Reading roundup Jan 22 - Feb 4
Jai Shree Ram, Molly Brodak, and once again a couple of arresting similes
I intend to post these reading roundups every two or three weeks. If you want to check out the first one, covering the opening three weeks of 2024 (including the two beautiful similes I took note of then), click here.
On 22 Jan, the Ram Mandir was inaugurated (is that the right word for what happened?) in Ayodhya. On 26 Jan, we Indians celebrated our 75th Republic Day. And on 30 Jan, we mourned the 76th death anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the man we call the father of our nation.
With the first date—especially in the neatness of its distance from Republic Day as a mirror to the distance of the other date—it is as if a counterweight has been added to our history, and we are doomed to slide one way from the fulcrum of constitutionality.
There was, of course, a lot of passionate commentary and hoary analysis about the event on 22 Jan, our recent history leading up to it, and the future that awaits us. But I was most affected by a Substack post which, with no more artifice than a simple blog post, with no more thematic ambition than a personal account, and with no more colour than unavoidable observation, painted for my eyes a most moving collage of the thuds that a big (Hindu) event causes in daily (Muslim) life. For the Indian readers in my list, I cannot recommend Mariyam Haider’s What’s common between a bowl of zarda, a ginger cat and hot jalebis? enough:
I finished reading Ian Mcguire’s The North Water, a novel about industry and villainy in arctic waters (or on arctic ice, if you want to be all correct about it). Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016, the novel had been on my list ever since, especially as it is set in the 19th century and is centred on the whaling industry, aspects which were attractive to me as someone who’d failed to read Moby Dick in an earlier attempt. The novel is very well written and very engaging. My review, which also quotes Colm Tóibín from his review in NYT, can be read here.
Most of the action in The North Water happens north of Shetland, but there is a surprising, and surprisingly detailed, flashback section in Delhi. It’s set during the siege of the city in the summer of 1857, at the end of which the British won a decisive victory and quashed Indian hopes of reestablishing the Mughal Empire. The events described in the novel happen sometime during the final days of street-to-street fighting, when the British forces also ransacked houses and did a bulk of their looting and pillaging (it is a matter of record that the Sikhs, who fought with the British in 1857, participated in the loot of Delhi as well). There is a treasure hunt of sorts, in which one of the novel’s main characters becomes embroiled.
I found the broad contours of this treasure hunt very similar to an actual excavation in Charles John Griffith’s A Narrative of The Siege Of Delhi With An Account of the Mutiny in Ferozepur in 1857.
Here’s part of Griffith’s account. Read, and wonder like I did, just how much people lost during that particular subcontinental upheaval. Emphases in bold are mine:
Picking through the cement, we came on a large flagstone, which we lifted out of the cavity. Then we dug a hole about 3 feet square, and the same depth in the loose earth, disclosing the mouth of a large earthenware gharra, or jar. Loosening the soil all around, we attempted to raise the jar out of the ground, but all our efforts were unavailing—its great weight preventing us from lifting it one inch out of the bed. Then, trembling with excitement, for we felt sure that a rich display would greet our eyes, we began slowly to remove each article from the gharra, and place it on the floor of the room. A heavy bag lying at the mouth of the jar was first taken out, and on opening it, and afterwards counting its contents, we found that it contained 700 native gold mohurs, worth nearly £1,200. Then came dozens of gold bangles, or anklets, of pure metal, such as those worn by dancing-girls. We were fairly bewildered at the sight, our hands trembling and our eyes ablaze with excitement, for such an amount of pure gold as that already discovered we had never seen before. But the treasure was not yet half exhausted. The jar seemed a perfect mine of wealth—gold chains, plain and of filigree workmanship, each worth from £10 to £30; ornaments of the same metal of every sort of design, and executed in a style for which the Delhi jewellers are celebrated all over India. Then came small silver caskets filled with pearls, together to the number of more than 200, each worth from £3 to £4, pierced for stringing. Others, containing small diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and the greatest prize of all—reclining in a casket by itself—a large diamond, which was sold afterwards by the prize agents for £1,000. There were many other articles of value besides those I have mentioned—gold rings and tiaras inlaid with precious stones, nose-rings of the kind worn by women through the nostrils, earrings, bracelets, and necklaces of small pearls without number.
1000 pounds in 1857 = upwards of 140,000 pounds today!
I have on occasion hypothesized that it might have been better to be a writer in America than it is to be one in India. The American market is bigger, there seems to be a big tradition in almost all genres, and a greater number of writers seem to be making a living through writing or writing-adjacent jobs like teaching. This is a simplistic view, for sure, compensating with broad-stroke-ism what it inevitably lacks on account of being at an irremediable distance. My rational mind tells me that the pressures are different in America, the ‘competition’ tougher, and that there is much good work that is tragically lost in the too much of it all. It might even be life-threatening. I thought of all this afresh as I became aware of the saga of Blake Butler and Molly Brodak.
For context, let me quote a few lines from Alexandra Schwartz’s Can a Memoir Say Too Much, a review of Blake Butler’s memoir Molly:
Molly was the poet Molly Brodak, Butler’s wife. They lived in Atlanta and married in 2017. On March 8, 2020, a few weeks before her fortieth birthday, Molly—I will call her Molly, because that is what Butler does—left the house, lay down in a field, and shot herself. That was the end of her life, and the beginning of Butler’s book.
