What I read in 2020
by Vandana Singh
In 2020 I didn’t get to read much fiction (excluding
mystery fiction for stress relief), in part because I was on sabbatical in
India for six months, which was complicated by the pandemic, the lockdown and
the consequent last minute change in my academic project. I read acres of
nonfiction instead; however, I also read some standout fiction, made even more
memorable against the dramatic and tumultuous backdrop of this historic Year of
the Pandemic. As always, I make an effort to read diverse authors, an immensely
rewarding experience, as my notes below indicate. And there’s a tottering pile of unread
wonders by my bedside, waiting for that mythical thing, a free moment. In no particular order, here are some
highlights of my readings in 2020:
1. When the River Sleeps
by Easterine Kire https://zubaanbooks.com/shop/when-the-river-sleeps/
This remarkable novel is set in
Northeast India, in the state of Nagaland, where a man haunted by a dream
travels through the hills and forests of his people in search of a sleeping
river. If you pluck a stone from a
sleeping river, it is said, you will gain power. But this journey through the verdant
wilderness, enriched by the author’s inside knowledge of Naga cosmology and
animated by spirits and magical beings, is a quest for meaning, not power. The main character is not a youthful Chosen
One, but a middle aged man called Vilie, who is compelled by his dream to leave
a relatively peaceful life as an employee of the Forest Department to go into
the unknown. This aspect of the novel – dealing with uncertainty, when the only
security comes from trust in others, trust that is sometimes betrayed – seemed
especially meaningful when I read it in Delhi in March, just when the pandemic
was gaining momentum and the false security that modernity gives us began to
slip from our lives. The story is told
in lyrical, unpretentious prose, and carries with it something like the cadence
of a river, slow and stately in parts, swift and urgent in others.
2. My Father May Be an Elephant and My
Mother Only a Small Basket, But… by Gogu Shyamala
https://navayana.org/products/father-may-be-an-elephant-and-mother-only-a-small-basket-but/?v=7516fd43adaa
This is a collection of luminous
short stories by Dalit writer and academic Gogu Shyamala, set in her home state
of Telengana, rendered in English from the Telegu by multiple translators. The daughter of agricultural laborers in
rural Telengana, her parents worked hard to ensure that she got an education; she
ultimately went on to gain a Ph.D. and became a scholar, an activist and a writer. Many of these stories are inspired by her own
life. As she says in an interview (https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/gogu-shyamala-being-dalit-and-woman-survival-beyond-victimhood-and-outside-it-41396)
, she avoids presenting Dalits as either victims or heroes; she does not shy
away from depicting caste violence and everyday prejudice, which are frequent
themes, yet her characters are fully human and her prose filled with an
ebullience that celebrates the resilience, courage, creativity, and humor of
her people. Their intimate knowledge of
the land and seasons, the animals and landscape, makes the natural world come
alive, and sometimes blurs the boundary between humans and the rest of nature; one
of the stories, for example, is narrated by a village pond. The stories take those of us from privileged
backgrounds into another world, which, although it exists in reality, feels
like the best of speculative fiction because of its superb worldbuilding,
immersing us in a world unfamiliar to most of us until it feels intimately and
viscerally real, and doing so with the sureness of a master.
3. Terra Nullius
by Claire G. Coleman
https://smallbeerpress.com/books/2018/09/18/terra-nullius/
Terra Nullius literally means no
man’s land. The title reminds me of
watching on TV the celebrations at the start of the LA Olympics decades ago, in
which the pioneers were depicted rushing valiantly into an empty United
States. Apparently Native Americans had
never existed. Unsurprisingly, this attempted erasure is also reflected in
classic science fiction; as academics such as John Rieder and writer/editors
such as Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan have noted, classic ‘golden age’ science
fiction is intimately associated with colonialism from the perspective of the
colonizers. Writers from countries or
societies that have experienced (and are still experiencing) colonialism are
often adept at turning this trope on its head. Indigenous Australian writer Claire G. Coleman, who identifies with the
South Coast Noongar people, does a spectacular job of this in her first novel,
Terra Nullius. It begins with a young
man called Jacky, who is on the run from a missionary re-education school meant
to ‘elevate the natives.’
