India

The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie

I was a big Salman Rusdie junkie when I was younger, and avidly ready all his books. On a number of occasions, I even sought out reader guides to better appreciate and understand the intricacies of his stories and their settings.

For reasons unknown however I never got around to reading his more recent books when they were published. I've had his 2001 book Fury sitting on my bookshelf unread for years. Perhaps with some twinge of a guilty concious, I dusted one of my favourites off the bookshelf a while ago and revisited this family saga that stretches down from the spice-traders of yore through India's independence and to the modern day.

As is often the case in Rushdie's books,the story and the characters act as a parable for India and her history. In this case, following the narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, aka "Moor", as he moves from his families spice warehouses in Cochin to the heights of Bombay's glitterati and the depths of a life on the lamb in sun-scorched Andalusia. It's a grand struggle between good and evil, with the Moor as allegory for India itself.

A friend recently posted this very interesting article about the state of Indian literature in India. It pointed out that the most celebrated Indian authors, Salman Rushdie included, come to India by way of the West. These authors were published and became popular in the West first before being imported back to India. Homegrown Indian authors are actually few and far between.

Afghanistan

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

I just watched the film for the book a few days ago and I was reminded of how dreadfully disheartened I was reading this book. While there is redemption and hope, mostly there is a full-plate serving of sadness reading The Kite Runner. – Not that that should put any off reading it; life is sometimes sad and this story beautifully told.

As I had read this quite a number of years ago now, when it first came out on the bestseller list, I was intrigued to see what Ann Morgan had come up with for her Afghan entry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she had a hard time escaping the ubiquitousness of Hosseini in Afghani writing. Despite a native narrative tradition stretching back a thousand years, and a daily presence in news stories for more than a decade, Afghanistan has always been something of literary hermit kingdom. With the success of Hosseini's writing, hopefully more avenues will open for new Afghan writers to emerge in the future.

Sri Lanka

Cinnamon Gardens
Shyam Selvadurai

Selvadurai is a Sri Lankan–Canadian author whose first book, Funny Boy, won a slew of awards, including the Books in Canada First Novel Award. It's coming-of-age story set in Sri Lanka where Selvadurai grew up. As with any hyphenated writer who's lived in more than one country, I faced the question of where I should considered them to be "from". Selvadurai was born to a Sinhalese mother and a Tamil father, which led his family to emigrate to Canada during the interethnic tension of the Sri Lankan civil war when Selvadurai was 19. Since Selvadurai spent his formative years in Sri Lanka, and sets his novels all there, I figure he is a safe bet for my Sri Lanka entry. I would, however, be particularly interested in reading some authors writing in the post-civil-war period to understand how the country has been affected by that dreadful conflict.

Funny Boy is set in the run-up to this turbulent period, which is when my family also lived in Sri Lanka. As such, it had a particular resonance for me that I didn't find in Cinnamon Gardens, which is set in the high-society world of colonial-era Sri Lanka in the 1920s. Cinnamon Gardens traces the story of two relatives struggling to find their way in the genteel but overbearing manners and social graces of the period, à la Jane Austen, which I've since learned was an inspiration for the book.

Selvadurai has a new book, The Hungry Ghosts, which follows on with many of the same themes of sexuality, ethnicity, and identity in Sri Lanka. Something to pick up for my upcoming Chinese New Year trip to the Sri Lankan beach?

Bangladesh

Brick Lane
Monica Ali

In her Year of Reading the World project, Ann Morgan had to lay some groundwork as to what constituted a book "from" a country. Does the author have to be born there? Live there? Does it have to be written about that place? Does it count if it's written about a different place? The answers, it turns out, were rarely straightforward.

A case in point is my archive entry for Bangladesh. Author Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother but then grew up in England from the age of three. Brick Lane begins in Bangladesh and deals with a young woman who moves from a village to enter an arranged marriage in London with and older man. Should this book of culture clash and the immigrant experience then be considered "English" or "Bangladeshi"? Letters to England from the woman's sister in Bangladesh play an important role in the narrative as well, further blurring the line of where the book might be "from".

There isn't, of course, a clear-cut answer to this question, just my own personal choices as I swashbuckle the literary high seas and shifting sands of place as I plot my course to circumnavigate the globe.

India II

Bhagavad Gita
भगवद्गीता

The reason I started reading this book is quite a silly one: it's the book Mrs Madrigal is reading when she meets Edgar Halcyon in Tales of the City, and leads to one of my favourite exchanges about spirituality:

He sat down on a bench in Washington Square. Next to him was a woman who was roughly his age. She was wearing wool slacks and a paisley smock. She was reading the Bhagavad Gita.
She smiled.
"Is that the answer?" asked Edgar, nodding at the book.
"What was the question?" asked the woman.

I'm not sure I found any spiritual enlightenment myself when I read the book, but in writing this post, I did learn that the book Mrs Madrigal was reading was not, in fact, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as I had thought when I started to put together the blog (the actual reading haven taken place many moons ago) and, by consequence, I don't seem to have read any German authors. That seems a bit strange to me, as there are so many German authors out there, but barring any sudden enlightenment as to books read far in my past, I'll add Germany back to the list of countries to read.