Tag: Prize Longlists

I’m writing a letter. The letter is addressed to someone. We’ve had a dysfunctional relationship. There have been highs and lows, peaks and troughs, warmth and resentment. The letter asks one question, “Have we ever really understood each other?”

Maybe we almost did when I was lying on that hospital bed, and all I wanted was to go back home. You wanted the same too. We showed good progress and were discharged within a week.

Or maybe it was after Dad’s funeral when I tried my best to fight back the tears so that I could be a shoulder on whom yours flowed freely.

There are many instances worth noting. Many where we have both understood and misunderstood each other. Sometimes within the span of the same second.

This letter is addressed to my mother.

A parent-child relationship is both a pillar and a boulder. A pillar to lean on when we are exhausted to our bones but also a boulder we get crushed under at the most inopportune moment. It’s a blanket we wrap ourselves in but also a cross whose weight our shoulders could barely develop a callous against.

Death and the Maiden by Egon Schiele (1915)

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth is about one such dysfunctional parent-child relationship. It is about a daughter trying to understand her mother and a mother trying to reconcile with scars whose depth goes beyond generations. It is a painfully visceral first-person account of both generational trauma and survivor’s guilt.

An example is the plot thread when the protagonist contemplates about feeling betrayed by her mother because, after her father’s death, her mother appears to have moved on while the protagonist feels left behind. It is especially in this instance when the title “Is Mother Dead” invites contemplation in the reader’s mind. The “mother being dead” is the mother who was once grieving. The mother, who has moved on, feels like a separate person to the protagonist. There are many such “deaths” the mother falls prey to in the daughter’s mind throughout the course of the novel. This is in tandem with the daughter trying to connect with her mother in her “current” self while reconciling with the fact that the mothers she has lost over the course of her life are never coming back.

The mother, on the other hand, is exorcising demons of her own. From concealing her left arm, a bearer of the scars of her multiple suicide attempts, from her daughter to being the victim of generational trauma, which inevitably gets carried on in her parenting.

Is Mother Dead is a scalding examination of the fatalistic dichotomy of a parent-child relationship where the thorns are as prevalent as the caresses.

On An Eerily Pleasant Coincidence: Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

By Ashwin Glittus

On 08/04/2023

In Book Reviews

Cigarette smoke wafting, the coffee grows tepid. This one’s taking longer to finish than usual. The coffee lays in the wake of the flicked ash while a trail of smoke envelopes it. The butler, Alfred Merryweathers, arrives at my table and asks, “Shall I get you another cup fresh from the pot, sir?” To which I reply, “The lukewarm the cup, the bitter the coffee. Complements my smoke in a manner only my palette can explain.” A book lies beside my cup.

It is a book I wrote years back. The book was born out of a dialogue I had with a peer. It had something to do with once-inhabited spaces. Inevitably about where and how we grew up. It was a building the color of cement. It wasn’t exactly sturdy. It had started flicking its crumbs barely a few years after construction. But what didn’t set this building apart from the others was its housing of stories, or rather, it in itself being a plot point in many a subplot.

One of them was a poet. The poet was a war veteran. His poetry was born out of the delirium-inducing hallucinations his brain was prone to. The poetry that flowed echoed the gradual crashing of two cars, each car being a realm of existence and the resulting collision being ink on the paper. This poet was felicitated with an award for his recent collection of poetry, a collection born out of the collected trauma of seeing his peers reduced to literal rubble.

There was another poet. This poet had been part of a “revolution” in his youth. Some business about overthrowing some government somewhere. His business was the usual. Write poetry in favor of the revolution. Nobody knew he did it merely to save up for cigarettes and contraband back then.

There was a movie star. She had been part of an acclaimed film about one of the world wars, or was it the War of the Roses or was it the Cold War? She is now a poet too. Her poetry stems from how the movie set wasn’t too divorced from a battlefield. Almost everyone was at loggerheads, food was rationed, every scene was a battle between the dichotomy of who she lived as and who she was made to become. She did this to pay for the whiskey. The movie business. The poetry flowed after the fourth glass of whiskey.

And then came my room. And no, I’m not a poet, at least not until now. I write novels. Well, something that almost resembles a novel. I am a grave robber. I steal stories from where they are inhabited. This building is where my mind goes on its nocturnal prowl. From the bits and snatches heard, I write fragments. No, I have never asked for permission. Hence I hesitate to mention names and places. Alfred is in on the secret and has given me his consent to be mentioned voluntarily.

I wouldn’t call my book a collection of stories, though. Stories have a beginning-middle-end. Could I be pretentious enough to call it snapshots of lives? Yes, life has a beginning-middle-end loop as well, but closure, more often than not, is not par for the course.

The above is an excerpt from a book I was working on for the past few years. Just like all my other projects, this book, too, went nowhere, and the manuscript probably is languishing in some nondescript folder of a computer I probably don’t even own anymore.

An eerie coincidence of this year’s Booker International longlist is that almost every title I have read so far is reminding me of some or the other of my unfinished work. Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi is no different.

