Two Novels about Mexico, 1968

 

 

 

 

 

1968 for Mexico, as for many countries around the world, marked a year of student protests, culminating in what has come to be known as the Tlatelolco massacres. Wishing to change the oppressive one party rule of the PRI students revolted in the backdrop of persistent, if not rising social inequalities.

Two recently published novels are on this theme: The Uncomfortable Dead by the Mexican writer of mysteries, Paco Ignacio Taibo and the leader of the Chiapas’ revolt, Subcommandante Marcos and the other one is by the Chilean writer who lived in Mexico in those years Roberto Bolaño- Amulet.

Amulet is thematically similar to Distant Stars, another Bolaño novels also published in English last year- both lie at the intersection of literature and politics.

Amulet deals with the generation of Mexican poets that grew up after the 1968 suppression of student revolt. It is narrated by a woman Auxilio Lacouture, an ‘illegal alien’ from Uruguay and who hides in the bathroom of the UNAP university in September ’68 as the military cracks down on the students. She survives to play ‘mother’ to a generation of Mexican poets growing up in the shadow of the aborted revolt.

There is something about Roberto Bolaño that even in translation he is so readable, like Tomas Eloy Martinez, a contemporary Latin American writer from Argentina.

However, compared to Bolaño’s earlier novels published in English- By Night, In Chile and Distant Stars, this Amulet is somewhat disappointing despite a promising start.

It also forms a link to his novel published in English last week The Savage Detectives, which is certainly the longest work by this writer, who died prematurely at the age of 52 couple of years back to be translated into English.

The Uncomfortable Dead, on the other hand, is a uniformly wonderful novel, and combines the narrative of a racy suspense thriller with a deeply social and political perspective- an intersection that a delighted Zizek would term as the ‘Parallax view‘.

Since it is a suspense novel, I’d rather not comment much on this except to point out that Elías Conteras, an Indian from the Chiapas, is a wonderful Sancho Panza like character who lives much beyond the novel. His first person account of urban Mexico, as well as the Chiapas struggle is both deeply humorous and moving.

This is, for example, how he describe Mexico City- the ‘Monster’:

The Monster has big houses and small ones, tall ones and little bitty ones, fat and skinny, rich and poort. Like people, but without hearts. In the Monster, the most important thing is the houses and the cars, so people get sent underground, to the metro. If people stay up their in car country, well, the cars kind of like get very pissed and try to gore them, like bulls would.

In the city, they don’t really know how to speak the language, they don’t even know the difference between a mare and stallion; they just call everything a horse. Then there’s cool. When city people don’t know how to explain how they feel or when they are angry or when they are happy or anything like that, they just say cool.

I found the escapades of this rather subaltern character, that somehow persistently reminded me of The Good Soldier Sjevk, most gripping, and the novel a worthwhile read, even if the rest had not been written as well as it actually is.

There is yet another minor similarity between the two novels- in both the authors themselves appear as characters. Roberto Bolaño appears as Arturo Belano in Amulet and Subcommandante Marcos in The Uncomfortable Dead as himself- the El Sup.

Technorati Tags: Roberto Bolano, Books, Mexico, 1968, Latin American Literature

‘To Sir, With Love’

It seems like yesterday when one read a chapter out of E.R. Braithwaites’s To Sir, With Love. Then, I had felt I was the student wishing for a teacher that was like Sir.

It was an excerpt from the book in the English textbook in class six and we nonchalantly went on to the next chapter.

Yesterday night, I got to watch a movie based on the book.

This time, however, I imagined that I was the teacher, and imagined that I had had students like those in the book, like those in the movie.

Yesterday night, I completed an education.

The In- between Life of an Immigrant

Guest Post by Harminder DhillonThe immigrant’s experience is often that of Trishanku- precariously, and perennially, held between the sky of aspirations in their adopted land and the gravitational pull of their native ones.

While the Indian diaspora experience in the West has been captured in Indian writing in English and cinema in recent years, the Indian connection to Africa has been less so, with Mira Nair’s movie Missisippi Masala being a partial exception. I realized this while reading M.G. Vassanji‘s novel The In- between World of Vikram Lall and then chancing upon a photo essay by Amarjit Chandan.

M.G. Vassanji’s novel deals with the ambiguity of being an Indian in East Africa: a people not accepted by their adopted lands, and forgotten and disowned by their native ones; people viewed with suspicion and admiration at the same time for same reasons –hard work, wealth and success; a people literally and metaphorically hanging in-between. Masterfully crafted, the novel captures the micro level lives being lived, dreams being dreamt –and often shattered.

While reading Vassanji one often finds oneself walking down bazaars of Nairobi –buying photos, gold from Gujjus and jalebis from Panjus. As I flipped through Chandan’sVassanji’s haunting characters came back to life. The octogenarian Punjabi standing by the railway line he built an era ago, the white family that visited the highway store, the black gardener, Hindu boy holding hands with a Muslim classmate but finally succumbing to historic boundaries, the black lover of the Punjabi girl who was never accepted, perhaps not even by the girl herself, but surely not by her family and community.

The In- between World of Vikram Lall is story of migration, the fragility of immigrants’ dreams and their struggle for survival in a culture so alien to theirs.
A similar thematic continuity is visible in the recent photo essay (pdf format) by Amarjit Chandan. Chandan, one of the finer poets writing in the Punjabi language is a product of the ‘Spring Thunder over India’ era of Naxalite rebellion and now lives in the U.K.

His poetry, though written in the Punjabi language, shows the adaptation of European poetic themes and literary devices.

In this essay, however, Chandan’s photos bring to life the Punjabis living their successes, just as Vassanji’s characters live in the Indian quarters of Nairobi and Mombasa. Wassanji and Chandan, one living in Canada and another in U.K. tell the same tale –one through his novels while another through his poetic lens.

Punjabis, soon followed by Gujaratis –or Kuchhis as they like to be known as, landed on the coasts of East Africa almost a century ago and went on to play a significant role in the 20th century history of the region.

Originally transported by the Empire as artisans for railway construction and saw mills, they soon set their roots and contributed to the nascent labour movement, freedom struggle, administration, professionals, sports (Remember Indian players in African hockey/cricket teams) and, most of all, economics.

