by Nancy Pearl
Lucy, the title character in a spare and elegant novel by Jamaica Kincaid, emigrates from Antigua to the United States to work as an au pair for a wealthy (and unhappy) couple in an unnamed northern city that resembles Manhattan.
America as defined by change—people changing their names and identities and the regions of the country where they live—is portrayed painfully but realistically in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. A slightly less distressing read about Indians adjusting to the new world is Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
In Mary Gardner’s Boat People, a diverse group of Vietnamese refugees try to make new lives for themselves far from all they’ve ever known in, of all places, Galveston, Texas.
INDIA: A READER’S ITINERARY
I’ve always been fascinated by India’s history, culture, peoples, and cuisine; books can satisfy all but the last of these interests. Luckily, there are good Indian restaurants wherever I travel, my son-in-law Anand can often be persuaded to make a South Indian dinner, and as a last resort, I can salivate over the recipes in a winsome cookbook such as Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking.
History
The place to start in any reading itinerary of India is with James Morris’s histories of the subcontinent—Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress; Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire; and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat—which together chart the rise and eventual decline of British empire-building. They are triumphs of historical analysis and accessible writing.
A good companion read to Morris is Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj, which covers the three and a half centuries of Britain-in-India, focusing on the mid-nineteenth century through 1947. Women of the Raj was not published until 1988, so MacMillan was able to interview some of the memsahibs who, having nothing to go home for after Indian independence, stayed behind. (This is also the subject of Paul Scott’s Booker Prize- winning novel Staying On.)
Freedom at Midnight: The Epic Drama of India’s Struggle for Independence by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre is required reading for those interested in understanding colonial and postcolonial India from a non-Indian point of view.
Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta is a vivid picture of the 1960s in India, where the hippie trail ended in (most often drug-induced) bliss for many nirvana-seekers.
Armchair Travel
Two of the best books for stay-at-home travelers are by William Dalrymple, whose City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi and The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (which also includes sections on Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and other areas in the subcontinent) are well informed, amusing, and filled with interesting details.
Don Bloch and Iman Bijleveld’s Seduced by the Beauty of the World: Travels in India includes stunning photos from all regions of India, celebrating its festivals, monuments, and culture.
Fiction
For many years all the novels about India published in English were written by Englishmen and -women, and their subject was the Raj, the period of British rule in India. Not until late in the twentieth century did American publishers take a chance on Indian novelists, a decade or two after British publishers saw the market for books by authors such as Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, and Salman Rushdie. With that in mind, here are some recommendations for books about India by non-Indians.
The Anglo-Indian John Masters wrote many romantic historical novels about his native land, several of which were made into not-so-great movies, including Bhowani Junction, in which an Anglo-Indian woman (played by Ava Gardner) searches for her place in what will be the newly independent India. Masters also wrote Nightrunners of Bengal, which deals with the great Indian mutiny of 1857, a seminal point in British-Indian relations (akin to our own Revolutionary War, perhaps). The mutiny is also the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker Prize in 1973.
M. M. Kaye was deeply in love with India, and that love is reflected in her romantic nineteenth-century sagas Shadow of the Moon and The Far Pavilions, both of which are on many people’s lists of all-time favorite books.
Susanna Moore’s One Last Look examines in fiction the real-life sisters Emily and Fanny Eden, who accompanied their brother, Lord Auckland, governor-general of India, to Afghanistan during what’s known as the First Afghan War in the 1840s. Emily wrote about her love of India and her experiences there in Up the Country and Janet Dunbar edited Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals, 1837-1838, both of which make good companion reading to Moore’s novel.
For books by Indian writers (many of whom now live in England, Canada,or the United States), try these titles.
The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, is a good place to start, as it includes writers from the mid-nineteenth century on, translated from many different Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. Many of the writers in the rest of this section are included in Chaudhuri’s book.
Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali: A Collection of Indian Poems by the Nobel Laureate contains most of this South Indian’s best poems.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s two exceptionally informative memoirs, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and Thy Hand, Great Anarch!: India 1921-1952, explore Bengali society from the turn of the twentieth century until shortly after independence in 1947, from the point of view of someone educated by the British but able to plainly see both their weaknesses and the necessity for India’s sovereignty.
