Contemporary World Fiction, Volume 3

Description

Contemporary World Fiction, Volume 3 is a collection of scholarly essays and recent reviews of the best of contemporary literary fiction from around the world, including the following titles:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga


• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini


• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami


• The Vegetarian and Human Acts by Han Kang


• Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, The Invention of Russia by Arkady Ostrovsky, and Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya von Bremzen


• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy


• Exit West by Mohsin Hamid


• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Modern
• Literature
• Contemporary history
• Modern history
• World
• Contemporary
• Global
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Novel
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438182018
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contemporary World Fiction, Volume 3
Copyright © 2019 by Infobase
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
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ISBN 978-1-4381-8201-8
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Chapters Laughter in the Darkness (Review of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga) Useful Disasters (Review of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini) Unmemorabilia (Review of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami) The Unsettling Gaze of Han Kang: Examining Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Human Acts Both Sides Now (On Secondhand Time, The Invention of Russia, and Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness [Review II] Words and Worlds: A Review of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid On Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng Support Materials Acknowledgments
Chapters
Laughter in the Darkness (Review of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga)
2008
Those were the good days, it turns out, when the Western world looked down upon American literature. Think about Virginia Woolf's verdict on a pair of story collections by Theodore Dreiser in a 1919 review: Their [Dreiser's characters'] animal spirits are superb. Nor are they entirely animal. The abundance of life in their veins overflows into all kinds of fine and friendly relations with their fellows. Mr Dreiser describes them with such enthusiasm that his work has a character of its own—an American character. He is not himself by any means a great writer, but he may be the stuff from which, in another hundred years or so, great writers will be born.
Granted, Woolf may be second only to Voltaire in the art of the lefthanded compliment (though the fortunate generation of Americans born after 2019 may feel rather bucked up); still, hers was the prevailing European snobbery. The British were the direct descendants of Shakespeare and Austen, the French of Montaigne and Racine, the Russians of Pushkin and Gogol. And the Americans … of Uncle Remus?
It was useless to gainsay this perception by argument alone, no matter how much a Frank Norris might shout about the superiority of the vulgar tongue, or a more reasoned advocate might point to the regal triumvirate of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman, each still relatively obscure at the time. To the cultured, American either produced unseasoned caricatures of 19th-century European epics, or books that were rough, instinctual, "animal"—books governed by the adolescent impulses of rage and rebellion against a status quo, and endowed with no more care and organization than you could expect from an adolescent in a snit.
Once that framework of thinking was applied—that an American novel was either a tinny knockoff of a European classic or else a wild and petulant rejection of the reigning legacy—the only way to shake its foundations was to write a masterpiece; and then, when that masterpiece was served its faint praise and genially dismissed, to write another masterpiece. Whether these masterpieces were in fact written may be a matter for debate, but there's no ignoring the intensely, sometimes obsessively, questing nature of the novelists of the era. Figures like Stephen Crane, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and even, latterly, Norman Mailer seemed to write with a fervor (and sometimes resultant prolixity) devoted to closing the centuries-wide gap in literary supremacy in a single generation. Maybe Theodore Dreiser wasn't a great writer, but there's no question that he's immensely more important and interesting than the esteemed frontlist Europeans to which Woolf and other critics gave far more of their attention, writers such as George Moore, W.E. Norris, and Joseph Hergesheimer.
It may well be, then, that a regular dose of condescension is a needful thing for a writer. But young auteurs in this country today are never going to have to find out. The "American character" is now supreme. Whether the coup was principally literary, political, military, or having something to do with the Big Mac need not concern us here. However it happened, the descent from Moby-Dick and Huck Finn is mapped with deep pride. And Europeans don't talk so big about Shakespeare or Montaigne any longer, do they? Instead, they write like Americans.