Ironically the endeavour to enrich the adoptive lands that flourished –and peaked –during the colonial times was halted in the 60-70s when these nations won freedom and became their own masters. Local nationalist leadership viewed Indians as carpet-baggers for the departing colonial Raj, which more or less, they were not. The ensuing exodus of Indians devastated local economies and from which they could never recover.

Maybe, after all, there still might be a happy ending to this story. The immigrant’s experience, after all, is a long one.

(Harminder Dhillon, an immigrant himself, is an engineer turning lawyer. He has founded and edited Punj Pani, a Punjabi weekly published from Toronto. )

The Burning Plain and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo

Not even a previous reading of Juan Rulfo‘s novel Pedro Paramo could have prepared me for this collection of short stories (The Burning Plain and Other Stories) that read like a novel painting a dark, sombre and chilling picture of Mexican life- more often than not of the underdog, the thief, the bandit, a murderer or a peasant.

The feeling that one gets while reading is of a smoky, dark night filled with suspicious shadows hiding still darker secrets that pour out of the words and sentences of the stories.

See this description of a daybreak (in the story At Daybreak) in which the main character is accused of killing his landowner, even though it was the latter who kicked him, and then died because of a heart attack.

San Gabriel emerges from the fog laden with dew. The clouds of the night slept over the village searching for the warmth of the people. Now the sun is about to come out and the fog rises slowly, rolling up its sheets, leaving white strips over the roof tops. A gray stream hardly visible, rises from the trees and the wet earth, attracted by the clods, but it vanishes immediately. Then the black smoke comes from the kitchens, smelling of burned oak, covering the sky with ashes.In the distance, the mountains are still in shadow.

A swallow swoops across the streets, and then the first peal of dawn rings out.

The lights are turned off. Then an earth- colored spot shrouds the village, which keeps on snoring a little longer, slumbering in the color of the daybreak.

They gave us land is the story of peasants given a piece of land bereft of water.

A big fat drop of water falls, making a hole in the earth and leaving a mark like a pit. It’s the only one that falls.

The opening story Macario is Kafkaesque and is narrated in a monologue of an idiot boy, in fact most stories are in the form of a monologue, of a people trying to know about themselves, of introspecting, searching for an identity, something to hold on to as they are washed up in a river of tumultuous time.

One of the early writings of what came to be called magical realism. The magic still holds. Spellbindingly.

Death of a Reader

Sham Lal, who introduced a generation of readers in the years between 1950- 1970s to books and literature via his column Life and Letters is dead.

A collection of his newspaper columns was published as A Hundred Encounters, which was a collection around works of fiction. Subsequently a collection around non- fiction works was also published. A Hundred Encounters was a wonderful treat for someone who was at best a toddler during his peak years and did not have the good fortune of growing up reading his column Life and Letters.

I came close to meeting him few years back, when MS, knowing my love for books- and the penchant for writing book reviews- asked me to accompany him to his house. For some reason, I could not go. Don’t remember why.

Mr. Sham Lal began his career with the Hindustan Times and, after 12 years with that paper, he moved on to the Times of India. He served as the Editor of the Times of India from 1967 to 1978.

He earned great journalistic reputation with his column, “Life and Letters.” In this column, he discussed and dissected modern thinkers, poets, playwrights and novelists. In 2001, a collection of these columns was published under the title “A Hundred Encounters.” He was known for his strong and independent views.

After his retirement, Mr. Sham Lal continued to write occasionally for The Telegraph and a journal, “Biblio: A Review of Books.” Failing eyesight forced him to stop writing three years ago.read on

With Borges by Alberto Manguel

More knowledgeable friends have often expressed consternation, if not contempt, for the fact that I have never quite ‘taken to’ Borges.

Silly as it may sound, but the fact is that I could not proceed beyond a few (well, actually just a couple) of his stories that I don’t even remember.

My reasoning is that I am a reader of the novel, not the short story, and then also novels in the tradition of the 19th century novel at least in their concern for social and political issues.

Borges does neither.

In fact, I was surprised by a statement attributed to him- that the novel is an unnecessary form since a good writer can express the same in a short story (or words to that effect) .

Jorge Luis Borges himself was a master of the short form.

His genre is also the fantasy, something that does not appeal to me for similar reasons.

It turns out that my views are not exactly original. In his early years, Borges was criticized on these very grounds (which makes me feel ancient.)

This and much else comes to light in Alberto Manguel’s slim, almost Borgesian volume, With Borges whose English translation came out last October.

Manguel read to the great Spanish writer when the latter was fifty eight years and had turned blind, and Manguel himself was sixteen years old. He was one of the many people who had the privilege of reading to Borges and it is very clear that these four years at that impressionable age left a lifelong imprint on his mind and his style of writing.

With Borges is part recollection and part an insightful literary excursion into the writings of Borges.

He brings out in one breathless sweep, the great man’s wide reading, his ability to correlate different works and ideas, his love for ‘inventive memories’, his disdain for convention when it came to writing, or reading for that matter, and his belief that the universe is a book.

There are writers who attempt to put the world in a book. There are others, rarer, for whom the world is a book, a book that they attempt to read for themselves and for others. Borges was one of those writers. He believed, against all odds, that our moral duty was to be happy, and he believed that happiness could be found in book, even though he was unable to explain why this was so.

Elsewhere he remarks:

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogs begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past.

Borges considered himself to be, above all, to be a reader.

…reading is, for Borges, a way to be all those men he knows he’ll never be: men of action, great lovers, great warriors. For him reading is a form of pantheism.

For anyone who is a fan of Borges already, this is a delightful book with incisive insights into their favorite writer’s mind and for those still not converted to the cult, it is a gentle reminder to go and read him carefully, and more generously.

Technorati Tags: Books, Reading, Writing, Book Reviews, Borges

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh‘s The Shadow Lines (1998) is an intense and anguished meditation on the creation of modern states in South Asia.

There are two streams in the novel- one that of the narrator who has heard about England from a cousin who lived there for sometime and his own discovery of the country when he visits it later in life.

The other stream is that of his grandmother visiting her old home in Dhaka, her nostalgia and the discovery of alienation from what she had remembered before Dhaka became part of Pakistan. I found the second stream to be far more readable than the first one, especially the grandmother’s character as seen by her young grandson (the narrator).