(‘Re-schooling’ for cultural erasure is a tactic used worldwide against
Indigenous people, and not just in the past – it is an essential instrument of
cultural genocide – consider for example the phenomenon of factory schools
operated by big business in India https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/adani-kiss-factory-school). What Claire Coleman does with the theme of
colonialism is something the like of which I haven’t seen before, something
that only speculative fiction can do. I’m
tempted to elaborate, but I shall desist.
Readers should experience the power of this astonishing book for
themselves. As the words at the back of
the book say, ‘Do you recognize this story?
Look again.’
4. The Overstory
by Richard Powers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overstory
This novel recently won the
Pulitzer prize, rocking the mainstream literary world because it acknowledges,
among other things, that non-humans exist!
(I am being a little sarcastic here, in case it isn’t obvious, because a
pet peeve I have with much of the modern mainstream Anglophone literature I’ve
read is its obsession with the exclusively human (where ‘human’ is limited to white,
suburban, privileged people engaged in an endless monotony of self-indulgent
misery-making)). There are many pleasures in this book, not least of which are
the positively sensuous descriptions of trees, especially the giant redwoods of
the West coast, one of which literally has a small lake and trees growing way
up among its giant branches. The sections of the book take inspiration from the
structure of a tree, and the first, ‘Roots,’ begins with the generational family
histories of each of the nine characters.
The paeans to the interconnectedness of trees, although beautifully
written, stand in (probably unintentional) ironic contrast to the often
unsocial, damaged, disconnected and typically individualistic main
characters. Although I enjoyed several
parts of the book, I would not have thought it worthy of a Pulitzer. Some of
the protagonists seem quite unnecessary to the story, while others make a
disastrous decision that seems to go against common sense as well as their
painstakingly set up characters and histories.
If The Overstory is intended
to be a space-and-time-spanning American novel, it fails, because – to begin
with - everyone except for a couple of Asian-American characters - is white.
(The portrayal of the Indian-American character made me wince more than
a bit). Indigenous people are invoked
once off-stage, then they make a cameo appearance near the end, and that’s it. Interestingly,
the powers-that-be are also invisible; the forces of destruction are not seen,
not named, except indirectly through standoffs with loggers. Thus we never get
a sense of why the world is so hopeless – and hopelessness (except in unconvincing
techno-visionary imaginings of one of the characters) seems to be the ultimate
message, because no other way out is presented.
To me this seems to be a result of the stupendous lack of speculative
imagination. Many people I know love this book, in part (I suspect) because
reading some of the most poetic sections about trees seems to assuage a little
of the species loneliness with which we moderns are afflicted – indeed, the
most triumphant and enduring characters in the books are the trees. One cannot help but weep when some of them
are destroyed. Worth a read for that alone; ambitious, but with major limitations
and flaws.
5. The Memory Police
by Yoko Ogawa
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101870600
This novel by Japanese writer Yoko
Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, is set on an unnamed island where the
Memory Police can cause any object or concept – or person – to cease
existing. For instance, at one point the
inhabitants are told that birds will no longer exist from that day onward, so
the people gather to open the cages of their pet birds and let them fly away. After that day they might see feathered,
flying things around, but cannot conceive of them as birds, nor imagine any
relationship with them. But there are
people who cannot forget, and they must keep their intact memories a secret,
else the Memory Police will take them away.
The protagonist, a young woman, lost her mother to them for that reason;
when the story opens, her father, an ornithologist, is also dead. The woman is
a writer, a storyteller, and as she witnesses her world shrink with the disappearance
of what was once familiar and conceivable, she attempts to rescue others like
her mother before they are taken away. As
the Memory Police ramp up their dreadful work, we see our main character become
less and less real to herself, and yet she retains a sense of self through the
creation of story, and through a final act of resistance. Disturbingly resonant in a time when
authoritarian regimes are trying to rewrite history, geography, and reality,
the book leads inexorably to its stark conclusion. (Reading this, I was reminded that about half
of the six-thousand-odd languages of the world are under threat of extinction,
and with them concepts and ways of being that are potentially as important for
our survival as biological diversity (see for example https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures?language=en)). In understated, almost journalistic prose,
the book tells me that we cannot be free alone, that our freedom is contingent upon
the freedom of others, that memory is both individual and collective, and that
without stories, without imagination, we are lost. And that any system which builds its power
through erasure – of people, concepts, ideas, words - plants the seeds of its
own destruction.
