liseuselonglist

Liseuse reads longlists.

[hasdrubal-gisco]

Stealing this from twitter but I liked the concept: put in the tags where were your 8 great-grandparents from (given modern borders) ?

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‘Sight’ by Jessie Greengrass

Greengrass’s debut novel, Sight, is both the story of the inventor of the x-ray, Wilhelm Rontgen, and of an unnamed woman, pregnant with her first child, thinking back about her (now deceased) mother, and grandmother who was a psychoanalyst. It’s a novel about bodies and how we feel ourselves to be human, what we do to ground ourselves. It is beautifully written and poignant and the switching back and forth between the narrator talking about her life, and about people from the history of medicine and psychoanalysis works in a way that could easily have fallen flat in the hands of a less skilled writer.

The history interludes don’t feel as if Greengrass is forcing her knowledge on to us, the narrator makes sense as someone who would know about these things. Who would have a relationship where, late in pregnancy, they decide to visit the Hunterian Museum (if you haven’t been, and are ever in London and interested in medical history after 2021 (it’s closed until then) you should go. Until 2021, may I recommend the Wellcome Collection).

I feel like I should pre-warn readers that a lot of the book is about assessing the relationship between a mother and a daughter when the mother’s death is in the recent past, and I spent a day or so wandering around wondering why I felt so dislocated until a friend who I had mentioned that I was reading the book to, pointedly told me I was an idiot and I had an ah-ha moment. So, if you are in the same position, and are just as emotionally dense as I am, consider yourself warned

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‘The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock is set in the Georgian era, concerned with a medical curiosity (the mermaid of the title), and the lives of Mr and Mrs Hancock. Mr Hancock is a shipowner, who is presented by one of his captains with a mermaid - the ship is unfortunately lost at sea - but Mr Hancock is persuaded out of his concern about this by the prospect of being able to show the mermaid to London and gain some money and notoriety. Angelica, is a courtesan, who, through a series of twists and turns which are largely predictable but made joyous by how much fun Angelica is as a character, becomes part of Mr Hancock’s life. He promises her a mermaid; another mermaid, the first one having been bought by a private collector.

Mr Hancock is solid and a bit staid and a genuinely kind man who is bemused by the fortune the first mermaid has brought him, but who moves into the world of property development with a charming sense of normalcy - he could afford to build in very fashionable areas and instead chooses to build in vaguely up and coming areas. Areas he doesn’t feel cowed by. Angelica, on the other hand, is all lace and gauze and fripperies and a fondness for sweets. There’s a clever businesswoman underneath it, and she can work her way around any social scene.

I liked the novel, but I felt that some of the subplots didn’t get as much attentions as they deserved. The other girls in the brothel Angelica is attached to had interesting backgrounds which were hinted at just enough that I thought the author was going to delve into them more. Ditto the lives of Mr Hancock’s relatives.

But, it’s a good old fashioned Georgian romp, and if you, like me, have less of a sense of whimsy than might be desired, you can skip the pages in italics where a mermaid is talking to you.

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‘The Trick to Time’ by Kit de Waal

I loved Kit de Waal’s The Trick To Time. I read it in a great gulp one weekend afternoon, sitting outside, and just completely absorbed. 

It’s the story of Mona, living in a British seaside town, reflecting on her Irish childhood and history. She sells dolls, carefully handmade and the clothes hand crafted, each with its own history and background. And she counsels women, who come to see her about the trick to time. Letting yourself experience it, not running from it.

And throughout the novel you slip back into her recollections of her childhood, and her early life in England, and the catastrophic event at the heart of her life. Mona is coming up on her sixtieth birthday, and she’s thinking about what it means to live a life, and if her life is too small, if she should be trying to live it on a larger scale. 

It’s hard to say anything further about the novel without ruining the central conceit; I just want to urge you to read it!

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‘See What I Have Done’ by Sarah Schmidt

Sarah Schmidt’s novel, See What I Have Done, is the novelisation of the Lizzie Borden murders. I basically knew nothing about the Lizzie Borden murders before reading it, beyond a vague awareness that they’d happened.