The grandmother goes to Dhaka to bring ‘home’ her uncle who had decided to stay on in Dhaka after the partition in 1947. He obdurately refuses, delivering one of the finest dialogs in the novel:

Move? the old man said incredulously. Move to what?

It’s not safe for you here, my grandmother said urgently. I know these people look after you well, but it’s not the same thing. You don’t understand.

I understand very well, the old man muttered. I know everything, I understand everything. Once you start moving, you never stop. That’s what I told my sons when they took the trains. I don’t believe in this India- Shindia. It’s all very well, you are going away now, but suppose when you get there they decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you do then? Where will you move to? No one will have you anywhere. As for me, I was born here, and will die here.

Even then, the grandmother tries to take her away from Dhaka when riots break out in the city and he is killed along with the narrator’s cousin Tridib and the rickshaw puller Khalil who had been looking after the old man.

It is an engrossing read, and shares a few elements with Midnight’s Children, though the latter is on a broader canvas. The Shadow Lines is written effortlessly and without the baggage of ‘magical realism’ that Rushdie carried even in his first novel. Ghosh’s prose is evocative and realist.

Nevertheless, what I found disconcerting at the end of the novel is the author’s treatment of the modern nation in South Asia as a given, and not historically formed entity. So the madness of the continuing riots is seen as inexplicable, and the humanist effort on part of his cousin to rescue his grandfather from the rioting mob, as fatal and meaningless.

Take this rumination of Tridib’s brother when he is reminded of Tridib’s death in a Bangladeshi restaurant in England, fifteen years later. It more then sums up the cynicism towards the nation states, towards the borders- the ‘shadow lines.’

And then I think to myself why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? What would it change? The whole thing is a mirage; the whole thing is a mirage. How can anyone divide memory? If freedom was possible, surely Tridib’s death would have set me free.

For some reason, after finishing it my immediate urge was to reach out for VS Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, because I think it helps to explain better the significance of shadow lines and why they are being continually redrawn, in physical geography as well as geographies of minds.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira

César Aira is one of the most prolific contemporary Argentinian writers. His “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter” recounts the transformation of Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), a German painter who is deformed during one of his travels across South America. This ‘deformation’ in reality is a transformation as well, as Rugendas begins to look beyond the beautiful landscapes of South America and into the faces of the native Indians. This change in perspective happens when Rugendas is struck by a lightening bolt.

It has certainly been one of the more unexpectedly wonderful books I came across this year, elegant with a dense story that is most poignant when the bolt of lightening strikes Rugendas and transforms him even while deforming his face forever.

The storm broke suddenly with a spectacular lightening bolt that traced a zig- zag arc clear across the sky. It came so close that Rugenda’s upturned face, frozen in an expression of idiotic stupor, was completely bathed in white light. He thought he could feel its sinister heat on his skin, and his pupils contraced to pin- points… From that moment on, like all victims of personlized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering. Why did it have to happen to me?

The introduction to the 87 page novella is by Roberto Bolaño who remarks in his preface:

Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.

The novel reminded me of Raj Kapoor’s early film Aag which investigates the same dialectic of Beauty and the Beast, but this book is far more spectacular in its meditation on the relationship between reality and art, as well as an encounter, or clash, if you like, of civilizations.

A more detailed review.

Drizzle of Yesteryears by M. K. Ajay

Drizzle of Yesteryears by M. K. Ajay

Publisher: Frog Books
Pages: 113
Year: 2006

MK Ajay’s debut collection of short stories, the blurb announces, “examines belongingness, delightfully eccentric behavior, displacement, every day surprises and longing to return to one’s roots”.

After reading the collection of short stories, one cannot but help observe that the writer has an amazingly gifted imagination as well as a knack for bringing alacrity to his writing.

However, the book delivers only unevenly on its other promises, more than the theme of belonging and a longing to return to one’s roots, the characters in the stories display eccentricity and more often than not are at the mercy of the supernatural and the unexplained (“Philatelist”, “The Drizzle of Yesteryears”, “Flight to Norway”, “Skylights”, “Departures”, “The Temple of Snakes”), when they are not rudderless.

There is a sense of purposelessness in the characters and situations that stands out (“The Holy Man”, “A Question of Morality”, ” Rebirth”, “Departures”, “The Temple of Snakes”.)

“Fortunes of Circle” shows a macabre sense of imagination.

“Country Practice” probes well into the cynical mind of man who has spent a lifetime in the village as a clerk in the post office.

“In Spam” is a perceptive journey into the mind of a contemporary advertising executive. Through a “virtual” Buddhist monk, the character achieves self- realization- a theme that is reminiscent of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta. Thematically, this is one of the better stories in the collection.

“The Search” impresses with its humanism, as does “The Sketch”. “Alpine Miracle” leaves a pleasant after taste and displays the writer’s ability to give an unexpected twist at the end- certainly a major hallmark of a good short story.

The story “A Sunday Visitor” is one of the finest ones in the collection. In a theme inspired, according to the author himself, from Pirandello, a character named Bhairavan in the novel of a writer comes to haunt the writer wanting to know why he was left unexplained in the novel.

Unfortunately, too many characters in the collection tend to be like Bhairavan- left without any palpable sense of meaningful existence.

The story “Twelfth Night” comes nearest to perfection, marred only by the writer not leveraging the caste dichotomy built in the first half of the story and selecting once again to be overawed by the inexplicable. There is a minor editing flaw though where the email is referred to as a letter.

In terms of literary style, the stories bear the mark of detail, for example:

He adjusted the loose soil with his sandals. Ants were carrying away an overripe mango from the tree nearby. The sun was peering through the mango tree as he scanned the hum of life around him- red ants, an oriole preening itself, a plump cat sleeping on the brick wall, hibiscus in full bloom.

There is no doubt on the technical finesse of the collection- there is indeed a mastery in the how to write a story, it is in the realm of what to say that expectations raised by the literary style leave one somewhat less enthused.

At their best, most of the stories individually succeed in holding the interest of the reader and some display a wonderful sense of suspense and mystery. But they have very little to tie the characters together on the theme of belongingness and longing to return.

Perhaps, it is an attempt to over intellectualize the stories- people have been migrating over centuries and being “At Home” and “In Exile” are not necessarily binary opposites or contrasting categories. And if they are, the stories don’t sufficiently bring that out.

