My Year in Books

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Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

God, okay. Let’s talk about the master of the Japanese short story. If you are unfamiliar with Akutagawa’s work, then this is unquestionably the best place to start. I have already written about how grotesquely beautiful Hell Screen is, so I won’t reiterate it, but this man thrives on the grotesque. His paranoia, his madness, his anxiety blend into biographical masterpieces that deserve to be read and then to be contemplated. In particular, the titular Rashomon and In a Grove, from which the famous Kurosawa film takes its name and plot respectively, display a ridiculously advanced understanding of the human psyche and its ability to deal with right, with wrong, and with its need to understand the right and wrong. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a masterclass in being faced with the absurd. This, after all, is the master of the Japanese short story.

1Q84

Haruki Murakami

Years are long things. When I saw this book on my list for this year, I could have sworn I’d read it much earlier. It’s poetic in a way: the book, whose cover boasts that it is ‘maddeningly brilliant’, also talks about uncertainty, Murakami’s bread-and-butter theme. This is a book for the detached and semi-conscious, for floating around in Alice-in-Wonderlands and wanting love to be something that the universe cultivates for you. In the middle of all the gunfighting, the secret cults and the glowing two moons in the sky is a genuine love story filled with yearning and the need for certainty. In 1Q84, I found the most human story Murakami has ever written, even with its outlandish and off-putting obsession with breasts that I will almost certainly be lambasted by his fans for, for being too obtuse to understand.

Tamas

Bhisham Sahni

Tamas is the most unnerving book I have read in a while, and to be honest, it deserves to be read in Hindi. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, over a two-and-a-half hour journey from Kolkata to Bangalore, not just because I didn’t have anything else to do. It’s just that. good. In its pages, you can smell blood, real blood, and realize how fragile our lives are. A dead pig is found on the steps of a Hindu temple, and by evening, a terrible riot has burned and pillaged and factioned the entire unnamed city on the Indo-Pakistani border. And yet, Sahni’s unflinching pen does not lay out scenes of destruction immediately: it focuses on families, separated and afraid, on women preparing to sacrifice themselves, on a Dalit tanner who spends his last moments before his death in love with his wife. That might be what makes it so painful, after all.

The Guide

RK Narayan

Ah yes. The Guide. I have so much to say about it but so little place to put it in. I don’t think anyone but Narayan could have written this book, even if the plot were whispered into their ears. That is because this story about moral deceit, a failing marriage and spiritual redemption is also funny. Indian art has a tendency to be sad. We understand sadness very well — Guru Dutt, Mulk Raj Anand, Sahir Ludhianvi. So if RK Narayan can write a story that portrays so many themes that we know must lead to sadness — themes like failed dreams, unhappy relationships, being thrown out of houses — then perhaps it is right to call this book what it is: a masterpiece.

Deep Thinking

Garry Kasparov

This is one of only two non-fiction books on this list. Kasparov’s memoirs on his match against Deep Blue has been sitting on my shelf for a while: I bought it when I wasn’t following chess and didn’t read it because I couldn’t appreciate it. Therefore, when my newfound obsession with The Queen’s Gambit panned into an obsession with chess, I thought it would be useful to revisit this book. And it was worth it — Kasparov crams stories about Anand, about Karpov, about Tal and Seirawan into a book that manages to keep its pace and theme quite strongly on the growth and evolution of chess computers. As we move through the decades, Kasparov introduces us to ChessBase and Fritz, Belle, and other chess engines that he has found himself fighting against until the eventual defeat of man against machine. I was also pleasantly surprised to find a number of my computer science heroes in the mentions — Alan Turing, the man who essentially founded the theory of computers; John McCarthy, the man who invented LISP; Ken Thompson, who designed the UNIX operating system.

In Praise of Shadows

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Look, this is a seventy-two page flex by Tanizaki to showcase how much better he is at understanding aesthetics than the rest of us mortals. There’s also a bit of nationalism within these pages — the Japanese just do aesthetics much better — and Japanese nationalism is always a thing to be wary of, especially if they’re writing in the early 20th century. Still, he defends his position well, talking about lacquer and darkness shimmering in alcoves, and the oppression of harsh white light. This reads like an assignment written by an undergraduate design student, if the design student in question were also in contention for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Full of glorious imagery and a passion for the darkness, In Praise of Shadows is elegant, smooth, and subtle, much like its subject.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel García Márquez

Santiago Nasar is dead. Everyone in this story knows this, even while Santiago Nasar walks on two feet. Chronicle is Marquez doing what he does best — vivid imagery wrapping barbaric scenes with a journalist’s neutral, observant eye. Why is Santiago Nasar dead? Who killed him, and for what reason? As with Akutagawa’s In a Grove, Chronicle also refuses to deal straight-forwardly with the truth. In moments of brilliance, Marquez introduces checkpoints into the plot, where madness, corruption, or delusion turn people to do things they would not normally do, so that the murder of Santiago Nasar falls into place like a celestially planned jigsaw.