6. Guido
Brunetti mystery series by Donna Leon
I mention this wonderful series
because of many reasons – one being the marvelously detailed setting,
Venice. Although I have never been there
and can’t speak for the accuracy of the depiction of the place and culture,
Donna Leon apparently lived there for thirty years. The waterways and palazzos, the way the light
falls at different times of the year, the seasons, the lagoons, the acqua alta
floods - all come alive in a wonderfully immersive way. I read mysteries mostly for light reading
before bedtime, to engage another part of my brain when I am tired, and forget
them rather quickly, but this series escapes being merely trivial because it gives
us the triple pleasures of place as character, intricate mysteries set in a
social context, and well drawn characters.
The philosophical and ethical questions that arise in crimes as dire as
murder, in a city that is fast changing due to modernity and an influx of
refugees, are not dismissed or ignored; instead our hero, Commissario Guido
Brunetti, engages with them as he works out the solution to the mystery. The
best part for me is the depiction of the characters, especially Brunetti, who
goes against the current popular (and annoyingly repetitive) stereotype of the
detective: a man who is disturbed, antisocial, or enraged on a near-permanent
basis due to some past tragedy, but of course, has a heart of gold under all
those layers of hard-boiledness. By contrast Brunetti is refreshingly human, a
grown-up, a decent man, happy with his lot in life, including his academic wife
and two teenage children. A man who is
secure enough to not play power games, yet bold and clever when he must be, to
get around the corrupt and inefficient people above and around him, he is
susceptible to springtime, opera, his wife, and the beauty of his city. And
Signorina Elettra, fashionista and diva of deviousness, who is fortunately on
Brunetti’s side, is a delight. As must be relevant in any city built on water,
environmental concerns are a frequent theme, but presented in a way that brings
out the reality of the problem alongside the indifference with which most
urbanites consider these issues.
7. Finally
I must mention two short story collections that are not out as yet but will be
this year, 2021, from two remarkable South Asian writers. I was privileged to
read these before they were put in final form for the publishers. Usman Tanveer
Malik’s Midnight Doorways and Anil
Menon’s The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun
are going to be out this year, and I hope that both will make it to multiple
best-of lists for collections.
Midnight
Doorways https://www.usmanmalik.org/product/midnight-doorways-fables-from-pakistan/
is a collection of lyrically told, atmospheric stories that shine the light
into the darkest reaches of the human psyche – and they are also very Pakistani
and very South Asian. Reading them, I
was reminded of sitting in the dark with cousins as a teen in India, each of us
taking turns to relate supernatural stories during the frequent summer power
outages. We terrified ourselves silly.
It’s probably because of those experiences that I don’t generally read horror. But Usman’s stories are not retellings of old
tales, dressed up to scare another generation of youngsters. They make something new out of the amalgam of
ancient culture and modernity, engaging with issues of love, betrayal, longing
and justice in the world we live in now, reminding the reader that electric
bulbs are no protection, not against the darkness within, nor the darkness beyond
the circle of light by which you are reading this. And that horrible things
happen in the world, and to look upon them and shudder to the depths of one’s
soul is one way we learn to recognize and confront these horrors.
Meanwhile, Anil Menon’s stories, collected in The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun
(coming out from Hachette), play with an eccentric mélange of science fictional,
fantastic and realist themes, with India a frequent setting. Anil (http://anilmenon.com/) is one of the most erudite
and well-read writers out there, who can quote an obscure Western philosopher
in one breath and ancient Indian love poetry in the next, and is himself
eminently quotable. This inconceivable variety and depth of knowledge allows
him to wander across multiple boundaries not limited to the geographical – fact
and fiction, spec fic and realism, poetry and table of contents. Odd things happen in the most ordinary circumstances
(many of the settings are domestic) and what is real and what is not real
become obscured. The ability to reveal the peculiar and extraordinary within
the most everyday situations is well displayed in this collection. The stories
are invariably clever, in the best tradition of the literature of ideas, but are
also emotionally resonant, rendered with characteristic elegance and wit.
With
these two, it is already a good year for short story collections.
Vandana Singh is the author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (Zubaan, 2009), numerous fine short stories, and two novellas published by Aqueduct Press in the Conversation Pieces series: Of Love and Other Monsters and Distances,
which won the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Award and was on the
Otherwise Award (at the time of the award, Tiptree) Honor List. She lives near Boston, where she teaches physics.