Overall an uneven endeavor by a young author, whose first collection of short stories is marked by occasional flashes of brilliance.

There is a blog on the book that the writer maintains.

The Underdogs- A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela

Few novelists have managed to create a successful short novel- some that instantly spring to mind are Turgenev (Father and Sons, Rudin), Juan Rulfo (Pedro Paramo), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Fiftyfive Five ), even Flaubert (Madame Bovary) and perhaps a few more complete the list.

To this short list also belongs Mariano Azuela’s classic novel about the Mexican Revolution: The Underdogs. In a mere 150 pages, Azuelo captures the tribulations of an Indian peasant leader- Demetrio Marcías and through him, the tribulations of the Mexican Revolution. Suffice would be to quote a a few lines from the novel that also serves as the summary of the novel:

Villa? Obregon? Carranza? Who do I care? I love the Revolution like I love the volcano that’s erupting! The volcano because it is a volcano; the Revolution because it’s the Revolution!… But the stones left above or below after the cataclysm? What are they to me?

…

“Why do you keep on fighting, Demetrio?”

Demetrio, frowning deeply, absentmindedly picks up a small stone and throws it to the bottom

of the canyon. He stares pensively over the precipice and says:

“Look at the stone, how it keeps going…”

The stone falling into a bottomless precipice is allegorical about the fate of the Mexican Revolution itself.

Tags: Mexico, Literature, Books

The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac

Marx pondered if his magnum opus Das Capital would meet the fate of the painting in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, Picasso actually tried to emulate the fiction in his last painting and Cezanne admired this short story.

Considereing that it is a mere 22 pages, it is amazing how much Balzac has managed to pack into The Unkown Masterpiece- there is the question of the relationship between art and life, between love and art and the search for perfection.

Balzac recounts the story of a 17th century painter Frenhofer who, in his search for perfection, spends ten years painting his masterpiece. However, when he shows it to two of his young admirerrs, they see nothing more than a canvas daubed with paint.

The old man, absorbed in reverie, did not listen to them; he was smiling at that imaginary woman.

“But sooner or later he will discover that there is nothing on his canvas!” cried Poussin.

“Nothing on my canvas!” exclaimed Frenhofer, glancing alternately at the two painters and his picture.

“What have you done?” said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin.

The old man seized the young man’s arm roughly, and said to him:

“You see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought you here, then? – My good Porbus,” he continued, turning to the older painter, “can it be that you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?”

Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the anxiety depicted on the old man’s white face was so heart-rendering that he pointed to the canvas saying:

“Look!”

Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered.

“Nothing! Nothing! And I have worked ten years!

He fell upon a chair and wept.

“So I am an idiot, a madman! I have neither talent nor capability! I am naught save a rich man who, in walking, does nothing more than walk! So I shall have produced nothing!”

Balzac ends the story in a way that one can see the almost King Learish tragedy of the painter- betrayed by his own work, as well as the story of perfection in which the work of art arrives before the aesthetic required to appreciate it has developed.

In either case, it is a story of art as transgression and a tragedy par excellence.

Image: Picasso’s rendition of Frenhofer painting The Unkown Masterpiece. Acknowledgement

Tags: Balzac, Picasso, Painting, Books, Literature

‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin

We by Evgeny Zamyatin is often seen as a precursor of George Orwell’s dysutopian novel 1984. Indeed, there are similarities, though We strikes one with it’s novelty and the fact that it was written in 1920-21, when the newly formed Soviet government was just beginning to consolidate itself.

Lenin was still alive, the Stalinist terror had not yet begun.

While it is possible to read We as a dysutopian novel- a critique of the socialism as it evolved under Soviet rule, it can also equally be read as a critique of positivism- a school of thought that reduced human nature to empirical and scientific facts.

It is a critique of a technocratic society and comparisons with modern Western societies are inescapable.

The novel is situated in about 3000 AD. The central character is numbered D-503- the level of civilization reached requires no names, everyone is a number. D- 503 is a mathematician/ engineer whose life is disrupted when he is attracted towards a woman I-330.

Even love appears as a mathematical problem when his mind grapples with the nature of an irrational number (the square root of minus 1).

D-503 is a law- abiding number who has absolute faith in the Benefactor, the supreme, God- like head of the One State. He recognizes the superior nature of his society. He compares his present with the primitive 20th century, for example, when he goes to vote in the election that every time unanimously returns the Benefactor to power. Those that disagree, are obvioulsy eliminated in a grotesque ceremony presided over by the Benefactor himself.

Naturally, this is entirely unlike the disorderly, disorganized elections of the ancients, when- absurd to say, the very results of the elections were unknown beforehand. Building a state on entirely unpredictable eventualisties, blindly- what can be more senseless?

Despite the inevitable comparisons with Orwell’s 1984, there is reason enough to believe that Zamyatin is more optimistic. At the end of novel, the One State- the State of Reason survives, but also suffers a blow, as the Wall that separates the sanitized One State from its primitive human neighbours is pushed back.

This cannot be postponed, because in the western parts of the city there is still chaos, roaring, corpses, beasts and unfortunately- a considerable group of numbers who have betrayed Reason.

The conflict between Reason and ‘primitive’ society (when numbers were humans) continues.

It is significant that while Zamyatin resisted efforts by the Party to censor his works, he considered himself to be a Soviet writer till his end in 1937.

His Bolshevik perspective comes through at places:

Then how can there be a final revolution? There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

In 1931, Stalin had, miraculously, granted Zamyatin permission to emigrate. Zamyatin died in Paris in 1937, waiting for his return.

He was thus spared the fate of many other writers who were to satirize the emerging Soviet society. Andrei Platonov, for example, spent his last years as a window cleaner and whose works like The Foundation Pit, Soul and Happy Moscow saw the light of day only towards the end of the Soviet Union.

Tags: Socialism, Zamyatin, Literature, Russia, Books

Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez

In an apparent attempt to reduce the popularity of her own blog, Bhaswati Ghosh invited me to guest- post at her blog “At Home, Writing“.

