how much better a book this is.

The campus is Westish, an Eastern liberal arts college with Melville as its hero. Henry Skrimshander is the unassuming baseball star with a talent that is potentially destiny-making. Mike Shwartz is the team captain, an intelligent jock, who spots Henry’s talent and takes it upon himself to be his guide and mentor, even if it means letting his own ambitions take a back seat. Owen Dunne, Henry’s roommate and baseball team mate is the Buddha, openly gay and wise beyond his years. Guert Affenlight is the college president, handsome, scholarly and falling into an affair that could prove disastrous. Pella is his emotionally fragile daughter who comes into campus from a broken marriage and slides easily into the lives of the other four.

I have little knowledge of baseball, but Harbach makes it feel like poetry. Henry is his poet, with a talent that has Mike Shwartz musing –“All his life Shwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t let it walk away.” But talent comes with its set of rules. The most important of which is, you never let yourself doubt it, because if you let one wrong throw bring in the first ounce of self-doubt, it’s a downward spiral all the way through. Henry’s wrong throw sets in motion a series of events that affects all the characters, throwing some relationships out of gear, starting a new one and most of all, challenging genius.

The heart of the story is the relationship between Mike and Henry. Mike needs Henry just as much as Henry needs him – to finally make sense of each one’s true calling.  And just as coming of age novels often do, it takes some heartbreak and some grief to ultimately get them to that realization. There are also other interesting relationships - Pella and Mike, Pella and Henry, Owen and Henry, Owen and Guert, Guert and Pella – pairings that Harbach gets the reader deeply involved in, getting them turning the pages to get to resolutions. And resolution there is. The way real life does resolutions. Where you don’t get all that you want, but just enough to let you hope. Where there is some sourness and grief and unrequited-ness; yet there is a sweetness to it all. Harbach sure does growing up well.

This is a first novel. And Chad Harbach, has hit it out of the park, to continue with the baseball theme of the book.