There are four voices in the novel - Lizzie, Bridget (the maid), Emma (Lizzie’s older sister), and Benjamin (a stranger). And the story of the murder and the trial is told through these different voices, everyone jumbling on top of each other with their viewpoints. 

Look, it’s well written and some of it is genuinely creepy, and you feel for various characters at various times. However, I just don’t care about the Borden murders. Even after reading an entire book about them. I was more intrigued, to be honest, by the afterword where Schmidt talks about staying in the Borden house which is now a B&B, and the disparity between her as a guest, knowing exactly what the place is, and two people who just needed somewhere to stay and were pointed to it by their GPS. Why do we stay in these places? What does that say about humans? Is it disrespectful?

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‘Three Things About Elsie’ by Joanna Cannon

Three Things About Elsie was, for me, a somewhat frustrating reading experience. I guessed one of the major twists in the novel very early on (and I’m not a guesser of twists, I am terrible at guessing twists) and had my suspicions about the other one all the way through. It’s not a hugely long novel but knowing the answer to one of the twists the whole way through did make it seem much longer. 

Flo lives in sheltered accommodation, and she ends up on probation for a month. In this month it will be decided if she can continue living there or if she needs more intense care, and will need to move. Largely this is because she’s not keen on group activities and her dementia is progressing. Mostly it’s the group activities because the manager of the accommodation is very keen on them. My mother used to run a care home for older people, and then she inspected them, and we spent a long time discussing how irritating she found people’s insistence that all the residents should somehow want to join in with group activities. She’d kept on pushing back against the organisation which owned the home she ran, because they kept insisting on group activities, and she kept pointing out that people are, in fact, allowed to not want to join in a group with people they only have one tenuous thing in common with - living in the same place. 

There is a mystery story at the heart of the novel, which needs to be solved by Flo, who forgets things constantly, Elsie, and Jack. It’s a novel, i think, about not underestimating older people, and working with them to keep their lives running as they want them to, even when they need more care. It was a nice enough fun read for a Saturday afternoon. 

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‘The Idiot’ by Elif Batuman

The Idiot is the story of Selin, our autobiographical heroine, arriving at Harvard and worrying about what classes to take and how to make friends, and what the world means. it’s set in the mid/late 1990s, and keeping that in mind is key to not getting too frustrated with everyone; email is kind of new and shiny and Selin gets her first email address on arriving at Harvard. She doesn’t really know how it works (there’s a frustrating bit later on in the novel where I rolled my eyes at her not realising you could access it off campus and then had to remind myself that people don’t automatically know this) but she’s charmed by the possibilities. Epistolary friendships and romances form a large part of the novel. Everyone communicates via notes and messages and emails. 

Selin’s communication with Ivan, another student in her Russian language class, starts through the medium of their Russian textbook. They play out the conversations written on the page, putting them in a strange doomed love affair right from the beginning. And then they move to emailing about their lives, reenacting their own doomed love affair. 

This is a novel I would have loved about ten years ago but some distance from being an undergraduate means I now heavily roll my eyes at the pining and worrying and I wanted to reach into the novel and shake Selin and tell her that a) Ivan is not worth any of the amount of time she wastes on him  and b) she needs to possibly develop some critical thinking skills. It’s a novel which relies, I think, on a more generous reader, someone who isn’t incredibly frustrated by Selin’s naivety at all times. 

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‘H(a)ppy’ by Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy is an intriguing novel, set in a dystopian future, where information is immediately available from the System, to which everyone is somehow connected. Emotions are regulated via the System and people have to strive to keep balanced. The population is regulated by this virtual reality, keeping them all happy or h(a)ppy. 

Mira, the heroine, is h(a)ppy. The brackets have appeared from somewhere. She doesn’t know where but they indicate that she’s not in sync with the System and that there is something odd going on in her conscious. She’s rebelling without really intending to. And this fracturing from the System is represented in the text by changing font colours and styles and typographical art and then regular art. It’s a very visually engaging novel, representing the changes in Mira’s viewpoint and conscious through the changes in font and style and colour. Unfortunately because I am at times a very boring and normative person where literature is concerned, I didn’t really like the playing around with the text all that much (this is the same bit of me which despises immersive theatre) but if you have a higher tolerance for it than I do (which is not going to be hard), you’ll probably enjoy the textual playfulness. 