My thanks to her. After all, the risk is all her’s

***

In the short span of six years between 1946 to 1952, Eva Perón, the wife of the Argentinian dictaror and founder of the Perónist party, Juan Perón, won over the Argentinian people so much so that her popularity was said to rival, if not exceed, that of Juan Perón himself. Having risen from obscurity, the youngest daugher of an unwed mother, her rise had been all the more spectacular.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita could have been termed as a biographical account Eva Perón’s life had the author chosen to write about her short but eventful life.

Instead, he has chosen to write about her corpse.

Eva Perón’s body, like Lenin’s, was embalmed after she died of cancer at the age of 33, at the height of her popularity. However, before the corpse could be housed in a mausoleum for public display, Juan Perón was overthrown in a military coup, and thus began the after- life journey of Eva Perón, as the incumbent military government wondered what to do with the embalmed body.

To bury the corpse could have, they feared, incited the loyal Perónists and even the masses. And Eva dead was perceived as more dangerous than the living one.

Even a few replicas were created to mislead any followers, and attempts were made to bury them. For over a decade, the corpse and the replicas changed hands and locations, traversing within Argentina and to Europe- one replica was buried in Bonn and the actual corpse in Milan, Italy from where it was finally recovered and returned to Juan Perón after his return from exile in Spain.

Martínez recounts the stories of all those that came in contact with the corpse, and the often calamitous ends that they came to. Insidious accidents wait those entrusted with the corpse.

Some were haunted till death, some met with unexplicable accidents and others were relentlessly followed by a mysterious person called the ‘Commander of Vengeance’.

It is characteristic of Martínez to write a novel that takes the after- life of Eva Perón rather than her not less eventful life as its theme. He does show us slices of her life too but often as flashbacks and in recollections of those that he meets with.

In a sense, therefore, he underlines the persona that outlived Eva Perón herself.

This is akin to his previous novel, the redoubtable The Perón Novel, where he focussed not so much on Peron’s politically active years, but the seemingly innocuous journey of an exiled dictator returning to his home country in old age.

Santa Evita is a novel within a non- fictional account where Martínez goes out in serach of information about Eva Perón’s corpse- the story emerges as he interviews people associated with Eva or later with her restless corpse.

He makes the reader an accomplice in this journey of discovery- it becomes very much like a mystery in which the reader has as many, and more often as few, clues as the writer. This makes the novel extremely readable, if not racy.

Santa Evita turned out to be unputdownable, and I finished it within a week. Along with The Perón Novel , it has been one of my best reads from Latin America in the last one year.

[Cross posted at Bhaswati Ghosh's blog: At Home, Writing]

Tags: Latin America, Argentina, Peron, Eloy Tomas Martinez, Literature, Books

Ayodhya 6 December 1992 by PV Narasimha Rao

Barring Jawaharlal Nehru, it is unusual for Indian Prime Ministers to have authored books giving their political perspectives. P.V. Narasimha Rao was an exception. He authored a novel, The Insider during his own lifetime. The book under review Ayodhya 6 December 1992 appears posthumously.

The author’s objective for writing the book is stated unambiguously in the Introduction:

…this book attempts to examine the broad factual, Constitutional, judicial, legal and political aspects of the events that culminated in the tragedy of 6 December 1992. It is not intended as an exercise in self- righteousness or justification of anything done or not done.

It is a tribue to PV as a writer that he has distilled from a vast amount of material to put together a racy, 188 page book without compromising the seriousness of the topic. There are less than a dozen pages that are tedious- mainly because of the long quotes from judicial and other reports whose complete text has been incorporated in the appendices.

PV does a meticulous job in the first six chapters recounting the history of the dispute, interspersing what could have become a dry narrative with perceptive insights. He points out, for example, that the RJM was already gathering significant momentum at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination that brought the DCM Toyota yatra to a grinding halt inflcting a temporary setback to the movement.

He is also fair enough to credit Mulayam Singh Yadav’s firm handling of the Ayodhya crisis in 1989 when he effectively used Central forces to halt Advani’s jaggernaut.

It is in the later chapters, specially, ” Ayodhya 6 December 1992″ and “Why was Article 356 not invoked” that PV’s book is at its weakest as it loses its initial promise of not being a self justification on the inaction of the Central government to thwart the destruction of the Babri Masjid on the fateful day.

Paragraph after paragraph, PV gets into hair splitting details as a defence for his and his government’s inaction. The objectivity of the initial chapters gives way here to repetitive citing of facts, rhetorical questions and labyrinthine arguments.

In not too subtle a language, he indicates that he was “betrayed” by the Kalyan Singh government, that there were insincere machinations by leaders of his own party, the unique and unprecedented situation that 6 December presented in the history of the Republic, the dubious role played by the non Congress, non BJP parties and the perceived lapses on part of the Supreme court.

In other words, all the stars conspired to paralyse the government into inaction.

Even as PV swings from one argument to another, sometimes contradicting himself (for example, on the “crucial” role of logistics on page 174 only to point out, a few pages later, that it was not the crucial factor), he slips in a sentence that this reviewer feels is central to understanding the reasons for the paralysis of his government. PV here lets the cat out of the bag as it were.

He indicates that the BJP leaders stepped up the aggressiveness of the movement when they felt that PV was getting too close to the sants and the sadhus, in the four months before 6 December. These sants and sandhus consitituted the vast and dispersed middle leadership that expanded the reach of the previously urban based party.

This “subtle aspect of the RJM”, as PV terms it, not only indicates that PV was hobnobbing with these elements, but in the very next sentence shows his own susceptibilities to the Hindutva cause: ” … the undeniable fact that while Hindu masses were swayed by their devotion to Ram and their intense desire for the temple, the political forces behind the issue could not care less for the temple.”

Earlier, he had promised to construct a Ram temple in his Independence Day speech.

In other words, he was trying to display a holier than thou attitude with the BJP and hijack its agenda. He clearly failed in his calculations or machinations, the BJP trumped him in any case. He evidently had no workable backup plan.

This political failure lies at the heart of the problem- the beginning of the 1980s was marked by Indira Gandhi’s tilt away from the Left, if not to the Right, progressing during the years of Rajiv Gandhi to a confused dalliance with both Hindu and Muslim communalism.

PV’s era marked a consolidation of this swing towards Hindutva- culminating in the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Interestingly, PV does not use the word “Babri Masjid” anywhere in the book (though he does in his speeches in the appendices)- it is referred to as a “structure” or as the “Babri structure”.