Take a look at Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song and A New World; R. K. Narayan’s A Tiger for Malgudi and Malgudi Days; Akhil Sharma’s An Obedient Father; Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey; Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu; Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting or the tragic Baumgartner’s Bombay; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart; Anjana Appachana’s Listening Now; Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics; Gita Mehta’s Raj; Nayantara Sahgal’s Mistaken Identity, Rich Like Us,and Plans for Departure; Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things; and Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road.
I can’t leave India without mentioning Jon Godden’s Two Under the Indian Sun, about the lives of Jon and her sister Rumer in India during World War I. Godden’s memoir is tender, loving, and a splendid evocation of imperial India.
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NOVEL
In Elizabeth Strout’s Amy and Isabelle, Isabelle feels at one point “that she might not read another book for a while, that life was difficult enough without bringing someone else’s sorrows to crash down about your head.”
But what can I say? Some of my best friends (and me, too) love dark novels. You know the sort, when you can read only a paragraph or two at a time because it’s so depressing to be so close to someone else’s low-down and endlessly tragic life. A friend once described slamming one of these books shut and shouting into the air at the author (who was in some other place entirely, of course), “Can’t you find it in your heart to let one, just one, of your characters have something good happen to him?!”
If that’s the kind of book you like, try these simply stunning novels.
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Russell Banks’s Continental Drift
Larry Brown’s Dirty Work
Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me
Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood
Pete Dexter’s Train
Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays
Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog
Kent Haruf’s Eventide
Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost
E. Annie Proulx’s Postcards
JERSEY GUYS AND GALS
Bruce Springsteen isn’t the only one writing about New Jersey. Here are some terrific novels populated by the men and women of the state.
Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter introduced alienated scribe Frank Bascombe. Its sequel Independence Day, about Bascombe’s plans for a trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame with his troubled teenage so
n, won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Richard Price’s novels are hard to classify: they’re not exactly suspense novels, and to call them crime novels somehow confines them too narrowly. In Freedomland, Clockers, and Samaritan (all set in the slums of the fictional town of Dempsy), Price explores the lives of men who are caught up in situations beyond their control.
Frederick Reuss’s Henry of Atlantic City is told through the eyes and voice of six-year-old Henry. After Henry is abandoned by his father, the former chief of security at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City, his life is made both easier and more difficult by his photographic memory and his interest in the writings of the Gnostics.
Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones is the story of Dave Raymond, a thirty-one-year-old guitar player in a wedding band, whose unexpected proposal to his on-and-off girlfriend of the last fifteen years reminds him of just how ambivalent he is about marriage.
Among the other fine books set in New Jersey are James Kaplan’s Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia (where have the twenty-five years since high school gone?); Frederick Reiken’s The Lost Legends of New Jersey (Anthony Rubin tries to rescue his next-door neighbor, Juliette, from an abusive boyfriend); Julie Schumacher’s The Body Is Water (pregnant and unmarried Jane Haus returns to her father’s house on the Jersey shore to figure out both the past and the future); and Goodbye, Columbus, the first collection of stories by New Jersey native Philip Roth, as well as his Portnoy’s Complaint, I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America.
JOURNALS AND LETTERS: WE ARE ALL VOYEURS AT HEART
Some of the books I’ve most enjoyed in my reading life are the journals and letters of interesting individuals. In part this may be because the art of letter writing seems to have died, and I am psychologically incapable of keeping a journal of my own. Luckily for me (and other readers), the following writers didn’t have those problems.
I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, remember reading Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s reflections on solitude and achieving a life of peace in a tumultuous, crowded world.When her journals began appearing in the 1970s, my friends and I, regardless of our negative feelings about Charles Lindbergh’s behavior before and during World War II, would eagerly wait for each new book to appear. Some of us still reread them yearly to remind ourselves of what’s important in this frantic world. They are, in order, Bring Me a Unicorn; Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead; The Flower and the Nettle; and War Within and Without.
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941 and I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942-1945 (also known as To the Bitter End) are the journals kept by philologist Victor Klemperer, who survived the Holocaust because his wife was Christian. He was one of the best observers whose records we have of those terrible, and ordinary, years inside Germany.
In The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page, you’ll have the pleasure of meeting this intelligent, bitchy, witty, and desperate woman whose friendships spanned the literary world, from John Dos Passos to Edmund Wilson to Noël Coward (whom she describes as “a perfectly dazzling thoroughbred madman” ).
