This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will be discussing Rupert Thomson’s excellent Divided Kingdom. The author himself will be available to answer questions today between 3:30 PM and 5:00 PM EST. (Note to my neighbor: If you’re done reading Divided Kingdom, can I have it back? My sister wants to read it.)
Seven years after Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai has finally returned with a new novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Pankaj Mishra reviews it on the front page of the NYT Book Review and finds it “extraordinary” and “the best kind of post-9/11 novel.”
“The Inheritance of Loss” opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai’s grandfather’s cook, who belongs to the “shadow class” of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.
What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. “Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,” Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.
Marjorie Kehe also praises the novel in the Christian Science Monitor, giving it high marks in particular for its ending, which “treats the heart to one last moment of wild, comic joy – even as it satisfies the head by refusing to relinquish the dark reality that is the life of its characters.” It sounds like this new book will have been worth the long wait.
Over at the Washington Post, Margaret Atwood discusses Somebody’s Daughter, a two-week camp for Inuit women that she took part in last summer. The project blends sewing, healing and writing, and Atwood’s experience helped her better answer questions about the role of writing in other programs she participates in, like UNESCO’s Literacy Initiative for Empowerment. You can read Atwood’s article: here.
*Before all your grammarian types email me: Yeah, I know it should be “Whom is it for?”
In a very cool way. Mayle Meloy’s new novel, A Family Daughter, outs one of her characters as the “real” author of Meloy’s previous novel, Liars and Saints. (Are you following?)
“Liars and Saints” began during World War II with the wedding of Teddy Santerre to a French-Canadian woman, Yvette Grenier. These two, after an extramarital incident that planted the chronicle’s first guilty secret, became the parents and then grandparents of a sizable, restless brood. And they also became — great-grandparents? Great-aunt and great-uncle? It’s hard to say. The pivotal character in both books is their granddaughter Abby, the budding novelist. And in both books Abby has an affair with Jamie, her feckless, irresistible young uncle.
The hall-of-mirrors aspect of these relationships is dizzying. In “Liars and Saints,” Abby and Jamie produced a son named T. J., and then Abby died. In “A Family Daughter,” the putative real-life version, there is also a boy named T. J., but he is a European-born child adopted by Jamie. Abby is not his mother, and Abby does not perish. She writes a novel that earns her both literary distinction and unwelcome curiosity about her family’s real story.
Intrigued yet?
My friend Maaza Mengiste sends word that she’ll be hosting a special reading at KGB Bar in New York. I would be there in a heartbeat if I were in town.
Quickies: In and Out in Two Pages
A Reading of Flash Fiction by New York Writers
Hosted by Maaza Mengiste and Rebekah Anderson
Saturday, February 18, 2006
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Ave
7-8:30pm; Free.
Go say hi for me.
John Tayman, the author of a new non-fiction book about the Molokai colony where people affected with leprosy were exiled for several decades, is a guest-blogger this week at Powells.com. In today’s post, he talks about his book tour experience, which has so far involved gossip-loving media escorts and radio interviews where callers ask things like:
Caller #1: “John, what do you know about the military’s plan to imprison the mentally ill in a million-acre gulag in Alaska?”
Me: “Um, nothing.”
Caller #1: “Well look into it. Could be a good next book.”
Caller #2: “Mr. Tayman, this story about that colony on Hawaii sounds interesting. Have you heard that the government is keeping a cure for leprosy secret, so as to kill us all off with the disease if it decides to?”
Me: “Actually, a cure was discovered in the 1940s, and is in wide use.”
Caller #2: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Yes.”
Caller #3: “Mr. Tayman, you’ve been talking about diseases and quarantines and such, and I wanted to ask if you knew that SARS was caused by eating bats.”
Me: “No, I had not heard that. Thanks for letting me know.”
Caller #3: “No problem. I’ll send you some literature on it.”
You can read the rest of Tayman’s post here, and you can find out more about The Colony here.