Behind Mira’s story is another story, the story of Barrios, a virtuoso Paraguayan composer and classical guitarist, and of Paraguay. It’s the story of empire and violence and colonisation and colonialism. It’s also the story of music and self-expression. Mira’s world offers no self-expression, everyone is part of the whole and the whole is everything. Being an individual offers a threat to the whole. 

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‘Once Upon A Time in the East’ by Xialou Guo

Xiaolu Guo’s Once Upon A Time in the East (published as Nine Continents: A Memoir In And Out Of China in the US) is a biography and cultural memoir entwined, telling the story of Guo’s upbringing and the changing China she grew up in. It begins with her, as a baby, being given away by her parents to a peasant family and then given back to her grandparents. Her father had been sent to a labour camp, and her mother was a factory worker, who sang in operas in the evening, and had no time or spare energy to care for Xiaolu. Aged two the peasant couple sent her back to her grandparents, who she lived with in a fishing village until she was seven. Then she moved to live with her parents, and older brother, in a communist compound.

Guo traces her life through these moves, including moving to Beijing to study film, and then to London. She talks about learning about poetry and fiction and film, and having to re-learn poetry and fiction and film as communism dissolves and translations from the West appear. And then having to learn the West when she moves to England as a Chevening scholar at the National Film and Television School.

This is a bio-memoir about translation and transliteration, learning how to slip and slide between mores and cultures (both within and without China), and the role of art and fiction and film in shaping how we think of ourselves and our people and our home.

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‘When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife’ by Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife is a novel about domestic violence, and about writing, and about women and their place in the world, and about politics, and about family, and how to survive and escape.

The narrator of When I Hit You is never named; it’s her story and she is telling it, so she doesn’t mention her name. But it’s also millions of women’s story, millions of people’s story. There can be no name put on it, when so many names could be put on it. She’s lived a fairly normal life, been to university, had relationships, written articles and fallen in love. She falls in love with her husband because of how he articulates his political ideologies, how he interrogates the world.

And then she’s trapped. They move to a new city, where she doesn’t speak the language and in learning it she’s trapped even further by only having the chance to learn domestic phrases. He entraps her into giving him her email account’s password, and starts to answer her email. Makes her deactivate her Facebook account. The only internet comes from the dongle he carries around. She can only use her mobile for things he approves of. And he rapes her, he beats her, and her family tell her this is something she just needs to power through because the first weeks of a marriage are always difficult.

Escape may save her from the marriage, but not from social castigation. The epigraphs to the chapters are all female poets. This is a novel about the power writing has, and the need to give written voice to things which are suffered by so many hundreds of thousands of women every minute of the day.

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‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ by Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing is set on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, telling the story of a family being pulled apart by prisons and drugs and events that may have happened years ago but which loom large over the family. It opens with Jojo being shown how to kill a goat by his grandfather. Ward doesn’t shy away from any of the visceral details of how you kill and skin a goat, or the smells and textures of the process. Jojo is trying to get through it, prove he’s a man, but he can’t help having to step aside to throw up.

Jojo’s mother, Leonie, had Jojo aged 17. She’s addicted to crystal meth, married to Michael, a white man whose cousin killed her brother, and who is also in jail, and barely a mother to Jojo and his younger sister, Michaela. She insists, however, that Jojo and Michaela, join her on the drive to pick Michael up from prison after his release. Along with her friend, Misty, they road trip through the Mississippi landscape. Along the way there is a lot of throwing up, a lot of desperation for food, and an inauspicious start to the family reunion. The return journey which brings the tangible threat of someone getting shot by the police thanks to the car being full of newly released convicts and drug addicts, further cements the fact that this family is going to have to work hard for anything to be even barely okay in the future.