What the book is about is something that is easily available to read online, hence, I didn’t feel the need to mention it here. What I instead want to say is that, in spite of being barely a few pages longer than a novella, the novel packs quite a literary punch.

On Time Being A Despot: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

By Ashwin Glittus

On 02/04/2023

In Book Reviews

A beach. An endless beach. An ever-receding horizon. Beings of the same species stranded on its shores. Some from the dawn of time, some from its oblivion. All stranded like a row of beached whales, except, they can’t be mined for oil and they are mobile.

A walk commences. A walk towards the horizon. This walk is scored by Johann Johannson. The composition is funereal. Mothers reunite with sons they lost in the war, and bands separated by the gulf of space and time are reunited again. John Lennon resumes his position as the leading man. But something has changed. Instead of all his troubles seeming far away, the first line he sings is “Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be”. As they say, the devil is in the detail. A bullet has grazed through his face. A bullet meant for him but missed by a split second intervention.

Snowflakes glide from the endless skies and melt upon contact with the surface. One of them is the fabricated skin of Officer K. Lying on the shore with a bullet wound on his chest, blood trickles out of him and coalesces into a puddle of which even some of the snow is now a part. He stares ahead, his vision gradually blurring, at Rick reunited with his daughter and the two of them walking with the others. K’s vision, at the sight of this, fades to black. The bullet was meant for Lennon.

Bowie searches for Mercury in this throng. Once they finally find each other, the remaining members of Queen follow suit. The guitar strings, piano notes, and drums start swelling up with both Bowie and Mercury in unison incessantly crooning ” This is our last dance!”

Jetty and Wharf at Trouville by Eugène Boudin (1863)

Kiarostami, a creature of habit, is rolling his camera and documenting the walk while subconsciously splicing it into a verite-narrative. One of his creations, the down-on-his-morale cab driver Mr. Badii, looks at the sand on the shore and finds it reminiscent of the golden dust in the mine all those evenings back. Kiarostami strikes up a conversation “Mr. Badii, where is your taxi?” To which Mr. Badii replies, “Must be buried somewhere! Also, tell the doctor that I don’t need the sleeping pill prescription anymore!” Kiarostami replies, “Has someone finally accepted your macabre job offer?” Mr. Badii keeps on walking ahead and Kiarostami sifts through the crowd for a new subject, the camera still rolling.

For Godard, everyone appears to be dressed in red and the crowd has frozen or rather the crowd is walking while appearing to be frozen while they strike conversations with each other without moving their lips and what Michel said to Patricia still remains an erroneously translated mystery.

This beach is a bomb shelter that humankind has bunkered down in as the clock strikes twelve for them as a species. The collective human experience disintegrating into crumbs as the moment passes. This bomb shelter is probably a last straw. The bombs are being rained by time itself. Hence, this bomb shelter is a time shelter.

On The Schadenfreude Optimism Of A Birthday: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

By Ashwin Glittus

On 27/03/2023

In Book Reviews

At a birthday party. The room is filled to the brim with cranky toddlers. One of them is crying because the choice of cake is not to a flavour of his liking. The cake in question is a store-bought sponge with bland vanilla frosting.

A clown barges in. He is tonight’s entertainment. Another kid starts crying. He has a phobia of clowns. The clown tries to console the kid. His smile. That spine-chilling smile with a smirk smeared with red that looks dangerously close to blood. The wailing continues, the clown gives up.

The person typing this has a phobia of clowns as well. But, he wonders, is he too old to cry? He can just walk out, right? But, the door is bolted. The rancid odour of the stale cake engulfs the room. He spots something. The clown has a gun.

It doesn’t take too long for the clown to pull out the gun and make the child stare down its barrel. The clown feels insulted. The clown looks at the person typing this and immediately rushes to him. Gun to the forehead, the clown threatens “you fucking rat!”

The host is trying to open the door. The bolted door. This is a house without any windows. This is a house situated in the remotest part of a rural settlement. The wailing and shouting barely permeate the walls and what’s audible is nothing more than a hum.

The person tries to continue typing. The clown snatches his phone and looks at what is written. He starts laughing and exclaims, “You’re trying to cash in on us? As typical as a writer can get?”. The clown throws the phone against a wall and it shatters to pieces.

The host hears a thud. She walks up to a neighbor. Nobody’s home. The host walks back to her door.

The clown tells everyone to lie on the floor. The person who just lost his phone spots that the gun is not loaded. He sneaks up to the clown and steals the cartridge from his pocket. The clown fishes in his pocket for the cartridge and that’s when the person says, “Looking for this?”.

The person and the clown get into a fistfight and the person manages to disarm the clown. He then loads the gun and points it at the clown. He uses the landline in the house to call the cops.

As soon as he hears the sirens wailing, he opens the door, gun in his hand, he leads the clown to the cops. The host stands stunned! The cops arrest the clown who turns out to be a fugitive on the run.