In The Writer’s Journal: 40 Contemporary Writers and Their Journals, edited by Sheila Bender, a diverse collection of writers, including poets, novelists, and essayists—Ron Carlson, Linda Bierds, Reginald Gibbons, Craig Lesley, and Pam Houston among them—give examples of how they use their journals in their writing life.
One of those books that many readers remember with pleasure (and one that still maintains its charm even with annual rereadings) is 84, Charing Cross Road, a compilation of the letters exchanged across the Atlantic during World War II between assertive NewYork book lover Helene Hanff, always looking for difficult-to-find titles, and Frank Doel, a London bookseller at Marks & Co. bookstore.
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (one of England’s leading theater critics, and for two years also a regular drama reviewer for The New Yorker) reveal a man who was engaging, exceedingly witty (often at the expense of others’ reputations), opinionated, and raunchy, and who wrote compulsively readable prose (exactly what you want in a diary, in fact). His Letters, edited by his wife, Kathleen, offers another chance to meet Tynan at his best.
JUST TOO GOOD TO MISS
You’re just going to have to trust me on these—they’re all wonderful reading, each in its own way. Some are light reading, some have unexpected (or expected) depth, some were written decades and decades ago, some were written yesterday or the day before. Most are fiction, but I’ve indicated (nf) which are nonfiction. Give them all a try!
Alessandro Baricco’s Ocean Sea
William Boyd’s Any Human Heart
Robert Cohen’s Inspired Sleep
Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (nf)
Frederick Crews’s The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh (nf)
Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel (nf)
Susan Dworkin’s The Book of Candy
Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me
Michelle Huneven’s Jamesland
Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street
Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening
Stewart O’Nan’s The Names of the Dead
Caroline Preston’s Jackie by Josie
José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Blindness
Mary Webb’s Precious Bane
John Welter’s IWant to Buy a Vowel: A Novel of Illegal Alienation
Edmund White’s Fanny: A Fiction
KRAKATAU
I know of only two books for the general reader about the 1883 eruption of this volcano on a small, uninhabited island in Indonesia located between Java and Sumatra. Both—the island and the volcano—are called Krakatau by the native people, but are usually referred to by their more familiar spelling, Krakatoa.
Many people will know about Krakatoa simply because they read anything and everything that best-selling author Simon Winchester writes, whether his subject is China, the Oxford English Dictionary, or, as in this case, a volcano, the eruption of which led to tsunamis that killed more than thirty-five thousand people and changed weather and climate patterns across the globe. Though Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 is as interesting, well-written, and informative as Winchester’s other books, it’s not the final word on Krakatoa.
That would be The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pène du Bois, which won the Newbery Medal in 1948. (This award, named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery, is given annually “to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association.) Du Bois’s book is a glorious fantasy about a balloonist who lands on the island of Krakatoa and finds it populated with eccentric people, enormous wealth (he gets a fair share), and a society that takes turns cooking dinner. And they even have an escape plan, of sorts, for when their volcano erupts!
LEGAL EAGLES IN FICTION
A good suspense or mystery novel requires a protagonist who has a legitimate reason (and a frequent one, if it’s a series) to come into contact with crimes and their alleged perpetrators. Who fits this definition better than a lawyer?
No list of this sort would be complete without Scott Turow’s genre-defining novel Presumed Innocent, in which prosecuting attorney Rusty Sabich finds himself in deep waters when his lover is found raped and murdered and he’s accused of the crime.
In Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness, attorney Tony Lord goes back to his hometown to help out an old friend who’s accused of murder.
A World War II German prisoner-of-war camp is the setting for John Katzenbach’s Hart’s War, in which former law student Tommy Hart is given the assignment of defending an African American soldier accused of murdering a fellow G.I.
James Grippando’s Las
t to Die has his series attorney, Jack Swyteck, needing to decide if his best friend’s brother (who is in line to inherit $46 million if five other people die first) is a killer or an innocent victim of a vicious plot.
In Death Row, William Bernhardt’s series lawyer/detective Ben Kincaid is trying to clear the name of an alleged murderer on death row. He runs into trouble when the witness who identified his client as the killer, but then recanted, is found dead herself.
Veritas is William Lashner’s second novel starring Victor Carl (his first was Hostile Witness), a criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia. When a young woman asks Carl to prove that her sister’s death was murder, not suicide, he has no idea of the complications that will be heading his way.
