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Thursday, December 12, 2019

How Perumal Murugan Was Resurrected Through Writing, by Amitava Kumar, New Yorker

Earlier this year, at a literary festival in Jaipur, I met the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. I had just finished reading his book “Poonachi,” which will be published in the U.S. this month as “The Story of a Goat.” (The translation is by N. Kalyan Raman.) Here is how the novel begins: “Once, in a village, there was a goat. No one knew where she was born. The birth of an ordinary creature never leaves a trace, does it?” When I read those lines, a thrill ran through me.

Murugan is nothing if not a chronicler of the ordinary. Schoolchildren in India—and here I’m speaking from what I remember of my own experience—are taught that Mahatma Gandhi believed that the soul of India lived in its villages. While that is arguable, it cannot be doubted that most of India’s population is rural. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Indian fiction written in English. Indian writers who work in English are mostly from the middle or upper classes, educated in English-medium schools, and, if not residing in one of India’s busy metropolises, then living in the West. Their characters tend to be well-heeled urban citizens of a mobile republic. In contrast, Murugan lives in a small, agricultural town in southern India, and he writes in Tamil. His characters are overwhelmingly villagers or people in remote, small towns.

Icebound: The Climate-change Secrets Of 19th Century Ship’s Logs, by Andrew R.C. Marshall, Reuters

An eccentric group of citizen-scientists called Old Weather has transcribed millions of observations from long-forgotten logbooks of ships, many from the great era of Arctic exploration. As the polar regions grow ever warmer, the volunteers have amassed a rich repository of climate data in a 21st century rescue mission.

Exquisite Cadavers By Meena Kandasamy Review – Writing In The Margins, by Aida Edemariam, The Guardian

Separation of “truth” from “fiction” is, it seems, really the artificial construct. The world rushes in, exploding her attempt at English domesticity. Which is either another argument for the necessary evolution of the novel – or a rediscovery of how it has always worked.

The Lost Books Of Jane Austen By Janine Barchas Review – A Survey Of Book Covers, by John Mullan, The Guardian

Jane Austen aficionados think that they know the story of their favourite author’s posthumous dis-appearance and then re-emergence. For half a century after she died in 1817, her books were little known or read. A few discriminating admirers such as George Henry Lewes and Lord Macaulay kept the flame of her reputation burning, but most novelists and novel readers were oblivious to her. Then, in 1869, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a memoir about her and the public got interested. Her novels started being republished and widely read. She has never looked back.

Janine Barchas’s The Lost Books of Jane Austen puts us right. Her book about books is a beautifully illustrated exploration, indeed compendium, of the popular editions of Austen’s novels that have appeared over the last two centuries.