Despite the scholarly collection of facts, that well document the main events culminating on the single biggest attack on Indian secularism after Partition, PV’s defence is unconvincing and one cannot but help recall Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

***

Related posts: review of “The Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri masjid- Ram Janmabhumi Controversy”

Cross posted at Desicritics.

Tags: Hindutva, BJP, India, Ayodhya Books

Technorati Tags: Hindutva, BJP, India, Ayodhya

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Time of the Hero was published in 1961 when Llosa was 25- it was immediately burned by the authorities for exposing the perversities of the Military Academy that was supposed to churn out candidates who would then hopefully join the military.

The novel is tedious in the first half, and begins to make better sense after the first 250 pages. The patience is worth it- all the elements of the future Llosa are there, even as the impact of William Faulker is very much evident.

There are multiple narratives, shifts in time and space, and in the battle between the reader and the writer, the initial incursive strides of the reader in the first 250 pages are shortlived.

The triumph of the writer thereafter is rapid, and unassailable.

Tags: Literature, Latin American Literature, Books, Mario Vargas Llosa

Technorati Tags: Literature, Latin American Literature, Books, Mario Vargas Llosa

Distant Stars by Roberto Bolano

Roberto Bolaño died three years ago at the relatively young age of 50 , at the pinnacle of his career as a writer and before he could be better known in the English knowing world.

The translation into English of his By Night in Chile a few years ago marked his arrival in the English world. Distant Stars is the next book translated into English. His collection of short stories Last Evenings on Earth has been published recently and the translation of his most ambitious posthumus work 2666 is eagerly awaited.

The theme of Distant Stars is the same as the By Night in Chile, the over two decades of unbridled exercise of power by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet after the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende on that other, less remembered, 9/11 of 1973.

The theme has been attempted by other writers, notably by Ariel Dorfman in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, who made a vastly more experimental attempt at capturing the brutality of those years. In contrast, Distant Stars is a relatively simpler novel, closer to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, but less verbose and less tedious.

Mann had taken the analogy of the folk legend of Faust and Mephistopheles where a musician signs a pact with the devil (in this case Nazi Germany), to illustrate the immorality of those who had been accomplices of the Nazi regime. Bolaño, in this work, takes the case of an avant garde poet, Carlos Wieder. In the process he also offers insights into the lives of that generation of poets that was torn apart by the dictatorship: “Madness was not exceptional at that time,” he remarks, when Carlos Wieder inaugurates a new form of poetry by writing one and two liners poems in the sky on an airplane.

While Carlos wins accolades from the regime, other poets meet with a different fate. “The good news was that we had been expelled from the university, the bad was that almost all of our friends have disappered”, the narrator’s friend Bibiano observes. There are many incidents that recount the “melancholy folklore of exile- made up of stories that are fabrications or pale copies of what really happened”.

Carlos meanwhile goes on to experiment with other forms of ‘literature’ till it becomes so grotesque that even the supportive regime finds it difficult to continue to stand by him. Bolaño unmasks the gory details, and Wieder’s participation in the brutalization of the Chilean soceity during the dictatorship. Wieder’s unwritten pact with the devil becomes evident.

Bolaño scores with the fact that he is able to evoke a series of sub texts that are pregnant with possiblities. The following narration, for example, by the Indian maid of one the victims of the Wieder’s murderous crimes indicates a new trajectory that deserves a different treatment altogether.

The maid makes an appearance in the court against the defendent Carlos Weider when his crimes are discovered.

Over the years her Spanish had dwindled. When she spoke every second word was in Mapuche… in her memory the night of the crime was one in the long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the event was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story, the story of the Chilean citizen Amalia Maluenda, who used to work for the Garmendias, and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror…. Remembering the dark of the crime, she said she had heard the music of the Spanish. When asked to clarify what she meant by “the music of the Spanish,” she replied: ” Sheer rage, sir, sheer, futile rage”.

Cross posted here.

Tags: Roberto Bolaño, Latin American Literature, Literature, Chile, Books

Under the Shadow of Kamakhya

Mamoni Raisom Goswami (aka Indira Goswami) is most well known for her novel The Moth Eaten Saddle (Howrah) of the Tusker, where she weaved the whole tapestry of life around a Vaishnavite satara (religious institution). Her writings represent a some of the finest in the much broader stream of literature from her home state of Asom (formerly Assam).

Under the Shadow of Kamakhya is a collection of eight of her short stories, some of which have appeared in other anthologies.

In all the stories, Mamoni Raisom enthralls one with the kaleidoscopic descriptions of her land and people. The details of the birds, the flora and fauna are vividly described with the flourish of a poet. The characters absorb the ambience of the landscape and are shaped by it:

“Her silk garmets shone like the phosphorescent foam on the turbulent waters of the Brahmaputra during the monsoon”

(Under the Stadow of Kamakhya)

Similarly, the landscape also acquires shades of the characters:

The bulbuls on the Hijol tree started chirping noisily. The sun rose above the Brahmaputra. Wreaths of violet and brown clouds clung to it, making it look like the pinched and pale face of a hapless prostitute, blushing at the thought of having to spend time with an unwanted stranger. The clouds seemed to lay bare the strange combination of helplessness and indomitable strength on this face.

The cinders of the burnout chest were scattered all over the place. In the morning sunshine this resembled the hide of a freshly butchered goat, spread out on the earth to dry.

(The Chest)

The Brahmaputra and the Kamakhya temple occupy a centerstage in the stories.

The most powerful story is undoubtedly the one named in the title: Under the Shadow of Kamakhya where the chief protagonist Padmapriya is sent back to her parent’s home when her husband’s family wrongly suspects that she has an incurable disease. The husband finally comes back to take her home and at his moment of glory of accepting her back is shocked to know about the strands in his wife’s life during the two years of his absence.

In The Chest Toradoi burns the wooden chest that belonged to the man who she believes never married because he loved her but could not marry her because of caste restrictions. Her brother’s revelation about the man shatters the last flickr of a misplaced illusion.

In The Journey, Mamoni Raisom poignantly weaves the personal story of an emaciated tea shop owner and his family in the background of the liberation struggle for Asom led by the ULFA.