The plot is draped with Ward’s lyrical writing about family history, ghosts, medical herbs, and people’s relationship to the landscapes and histories they’ve grown up with.

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‘A Boy in Winter’ by Rachel Seiffert

A Boy in Winter is set in Ukraine, in 1941. The Soviet army has retreated and the Germans forces are arriving. Ukrainian peasants greet them warily; they’ve survived Soviet collective farms and just want to survive this next occupation. Roads are being repaired and built, the railways are to have work done on them, and leaflets promising peace and no harm to those who want Ukraine to prosper have been falling from the sky. Otto Pohl is a German engineer, taking charge of a road-building programme. He has become a member of the Nazi party because he felt he had no other option, and he struggled to write letters home to his angry and disappointed wife.

Yankel is the titular character. He and his younger brother, Momik, have fled the soldiers rounding up their area’s Jewish population. The reaction other characters have to Yankel and Momik is what defines them and their physical journey is the forward movement of the novel. Yasia, a Ukrainian farm girl, gives food and shelter to the boys, having not realised that they are Jewish. She does it because they are young. When their presence is discovered they, and she, are sent away from her home because she has brought danger to the doorstep. They have to travel across Ukraine, to find safety in the face of danger from the Nazi forces and illness.

Pohl, tormented by having to choose road workers from the area’s Jewish population, is slowly made to come to terms with the fact that he cannot console himself with not being like the troops, like the ‘real’ Nazis, that he is, as his wife made clear, enmeshed and responsible. His careful picking of only the people he assesses as being strong enough to cope with road building, and his one moment of true mercy, will in no way ever be recompense for the part he has played in the Nazi machine.

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‘Bone’ by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Bone is Yrsa Daley-Ward’s re-issued poetry collection; it was originally self-published via Amazon and then expanded for publication by Penguin in 2017. Daley-Ward is a poet, an LGBTQA+ activist, and a model, and is from Chorley in Lancashire, now living in LA. Her parents were from Jamaica and Nigeria, she was raised by her grandparents who were Seventh Day Adventists before returning to live with her mother, moved to Manchester before moving to London and then moved to Cape Town where there were more opportunities for black models. Whilst in Cape Town she went to a spoken-word evening, and then went back again and again.

In some ways I am more interested by Daley-Ward than by her poetry. The poetry itself is fine, it’s good, it’s about very relatable experiences and emotions. It’s no wonder that her poetry is incredibly popular online - she engages people with her poetry via her instagram page - because she does have a real knack for getting to the heart of a thorny emotional or physical knot, in very few words.

My lack of reaction to the poetry is, I think, because over the years I’ve become somewhat more interested in people playing with form as well as language. Daley-Ward’s poetry doesn’t play with form; most of Bone is prose-blocks or short, sharp, five/six line poems. They’re good, don’t get me wrong! It’s just that they’re not to my poetic taste, right now. But they are excellent poems about important things, and I really don’t want my lack of bouncy enthusiasm to be taken to mean that they aren’t good or worth reading. Because, and here is the fairly terrible bit of all this, how often do I pick up collections of poems by black, British, queer, female poets? I read quite a lot of poetry, and the answer is ‘shamefully, not very often’. So, even if these poems weren’t quite to my taste, I’m glad I picked the collection up, I’m glad I read them. I’ve followed Daley-Ward on instagram - not out of reflexive guilt but because there are videos of her performing her poems on there, and they really do come to life when spoken.

(Anyone reading wondering if Chorley is where Chorley cakes are from, the answer is yes. Anyone who is reading who has never experienced the joy of a Chorley cake, well, I would recommend you address that. If you’ve eaten an Eccles cake, you’ve eaten something similar, but Chorley cakes are thinner, less sweet, usually eaten with a smear of butter on the top and sometimes with crumbly Lancashire cheese in accompaniment. It’s worth noting that Eccles and Chorley are separated by the grand sum of about twenty miles. As someone from Yorkshire I think I am now duty bound to say that Chorley cakes are one of the few good things to come from Lancashire.)

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‘Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime’ by Jeffrey Boakye.