Em and the Big Hoom

Jerry Pinto

(TW: Mental illness; suicide)

Originality ought to count for something. In Jerry Pinto’s beautifully-written, two-hundred page, ink-stained debut novel glows with originality. It is brilliant. Pinto writes about mental illness, a subject that has been mutilated by modern fiction over and over again. His protagonist has a mother who suffers from mania, who has suicidal thoughts, and who has a family she loves and who loves her. The book’s characters are learning and unlearning everything they know: about illness and about family. This is a piece of art. Please read this book.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk

The 2018 Nobel Laureate for Literature was well-deserved. Drive Your Plow feels like those novels (The Old Man and the Sea, Buddenbrooks or Olympian Spring) capable of springboarding their writers to Nobel Prizes purely of the masterly display of literature they cram into each of those books. But Tokarczuk is not Hemingway or Mann, and I have never read Spitteler. She gives us a sarcastic old lady who cares about deer and forests, who lives in a remote village and translates English poetry to Polish, and who doesn’t keep many friends. This is the type of person who Tokarczuk believes we should have as our narrator through a cine noir story straight from Raymond Chandler’s desk. Set on the border between Poland and the erstwhile Czech Republic, she gives us a glimpse of characters who are cruel or sympathetic or simply getting on with their lives. This is a masterpiece of existentialism, noir fiction, feminism, and of writing character studies that do not betray the characters.

Jazz

Toni Morrison

When the first word of a book named Jazz is ‘Sth.’, you know the writer digs poetry. Of course, when the writer in question is American Literary Giant Toni Freaking Morrison, you should have known that already. In paragraphs that are so poetic I have to resist the urge to quote them when I see the sunsets in Bangalore (‘Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half’, and that’s from page THREE), she describes jealousy like she’s a witness to a robbery describing the perps to a police officer. Violet Trace shoots the teenager her wife is cheating on her with; then, she goes to her funeral and attacks the corpse with a knife. There’s your knockout premise. And then Morrison turns to the experiences. Who the three people in the above premise (the woman, her husband, his lover) are, what they do, how they think. These are important things to understand, even if not to sympathize with. And amidst the drama, jazz plays on and on and no one can do anything about it.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey

I did talk about Pinto’s Sahitya Akademi-winning treatment of mental illness already. Cuckoo’s reputation as a mental health awareness pamphlet is well-known: it is to that subject what Animal Farm is to animal husbandry. No, this is about tyranny and revolution, about down with the establishment! and being counter-culture and not caring what the big man thinks. That it is set in a mental hospital is not the point: that the hospital is run by an authority figure who strives to make all those who come under fit into the program is what matters. The Big Nurse resonates with us: with anyone who has ever been under any authority. It is the individuality of the self that the book is celebrating, even if it does so with the misogynistic and racist undertones of many of its contemporaries (I highly recommend reading some critiques of this book after you finish it. Read responsibly, kids!). It’s still painfully easy to see why Cuckoo rang so many bells in the counterculture movements of the 60s. Bob Dylan is practically compressed into its pages like a bookmark.

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

Postmodernism should make you nervous. Paranoid. Get your Radiohead CDs. This is the book to play them to. Pynchon is confusing, he is outlandish and strings together plot points into a poorly made necklace, the kind you’d give to your girlfriend but not your wife because she expects more of a holiday in France anyway. The radio is playing when you read this but that’s okay, the moon landing happened three hundred years ago or something anyway. Not since its appearance in a physics lecture my 11th grade teacher gave me while explaining thermodynamics has Maxwell’s demon made a less significant appearance. Might as well. With the Beatles clones popping up all over this story, Maxwell’s silver hammer might be hidden somewhere too. Did you know there used to be a royal house responsible for delivering mail throughout Europe? Now you do.

