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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. There’s a new novel out by Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. We Do Not Part (Penguin), translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, was first published in Korean in 2021. If her Human Acts, translated into English in 2016 by Deborah Smith, who had also translated her Man Booker International winning novel The Vegetarian, tells the story of a student uprising in the 1980s at Gwangju which was brutally put down, We Do Not Part narrates another hidden chapter in South Korea’s violent past. She sets the story about two friends in the backdrop of an uprising, violently put down, on Jeju Island post World War II. Kyungha is asked by her friend Inseon, who is in hospital after an accident, to travel to Jeju Island to save her beloved pet, a white bird called Ama. But a snowstorm is raging, and will she reach on time? And when she does, what horrors await? “All my novels are variations on the theme of human violence,” she told The Guardian in a recent interview. In Human Acts, for example, she asks: “Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth, that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?” Besides her interrogation of the human condition, We Do Not Part shares a motif – the use of the colour white -- with another of her works, The White Book, a prose poem on grief about her sister who died soon after birth. Han told The Guardian she wanted to use very soft and light things like snowflakes to deal with “heavy and painful things.”
In books this week, we bring you an interview with Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize in 2023, who was one of the speakers at the recently concluded Kerala Literature Festival; we also talk to Devdutt Pattanaik about his book on the Harappan civilization, and read the last part of Manu Gandhi’s diaries, and a book on sport and climate change.
Books of the week
Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud has translated the second volume of the diaries of Gandhi’s grandniece, Manu Gandhi, starting on December 19, 1946, and ending the day after the Mahatma’s assassination on January 30, 1948. The Diary of Manu Gandhi: 1946-1948/Oxford University Press) bears witness to Gandhi’s innermost struggles in the last months of his life. In her review, Ananya Vajpeyi writes that it is the testimony of a witness not only to the principal events of India’s history in those years, but also to Gandhi’s struggles with his mind and body, his politics and sexuality, his truth and nonviolence. “It is an altogether singular work. In our long civilisational quest for self-knowledge, there is no moral protagonist like Gandhi, nor an intimate witness like Manu.”
A century after the world learned of the existence of the Harappan civilisation in September 1924, a civilisation as ancient as Mesopotamia and Egypt, Devdutt Pattanaik reflects on the “peculiar” but peaceful Harappans in his new book, Ahimsa (HarperCollins), which he has also illustrated. In an interview with historian Parvati Sharma, the mythologist explains why he chose Harappa. “I was interested in the art. I kept sketching the bull, the unicorn, the rhinoceros, the crocodile [from the Harappan seals]. As I was drawing, I noticed that the animals are anatomically absolutely correct, almost like photographs — it’s quite impressive. The timelines [are fascinating]: the pyramids are built exactly when the Harappan cities are being built. The lapis lazuli — a stone found only in Afghanistan — made its way to Mesopotamia along the sea coast from Harappa. It’s something every child in India should know, but we don’t talk about this — 4,000 kilometres, 4,000 years ago at the time of the pyramids, by a culture that has no big monuments, does not seem to glamourise violence and power. This is a very peculiar civilisation.”
In Warming Up – How Climate Change is Changing Sport (Bloomsbury), Madeleine Orr sends an SOS to the sporting industry to take global warming seriously. In his review, Suresh Menon points out that Orr says “climate action is a team sport,” reminding us that U.S. President Donald Trump has called climate crisis a “hoax” and “pseudoscience”, thus giving us a glimpse into the difficulty of doing the right thing. “Warming Up is not all doom and gloom, though, even if some of the suggestions, like playing golf ‘between cooling towers, on the grounds of decommissioned fossil-fuel refineries and abandoned sports stadia,’ sound impractical.” In the middle of a match on the hottest day of the US Open in 2023, Daniil Medvedev complained: “One player [is] gonna die.” Warming Up, says Menon, throbs with urgency.
Spotlight
ROME, ITALY - JULY 16: Paul Lynch attends the "LETTERATURE" - Rome International Festival at Colosseum Archaeological Park on July 16, 2024 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Maria Moratti/Getty Images) | Photo Credit: Maria Moratti
Paul Lynch, who won the Booker Prize in 2023 for Prophet Song, set in an Ireland that is moving into the firm grip of totalitarianism, was one of the speakers at the recently concluded Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode. Speaking to Preeti Zachariah on the sidelines of the festival on a hot day, Lynch says, “Sooner or later, every winner of the prize of the magnitude of the Booker has to decide what kind of person they are, whether you’re a public-facing person or a writer again.” His goal in Prophet Song was “to articulate a particular aspect of the human condition, which is what we do to ourselves again and again.” There is this myth of progress, particularly in the West, that we’re always moving in this direct line towards some sort of utopian ideal, adds Lynch. “We’re not capable of that. Utopia is a dangerous idea because it relies entirely on reason to get you there. And reason is never truly reason in itself; it is always corrupted by belief. Human beings aren’t capable of pure reason.” Lynch contends that fiction can do something really special. “It’s that whisper in the ear that the novelist has. No other art form can do that in the way that fiction can do it. You take the reader into that lived space where empathy, real serious empathy, is possible because you start to feel the pain for yourself.”
Read this piece in which Booker Prize winners and shortlisted writers, including Jenny Erpenbeck, Paul Lynch, Georgi Gospodinov and Gauz’ talk about the hot button issues of the contemporary world and the role of fiction..
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- Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad’s debut non-fiction One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Penguin) follows from his conclusion after years of working and living in the U.S. as an immigrant that there will always be entire groups of human beings the West never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. The title is from a tweet he put out in the early weeks of the bombardment of Gaza in 2023: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
- Do some lives matter more than others? In a powerful treatise, The World after Gaza (Juggernaut), Pankaj Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by the present crisis in the world, particularly why racial antagonisms are intensifying amid a far-right surge in the West, threatening a global conflagration. Historian Rashid Khalidi says Mishra grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of stone-faced Western elites ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
- Annie Zaidi’s new novel, The Comeback (Aleph), is the story of two friends, actor John K. and his college mate Asghar Abbasi. When Asghar’s world is thrown into crisis after an interview given by John K., Asghar returns to his hometown, where he finds that his true calling is the stage. The story traces both their journeys – into the arts, and friendship.
- 100 Indian Stories (Aleph), edited by poet, editor and translator, A.J. Thomas, is a collection of Indian short fiction written by literary giants across centuries, starting with Rabindranath Tagore.
Published - February 04, 2025 02:26 pm IST