It's one of the less savory parts of the American character to complain about the downsides of privilege, but here goes: I am often unable to shake the feeling while reading book reviews that today's literary lions are going to be tomorrow's Joseph Hergesheimers. And this enervating suspicion that regard is rewarded based on pedigree instead of passion is what, I think, sends many readers to sample the strange imports from foreign novelists. Could it be possible that new, more passionate voices are being sounded in countries without rich novelistic heritages, and could it be that the headwinds of American patronization are prompting non-American writers to work harder ?
In recent years it has appeared that the emerging literature most likely to inspire the perplexed admiration and lefthanded praise from American critics is coming from the Indian subcontinent. There are books suggesting that the region is not only producing a series of excellent writers, but that an independent, aspirational culture of novel writing is being established, one aware of literary traditions and conventions but primarily fixated upon forging a style best suited to illuminating its own people and homegrown issues.
I no doubt drag my own snobbishness into the assessment when I suggest that there are two kinds of books that come from writers of the region, and the first steers us back in the direction of kitschy reproductions. Some books take as their subject the challenge of conforming to the Western world as an Indian, Pakistani, or Bengali—these are books written almost exclusively for a Western audience; similarly, other books, like Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things , Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke , or Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu , simply translate the clichés, the lead-footed symbolism, and the shaggy-dog narratives of a writer's workshop student to foreign settings.
But other writers, including Vikram Chandra, Mohammed Hanif, and Daniyal Mueenuddin appear to be searching, in their very different ways, for subjects and modes of expression that will lengthen the roots of a new character of writing, the character of the subcontinent. So it was encouraging to see this year's Man-Booker Prize awarded to another such novel, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
The White Tiger is a lean, pared-down book, but it's bracing and sticks in the memory; its fierce singlemindedness is its best asset. There is only one voice here, that of Balram Halwai, who tells the story of his quick climb from the slums of the Indian interior to a chandelier-filled office (there's even a chandelier in the bathroom) in Bangalore. Balram's rise has the remorseless simplicity of a morality play, albeit one turned perversely on its head: he is born into a low caste of sweets makers and tea shop proprietors, and he is expected to wed young and wipe tables for the rest of his life. Instead, he pays to learn to drive and manages to ingratiate himself into a position as chauffeur and all-purpose servant for the brother of a local landowner. Not long afterwards, he murders his master and steals a bag of money meant to be delivered as a bribe to government officials. He flees with the money and begins his own taxi business and buys a bunch of chandeliers—and that's where we find him, telling us his cautionary tale.
The tone in which he tells it is the novel's crowning achievement: Balram's cynicism coats every scene of this book like scalding wax, but his is an angry, animated disillusion, mocking, disgusted, and self-lacerating. Western readers will unquestionably detect in the ruthlessly goading, sardonic narration a number of slashes at some of the sacred cows of conventional Indian novels. Amitav Ghosh has just written a historical novel called Sea of Poppies which has in its first chapter a scene that will be soothingly—indeed, anesthetically—familiar to readers of Indian fiction: The poppies ended at a sandbank that sloped gently down to the Ganga; warmed by the sun, the sand was hot enough to sting the soles of their bare feet. The burden of motherly decorum slipped suddenly off Deeti's bowed shoulders and she began to run after her daughter, who had skipped on ahead. A pace or two from the water's edge, they shouted an invocation to the river— Jai Ganga Mayya ki …—and gulped down a draught of air, before throwing themselves in.
Here, in contrast, is Adiga's invocation of Mother Ganga in The White Tiger : Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds of American tourists come each year to take photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or Benaras, and our prime minister will no doubt describe it that way to you, and urge you to take a dip in it.      No!—… I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.
But puncturing clichés is only side sport in The White Tiger ; Adiga's burning obsession is with the profound, amoral materialism at the heart of Indian society. Balram, a self-described "half-baked Indian" because of his pitiful formal education, has lived as a cipher, a groveling servant, and a business manager, and his voice is one of derisive laughter in the darkness at any pretension of justice or civility. In his experience—which includes watching his father die of untreated consumption, kissing his master's feet, sleeping amidst swarms of r