The Beasts is about the unpredictability of people, the capitulation of a principled man who sells his trust among a Rubha tribeswoman to an unscrupulous but powerful merchant. The story is narrated through a mute character. It is a strory of betrayal.

Dwarka and his Gun shows the power of an uncertain, open ended story where the reader’s imagination is left free to soar.

Mamoni Raisom displays her mastery over the craft of the short story that would rank her with some of the best in the world today. They also bring out the concerns of this extremely talented writer and illustrate the enduring place for realism.

In Parasu’s Well, a greedy Kabuliwallah moneylender melts when he sees the hard work put in by the dull, almost wretched character of Parasu, and the sad condition of his sick brother.

Mamoni Raisom always manages to rescue humanism from the clutches of the rigmarole, the grind of daily life, misunderstandings and human failings.

[Cross-posted at Desicritics.org]

Tags: Assam, Mamoni Raisom Goswami, India, Literature, Books

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages

Best known for the novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, and about whom the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa once said : “Of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig (1932-90).”

The plot of Manuel’s novel (the first one that he wrote in English) Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is seemingly staightforward.

An Argentenian revolutionary, a trade union- organizer actually, is tortured after the military coup in 1976. He manages to find his way to a sanatorium in the United States via a human rights organization. Here he is allotted an attendant who takes him around in his wheelchair. The novel is little more than a series of conversations, a continuous dialogue between the two as the attendant Larry takes Ramirez around New York.

But as the novel progressed, I found the plot somewhat convoluted and the novel crashing to an uncertain end- the reader is urged on not so much by the plot but by the layers of reality and unreality that are unsheathed between the dialogues.

The novel has no other text except 223 pages of dialogue, five letters, one will and one job application.

The plot is rendered meaningless in the web of psychological trajectories that Puig weaves for the reader.

There is nothing sinister about the novel itself despite the title. But it has dark undertones throughout, peppered and enlivened with deep insights that make one aware of the sensitivities of this writer “least interested in literature.”

I found the novel stylistically very innovative and confirmed the view that Latin American Literature is not all about magical realism. It is enriched by a galaxy of writers with very distinctive styles.

Tags: Latin American Literature, Manuel Puig, Review, Fiction , Argentina

Review of Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution by Richard Gott

I came upon Bolívar, one long morning
in Madrid, at the entrance to the Fifth Regiment
Father, I said to him, are you, or are you not, or who are you?
And, looking at the Mountain Barrak, he said:
‘I awake every hundred years when the people awake’

- excerpt from the poem a Song for Bolívar by Pablo Neruda, quoted in the book

As the coup to topple Hugo Chávez gathered pace on the night of 11 APril 2002, Fidel Castro heard about it and called up Chávez at midnight. The veteran warrior from Cuba provided distilled wisdom to the young socialist crusader:

‘Save your people and save yourself. Do what you have to do. Negotiate with dignity. Do not sacrifice yourself, Chávez, because this is not going to end. You must not sacrifice yourself.’

Chavez was too important a figure for the future of Latin America, Castro argued, for him to allow himself to be killed off in a coup. The advise was timely and wise.

Castro evidently had the experience of the 1973 sacrifice of Salvador Allende and his government- and the long dark years that followed the coup.

Chávez turned out to be a sharp learner who not only survived the coup but also emerged as an astute politician who is poised to succeed Fidel Castro as the leading voice of dissent against neo- imperialism and globalization as defined by the West.

Richard Gott brings such quotes- like the telephonic message from Castro- and many a historical insight to explain the phenomenon of Hugo Chávez.

Chávez is an advocate of New Socialism for the 21st century and has initiated a number of changes in his country to translate that vision into reality.

Having said this, it is important to remember, as Gott points out in this extremely necessary book- that Chávez and his concept of Socialism is derived much more from the Latin American experience of the last three centuries than from the Marxist- Leninist or Stalin- Maoist models.

Simón Bolívar has often been derided by Marxist writers as bourgeois- even Garcia Marquez ruffled a few feathers by his implicit criticism of ‘The Liberator’ in his The General in his Labyrinth. But Chavez considers Bolívar as an important part of the Left wing tradition in South America.

Left scholarship has traditionally seen Bolívar as securing liberation from Spain but with the help of the British- having subsequently handed over the continent over for exploitation by English capitalism.

Chávez, on the other hand has incorporated Simón Bolívar into the Left tradition and thereby brought in a heavier dose of nationalism into the ideology of the Left.

However, he does not share the pessimism of even the Liberator who is said to have remarked on his deathbed: ‘America is ungovernable. Those in the service of the revolution have ploughed the sea.’

‘The contradictions in Bolívar’s thought are not the determining factor’, argues Chávez, ‘What we can see in the period of history between 1810 and 1830, are the outlines of a national project for Spanish America’. Chávez evidently plans to pursue that project with renewed energy.

Another historical personality that Chávez looks upto is Simón Rodríguez, sometimes called the Robinson Crusoe of Spanish America.

Rodríguez was a schoolteacher with unorthodox views on education and commerce far in advance of his time. he also had a passionate belief in the need to integrate the indigenous people’s of Latin America, and the black slaves brought from outside, into the societies of the future independent states.

Rodríguez’s ideas about education for the indigenous population of South America and the role of the underclass are crucial for Chávez- himself a mestizo.

The third major influence on Chávez has been the revolutionary soldier Ezequiel Zamora, a provincial radical who became a soldier and strategist. He advocated far reaching land reforms for the peasants and was passionately hostile against the land owning oligarchy. But more than that, the crucial element from his thought that Hugo Chávez has internalized and that has become the axis of the Chávezista phenomenon is his advocacy of the combined role of the soldiers and civilians in his struggle and the Bolivarian dream of combining with like- minded forces across South America.

Having traced the idelogolical roots of Chávez, Gott goes on to give us an extremely well crafted narrative of the rise of Chávez, his failed coup and subsequent rise as a democrat. The new constitution that the National Assembly in Venezuela wrote under his leadership has to be read in the context of these influences on the progress of the Venezuelian revolution led by Chávez.