Nobody is in the mood for stale cake. The host asks “I have a couple of beers in the fridge, let’s have those instead?”. The person who is wondering about which phone should he get next answers, “But what about the kids?”. The host replies, “Who else will gorge on that cake?”. The person replies “Is it fit for human consumption?”. The host replies, “You have not lost your sense of humor even after being at the receiving end of a 9mm barrel!”.

I haven’t figured out what happens next. After watching a hostage drama on television a few years back, I wanted to write a novel that spans a single, drawn-out day where it is more about the atmospheric claustrophobia that a situation like this entails than merely a protagonist-antagonist thriller. I wanted to write something closer to what I would call domestic noir. Mauvignier’s novel reminded me of the book I wanted to write.

The Birthday Party is a hostage drama where, for a change, it is the drama that takes center stage. It’s as much about the characters as flesh and blood people as it is about the peril they are in. Laurent Mauvignier writes in long, serpent-like sentences that coil around the reader’s mind and gradually, through increasing tension, squeeze it to a pulp. As each sentence goes on, the claustrophobia builds to an almost unbearable crescendo and before long, there is barely room for even a sigh.

A sigh is the closest one could manage to a gasp of air, especially when the book is intent on drowning its reader in a sea of claustrophobia.

At a whopping 500+ page length, it could have ended up being a bloated affair, but the book is anything but that. On the contrary, in spite of spanning a single claustrophobically atmospheric day, this is a read that flies by, in spite of its deliberately slow pacing, giving the reader time and space to soak in each and every detail. Or maybe it flew by for me because I love slow pacing.

On Choices and Quandaries: Boulder by Eva Baltasar

By Ashwin Glittus

On 27/03/2023

In Book Reviews

I’m aboard a ship. A rust bucket to be more precise. A vessel that creaks to high glory. Down here in the ship’s dimly lit dining hall, a Madonna crooning from the lonely speaker nudged in a crevice, her tunes remind me of a while bygone. Dinner is served, and the meal is a lonely affair. Some mashed potatoes and a sauce whose colour and name I can’t discern to save my life.

A few moments later, the sous-chef joins me. She asks “How is the food?” and before I could answer, she says “You can be honest about it. I only blanched the vegetables and the head chef has already snoozed off in the throes of his extra glass of rum.” Since honesty is the order of the hour, I say “The potatoes are bland, but in a comforting manner. I’m not much of a spice person anyway.” Quickly she replies “That’s why you have barely touched the gravy!” We both laugh at this and she brings out, to my surprise, a bottle of Merlot. A few glasses later, she starts telling me something.

She doesn’t have a name. Or rather, the closest to a name she has is a nickname called “Boulder”. No, it wasn’t either of her parents. It was her girlfriend. Her name is Samsa. And before I attempt to draw any conclusions, she clears the air by saying “My story isn’t Kafka-esque even in the remotest manner!”. The girlfriend is almost an ex. They have been together for decades. Then one fine day, she wants to have a baby. A few arguments later, Boulder caves in and ten months later, the baby is born. Her name is Tinna.

Once Tinna is born, the grammar of their relationship changes. Tinna consumes Samsa’s existence and while the physical transformation has been endured by Samsa, the Gregor of our story in a way is the relationship between Boulder and Samsa.

At this juncture, Boulder asks me “What do you think? Should we have become parents or should I have put up a stronger force of resistance?” As someone who has only been a child and never a parent, I felt like I was in no position to answer. But, I had to bring something to the table, if nothing then at least for an extra glass of that delicious Merlot.

So, fishing for answers I went. My choice of pond was my parents’ marriage. It was arranged and like most arranged marriages, both barely knew what they were getting into. The marriage was undoubtedly a disaster. While surviving for twenty years under the roof with two children in tow, every alternate conversation was an argument. The classic case. One parent being present while one being absent. The absent parent trying their best to shun any responsibility pertaining to the children while the present parent striking arguments about why the absent parent is being so… absent.

Returning back to the conversation at hand, with something resembling an answer in my tow, I say “I had a present parent and an absent parent. But in my eyes, both were not ready to become parents. But in my parents’ case, even after twenty years, they barely knew each other. So, this answer in turn provokes a question, how and why does a person have a child with someone they barely know?”

Boulder replies in a stern manner “Instead of answering my question, you are bringing quandaries of your own to the table!”

My reply being “That’s what stories do. They spark quandaries that until then laid dormant in the darkest recesses of one’s mind.”

The ship with Boulder in it was in a book I was reading and my conversation with Boulder was my reading between the lines. That’s what great literature does. It compels you to read between “your” lines, have a dialogue with the characters while drawing parallels with your own existence. Boulder by Eva Baltasar, in a lean span of 112 pages, achieves that and much more.

Tag: Prize Longlists

On The Fatalistic Dichotomy Of A Parent-Child Relationship: Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth

On An Eerily Pleasant Coincidence: Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

On Time Being A Despot: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

On The Schadenfreude Optimism Of A Birthday: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

On Choices and Quandaries: Boulder by Eva Baltasar