In Butler’s telling, his courtship and marriage with Molly Brodak reveals itself to be full of red flags crying hoarse about Brodak’s manipulative personality, which Butler, ‘sensitized to the many pitfalls of male power, compensates for […] to a fault’ (Schwartz’s words). But the most damning twist in the tale is in what Brodak is revealed to be after her death: a serial cheater. I conjecture that this is the one revelation that, more than any late, post-grief de-misting of the red-flag-filled landscape of his marriage, caused Butler to write Molly. It’s the kind of discovery that violently erases all existing narratives and sours, I presume, any reservoirs of good feeling. It is, in fact, simultaneously an erasure and a rewriting (in my mind I cannot let go of the image of a pen leaking ink on freshly abrased paper, the two actions leaving the manuscript both ravaged and stained). Molly is the culmination of that rewriting process. It must have required not a small amount of artifice to have any hope of conveying the truth in its full felt power; to commit to this artifice (call it truth-telling if that works better) is itself an act of courage. It appears from Schwartz’s review that Molly’s ultimate sense-making isn’t filled with rancour but love. Butler finds Brodak’s abuse of him coterminous with her own suffering. To me, this is significant, for even though rancour might appear to be too basic a feeling for a good writer to work under, the set of circumstances preceding the writing of Molly is so altogether life-shattering that I would have forgiven from any writer some measure of ill-feeling.
On the same matter, I found Patricia Lockwood’s LRB essay, The Secret Life, altogether amazing. Lockwood had in this same publication written critically of David Foster Wallace’s work1, but I must say that I find the pleasures of reading her essays quite similar to those by Foster Wallace, primarily in how their circuitousness itself effectively becomes their subject matter. Here her essay starts with an account of reading Butler’s book on the phone ‘until one of the headaches started.’ The rest of the paragraph is about the headache; the last sentence somehow finds a (slightly unconvincing) way to return to the promised subject: Molly Brodak. Lockwood knew Molly personally. Early enough in the essay, she includes, even if tangentially, the difficulty of being a writer, alive or dead, in any country. Emphases below mine:
Before we ever met we were published in the same places. But she had arrived earlier than the rest of us, so it seemed back then. ‘Molly Brodak: Poet and Memoirist of Her Father’s Crimes’, as the New York Times would put it in the headline of her obituary. Why are you more likely to be remembered as a memoirist of your father’s crimes than as a poet? Why is it easier to appear on The Great American Baking Show, as Molly did in 2017, than it is to get people to read your work when you are alive?
To me, Lockwood’s writing seems filled with not irony but a kind of translucence of irony, and I say it in a good way, for this translucence is the result of an ennobling filter, a defamiliarising kind of ennui, one that has no relation to ennui’s usual source—aristocracy—and is, therefore, a feeling, empathetic ennui, despite all its surface lassitude, easy blur, and occasional bite. I don’t know if I’ve made sense. The Secret Life is at times remembrance, at times declaration of confusion, at times personal essay, and at times a review of Blake Butler’s Molly, about which Lockwood provides perhaps the most acute observation:
The book begins at the end of language, someone at a bombsite or in a burned-out church, the words and phrases jarred out of their places, as if they too had heard the gunshot and started running; as if the ripples of the act, the derangement in the air, had entered into English itself.
Needless to say, I can’t wait to read Molly.
I have continued my readalong journeys for War and Peace and the Cromwell Trilogy.
I started a monthly newsletter about reading War and Peace, of which the first instalment went out on Jan 31. Here it is, ICYMI.
And, at last, the promised similes.
From Ian McGuire’s The North Water:
After an hour, the ice flattens into a mile-wide plain, its surface gently ribbed like the palate of a hound.
I see the ice surface immediately, despite not being a particularly keen observer of the insides of canine mouths, and I believe that is the case for almost every reader. What an astonishing likeness, what sheer magic!
I used the simile recently in a conversation on Twitter, in which a friend argued that prose descriptions had been made all but redundant by cinema. Cinema can indeed do ‘the ice flattens into a mile-wide plain, its surface gently ribbed’ part well, but it can’t do the impressionistic ‘like the palate of a hound’ bit as naturally as prose, not without going into the all-too-obvious way of superimposing two images. Similes are important for they pepper micro-observations in ways unique to writing. They add impressionistic volume.
The second simile is also from the same novel. It talks of two dead bodies laid out in an arctic chillscape as bait for a polar bear:
The two dead bodies lie just as they were, exposed and recumbent, like the eerie gisants of a long-forgotten dynasty
I didn’t know what gisants meant, but once I looked it up, the image was vivid at once. Again, I marvelled at the writer’s imagination, and his ability to bring up this likeness at just the right juncture.
This criticism was liable to be criticised in turn. Mala Chatterjee does it well in her essay Saved by Infinite Jest, with no punches pulled
Hungerford, Lockwood and the mainstream ethos generally dismiss [Infinite Jest]’s intended and actual audiences as white, male and not to be trusted, driven by Stockholm syndrome, sunk costs or delusions of self-interested grandeur in calling the book genius or important. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I find these critiques – so often snide or irreverent in their cadence – baffling, gaslighting, disempowering, at times even agonising.
Gosh, thank you for this generous shout-out in such a beautiful way. Added warmth and notes of joy to my day. :)