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch

Out-of-work writers make for the best main characters. Jake Donaghue is the type of antihero we should all aspire to be, but only in our fantasies. Murdoch’s real talent is making her characters flow, and this one flows all the way across the English channel and back. Penniless, odious, oozing-with-laziness Jack Donaghue. Dame Iris Murdoch has squeezed in as much charismatic lunacy into this man as his broke and thoroughly unhinged frame can hold. He jumps around London and Paris on a mission to find himself some kind of purpose (or maybe some kind of love), visiting old friends and other people who are growing tired of him. I endorse this novel fully and in complete celebration of its sloth and chaos: read this book. I dare you. I double dare you. I triple dare you. And then come and meet me so we can fall in love.

Midaq Alley

Naguib Mahfouz

Some would argue that independent women don’t all become whores, and that would be a perfectly valid criticism of this book. So that’s my preface for this book. Now, coming to why critics often call it Mahfouz’s finest work: it is a painting. In Midaq Alley, the first and only North African to win a Nobel Prize in Literature brings to life this dusty little street in Cairo filled with the yelling of dysfunctional families, of vice and sin. His characters are uniquely grotesque — a man who makes cripples out of healthy men because they want to become beggars; a dentist who robs graves to prepare his dentures. His characters are living wretched lives, and it is no wonder that his protagonist — Hamida — dreams of leaving the alley. In this, Mahfouz brings out a story that could have been narrated by Scheherazade herself. Midaq Alley exists as a book that has one dimension: the action and its consequence. The question that you, as a reader, deserve to ask is if it’s enough.

The Song of Achilles

Madeleine Miller

J. lent me this book. They told me it was going to be the most painful book I’ve ever read, that I’d be heartbroken fully and completely. I knew the risks going in. Still, it’s heartbreaking beyond belief. What Miller achieves in her retelling of the story of Achilles and Patroclus is a magnificent crescendo. She builds up a relationship slowly, surely, with cement and mortar to give it stability, covered in glittering paint that glows in the dark: all so that when she detonates the dynamite at the end of the book, it causes an emotional avalanche. The finale of the book is a whirlwind. It beats around your head and deafens you. I read a lot of books on love this year, but the way Miller unearths a story from thousands of years ago and injects into it that universal theme filled with loss and tragedy and forgiveness is proof that when we have finished telling each other stories, there will still be an infinite sea filled with the tales of human love we never mentioned.

Kanthapura

Raja Rao

Rao completes my triumvirate of Indo-Anglian fiction. With the last page of Kanthapura, I completed at least one book each by Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, and Rao himself. This particular triumvirate was credited with starting Indian literature in English, and yet their styles vary drastically. I credited Narayan earlier for being funny; something completely original in Indian literature. Anand is formal, concerned with preserving metaphors and idioms when translating conversations to English. Rao, on the other hand, writes poetry. This is not a compliment — his style is difficult to read and chaotic on many fronts. However, in the context of the era in which Rao wrote, that should not deter you from reading Kanthapura. This book is Indian history. Written about a small Kannadiga village that begins to decay when Gandhism comes to its people, the book is a reminder — in many ways, like Tagore’s The Home and the World — of how political theatre acts out at the grassroots level. To be Pontius Pilate, one must start by being prepared to wash their hands.

The Makioka Sisters

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

Tanizaki is a genius. But appreciating Makioka takes a little more than just reading the book. It requires questioning why Tanizaki, in the middle of World War Two, when Japan was undergoing its most aggressive imperial phase, chose to write about domestic life in the serene, august way that he presents it. This thought was shared by the Japanese government too, who censored the novel saying the Japanese should be on their guard against stories about “the soft, effeminate, and grossly individualistic lives of women”. The premise is simple — the book is about four sisters, and one of them has to get married. Quickly. And so we waltz through Osaka and Tokyo, meeting ordinary Japanese people, doing ordinary Japanese things. Like Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Tanizaki combats mention of the war except to present the time period with a devotion. Life is going on. Society is changing but life? Life is going on.

Shame

Salman Rushdie

This book is filled with pizzazz and boom boom bang bang and people named things that they shouldn’t be named. Only Rushdie can get away with naming his characters after the Indus Valley Civilization. In what is yet another piece of evidence that Rushdie deserves to become the first writer to win a Nobel Prize in Literature whose oeuvre contains the word ‘funtoosh’, Shame explores what it must be like to be shameless. Its characters, military dictators and high ranking parliamentary members in an imaginary society based on Pakistan, move through endless mounds of shame like mud, trollopping and dilly-dallying as though their lives deserve to have any rational meaning. The best magical realist in the business (now that Marquez rests in peace) brings his menagerie of clairvoyants and chicken-killers, and before your eyes, turns them into one of the most powerful psychological examinations of human nature that you will ever read.