I am going to preface this by saying that I am a) possibly the least likely person to really enjoy a book about grime music, b) I picked this book up solely because it was on the Jhalak longlist and did not think I would necessarily enjoy it - I thought I’d definitely learn things, and that’s always a thing I want to do, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be a fun reading experience, and c) I really really enjoyed this book and I learned some things and I laughed out loud more than once. Did this book leave me with any desire to listen to grime music? No, not particularly, although it does kind of have a soundtrack and I do remember some of the songs that Boakye writes about from the radio when I was a teenager. I, if you want complete honesty, read this book whilst listening to Radio 3’s ‘With A Little Bit of Lerner’ which was their Friday concert celebrating the work of Alan Lerner, famous lyricist for musicals.

SO, with all that out of the way, can I please highly recommend Jeffrey Boakye’s Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime to you all? I promise, you don’t need to know what grime is! I read an entire book about it and still couldn’t really tell you. The book does start off with a brief history of how the UK music scene got to grime, and to be honest, I should probably have had my phone next to me because I could have done with googling ‘the Amen break’ (a drum break in the song ‘Amen, Brother’, apparently, and according to Boakye, who I am more than happy to believe, we have heard this drum break a thousand times in all sorts of songs), Dancehall, Ragga, Breakcore, and a couple of hundred other things. I’d google it but I am fundamentally a person who very much enjoys music but who has no real ability to pick elements out. I like to blame this on having very little ability to determine which direction sound is coming from, and an associated inability to untangle strands of music and instrument.

Happily, not knowing what any of the music that Boakye is writing about sounds like, is not a hindrance to reading the book. Boakye describes the music, and the atmosphere surrounding each artist, and the different styles they all perform in, and he does so really really well. What shines through is how much Boakye loves this music, how much he knows about it, and how much he sees it as a potential lens for talking about London and black masculinity and capitalism and violence and drugs and community and family and heritage and on and on.

The second half of the book - the first being the run-through of the tracklist and the importance of the songs/artists - is short essays on the cultural importance of grime, what music means to the kids that Boakye teaches, what we can learn from this musical scene and how it’s spreading out from East London. Boakye gives a brief rundown of important grime artists from other UK cities, and thanks to him I now know that Blackpool apparently has an emerging grime scene. Blackpool! Who knew?

Anyway! Please all go away and read a book about grime music immediately. I mean, preferably this one because then we can all talk about how much we enjoyed it, but if there’s another one you want to read, don’t let me stop you!

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‘Kumukanda’ by Kayo Chingonyi

Kumukanda is Kayo Chingonyi’s debut poetry collection; kumukanda is the name of the tribal rites of passage that Zambian boys of the Luvale people undertake before they are considered me. Chingonyi moved to the UK aged 6 and, therefore, never undertook them. Kumakanda is the poetic re-telling of different types of rites of passage that he did undergo. They are about rap music and school and cricket, in their loosest forms; these are poems about social tests and testing and finding a place in the world.

Chingonyi talks about being a black actor and hating the casting calls for ‘lean dark men who may have guns’ whilst he’s carry around a rucksack containing notebooks full of poetry and ‘headphones / that know Prokofiev as well as Prince Paul’. Eminem becomes a counterpoint for black and ethnic minority poets proving their place in lyric verse (it was when I read the poem about Eminem that I realised that Chingonyi and I must be about the same age because wow do I remember the days when Radio 1 seemed to play Eminem every single minute of the day). These poems are steeped in music - Chingonyi collected cassette tapes, writing in the collections about which ones of his mother’s he could take to record over, and practiced rap lyrics, and the poems leap off the page with their musicality. I am 100% certain I missed 90% of the references; I listen to a lot of music, but very little rap music. But that doesn’t matter. I didn’t need to understand the references completely to understand their importance.

A lot of the poems are also about death and grieving and the changes that happen when parents die. Chingonyi was six when his father died, precipitating the move to the UK, and then thirteen when his mother died. The poem from which the collection takes its title asks what his alter-self, the one who didn’t leave Zambia, whose father didn’t die, would make of the one who did. Kumukanda is not just the set of actions and tests that make someone an adult, but the fledging process of becoming an adult, learning from the world, and making a place in it.

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‘The Golden Legend’ by Nadeem Aslam

Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend is set in contemporary Pakistan, putting violence, cruelty, and sectarian divides at the heart of the story.

The novel begins with the death of Massud. Along with Nargis, his wife and architectural collaborator, Massud was part of a human chain to transport books to their new library, and he is accidentally shot by an American. This propels Nargis into the shadowy hinterland of diplomatic affairs, being pursued by an US intelligence officer who wants her to publically proclaim her forgiveness of the shooter. Tied into this is Helen, the surrogate daughter of Massud and Nargis who, along with her father, Lily, are part of the Christian minority in Pakistan. Helen is pursued for her journalism as well as her faith.

To make matters all the more complicated and all the more human, Helen falls in love with Imran, who is recently escaped from a Kashmiri terrorist training camp, and Lily’s love affair with Aysha, is a dangerous prospect especially in a city where misdeeds are being proclaimed from loudspeakers for everyone to hear.

Love and politics make fugitives of all the main characters, and Aslam sends them to a mystical island on the outskirts of the city where Massud and Nargis had once built a mosque. The mosque was intended to heal religious rifts, with a church and a Hindu temple also being planned. However, the island and its plans were abandoned years before after someone was murdered in the mosque. But it functions as a retreat for the assorted characters.

This all sounds incredibly unsubtle, and that is true in a way for the whole of the novel. There is a thread running through where a book which has been shot to pieces must be sewn together with golden thread. The set pieces and the imagery are the antithesis of subtle, and some of the dialogue feels clunky, but the novel isn’t, I don’t think, aiming for realism. Everything is heightened to show how heightened and exaggerated everyday life is for these characters.

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‘We That Are Young’ by Preti Taneja

We That Are Young  is a re-telling of King Lear set in contemporary India, focusing on Devraj the head of the India Company, his daughters, Gargi, Sita, and Radha, his son, jeet, and his right-hand man Ranjit. The Company has interests in everything - hotels (including one in Kashmir), coffee chains, fabric - and the daughters are increasingly involved in the Company and its day to day functions. Taneja focuses the story on the daughters, not Devraj - he is there and he fasts and he is important, but this retelling of King Lear is about the women and their relationship to Devraj, to the Company and to India.

The novel opens with Jivan, Devraj’s illegitimate son, flying from the US to Delhi; everything in this novel happens in India, and is about India and its relationships with the world. The characters eat Tibetan-Mexican food, talk about the bringing of varieties of caffeinated drinks to India and making them popular, how to apply a Cambridge education in modern India. And simultaneously it’s about how India, through The Company, is making and re-making itself.

The daughters are the last descendants of a Kashmiri royal family, and they’re all brilliantly drawn and identified. Gargi is the eldest, intensely focused on certain projects - shoes for workers, schools for their children -, Radha is the middle child, always perfectly turned out and seemingly completely in charge of herself, but constantly looking to men she despises for their approval because that is what she has always done, and Sita, the youngest, is recently returned from Cambridge and devoted to political activism, interested in green politics, and missing for a large swathe of the novel.

Every single one of the characters is horrible and wonderful, intent on revenge or mastery, prone to violence of various kinds, and swathed in layers of privilege and glory.

Taneja’s novel is sweeping and wonderful and the chapters overlap giving different viewpoints on the same things, moving across various cities and through the calendar. The novel is linguistically multiple and the Hindi is unitalicised and largely untranslated. I read a lot of this novel with my phone in hand, googling different phrases and words. Some I could get from context but others needed the wonder of the internet. And it’s one of the elements of the novel I found most pleasing; this is a novel set in a bit of the world I know little about (and yes this is a crying shame) and I like being sent on little research missions when I read. It’s no different to looking at the footnotes in my Norton Shakespeare for explanation of phrases which mean nothing to a reader in 2018 but which meant something to an audience in 1606.