Another distinguishing feature of this revolution- which marks it out from previous socialist projects in Europe and Asia is the lack of an organized political party- the Movement for Socialism that Chávez leads is an amalgamation of various Left wing groups and patriotic elements from the military, the latter is explained well by Gott:

For many people outside Latin America, particularly in the quarter of a century since General Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende in September 1973, it has been almost impossible to think of a military leader without conjuring up the image of the gorila, the general and his military junta in dark glasses presiding over an authoritarian and repressive regime. Few recall the handful of leftist military rulers to have taken the side of the poor and the peasants, and pushed through radical reforms in the teeth of fierce opposition from local oligarchs and the United States. Few remember that Allende recruited progressive officers to serve in his government.

The extent of the opposition that he has invited from the previous ruling circles in his own country and the repeated coup attempts against his government are explained in the context of far reaching changes that he has brought about in nationalizing specially the oil industry, providing rights to indigenous people and in his efforts to decentralize development works.

He has repeatedly invited the wrath of the United States as his policies place him in the anti- globalization league.

Revolutionaries in every age are threatended by twin forces. On the one hand, every revolution spawns a counter- revolution as Marx observed somewhere, on the other, as the experience of the socialist revolutions of the 20th century have demonstrated, every revolution devours its own children.

The Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela is threatened more from the former at the moment, though the latter may soon be a threat too.

For all those who wear of a patch of red on their heart, the success of socialism in Venezuela and in rest of South America is extremely important.

Its continuous progress opens up new vistas for the revival of the socialist project that suffered a dramatic, if temporary, defeat after the fall of ‘existing’ socialism in the Soviet Union.

An interview with Richard Gott here.

Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution by Richard Gott
Publisher: Verso

Edition: 2005
Pages 315

Tags: Books, Chavez, Left, Latin America, Socialism,Venezuela

The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov

The classical Russian novel was more than a work of literature, it was more often than not a means for communicating ideas and for philosophical discourse. There is also a remarkable continuity of themes with Russian writers taking up, as it were, themes from a previous novel by a different writer and taking them forward.

In that Andrey Platonov followed in the footsteps of the other great Russian novelists and used the medium of the novel to comment on the progress of the Russian Revolution. Once its enthusiast- he came from a working class background and immediately after the revolution graduated as an engineer and worked towards the electrification plans, he was sensitive to the brutality of its implementation.

His enthusiasm was soon to be curbed and his disenchantment was to be reflected in the novels that he subsequently wrote. His major works were to be published decades after his death in 1951. He was working as a window cleaner in the Soviet Writer’s building when he died.

The Foundation Pit is the most well known of Platonov’s novels. It describes the impact of the forced collectivization that Stalin introduced in 1927. There are over a dozen major characters and is mainly a novel of action and development, there are few soliloquies or psychological portraits of the characters. That is for good reason and is indicated right in the beginning of the novel.

The pace is set by the first paragraph of the novel where Voshchev is discharged from his job in a machine factory “because of his increasing loss of powers and tendency to stop and think amidst the general flow of work”. Subsequently, no character in the novel makes that mistake again as the Party activist goes about forcing the poor and the small/ middle peasantry into the kholkoz, the collectivised farm.

He also gets them to dig the foundation pit for a massive building that would house the future socialist citizenry. The pit finally becomes the burial ground for the little girl Nastya, who is born of a “kulak” woman and therefore of “capitalist scum.” But her dying mother ingrains in her daughter the noble virtues of socialism and the little girl imbibes all the right words and ideas.

She describes her own capitalist tainted origin to the loyal Party excavator Chiklin thus: “I didn’t want to get born- I was afraid my mother would be bourgeois.” Later, as she is taken to school and where she “learned to love the Soviet government and began collecting trash for reuse”, she writes to Chiklin, the overseer of the foundation pit:

Liquidate the kulak as a class. Long live Lenin, Kozlov and Safranov.
Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks.

At the end of the novel the Revolution finally devours its own child and she is buried in the pit by Chiklin.

Platonov’s style is very direct in this novel, it was to tone down dramatically in later works like The Soul and Happy Moscow that dealt with later Five Year Plan periods and where his style is more implicit (specially in the very effective use of the rhetoric in Happy Moscow.)

The Foundation Pit reflects the confusion of the 1920s that unleashed a great deal of creative energies among the intelligentsia specially of those coming from poorer and working class families. It also showed them the limits of that euphoria. By the 1930′s the State’s control was firmly established and by 1937 Stalin was to confidently go and finish of the bulk of the Party leadership, including “Lenin’s son” Nikolai Bukharin- something that led another disillusioned communist Arthur Koestler to chronicle in Darkness at Noon.

Platonov brings forth the Party slogans that were established and were executed with meticulous haste by the rank and file, only to be rescinded later with a different set, if not opposite ones. Former local leaders, once decorated for their result effectiveness, were now identified as having misinterpreted the Party Line and hence he is “liquidated.”

These are indeed themes that have occured in many works about Russia of the last century- what lends crecedence to Platonov his is physical presence during the times (unlike that of Western writes notably Koestler and Orwell) but also his ability to both write objectively on a progress of which he was a sympathiser of and maintain his belief that communism needs to proceed on a more humanistic basis than it did under Stalin. That rescues Platonov from succumbing to the disillusion of a Koestler and the propagandistic overtones in Orwell and enhances the authenticity of his work.

His own subsequent treatment and his elimination as a writer in the Soviet Union make him out as a martyr.

The Foundation Pit (as also his previous, longer novel Chevengur), follow up the themes that were previous treated by Dostoevesky in The Possessed and by Josef Conrad his near- prophetic Under Western Eyes. Post- revolution, the novel marks a continuity with Zamyatin’s We that was published in 1920.

The universality of this work lies in the fact that similar mechanisms continue to be employed in the contemporary world, whether it is in attempts at exporting democracy or exporting globalization and IMF diktats to the Third World in Capital’s thirst for markets. The vocabulary has changed, but the language remains the same- of violence against people en masse. The tragedy was more grotesque in the case of the Soviet Union of the 1920 and 1930s because socialism was supposed to have rescued the masses from the evils of exploitation.

Finally, a note on the length of the novel. Russian novels are generally long and run into hundreds of pages, with Tolstoy and Dostoevesky probably taking the cake. Only a Turgenev could write as concisely as Flaubert covering a whole gamut of human experiences in a novel of a hundred or so pages. In The Foundation Pit, Platonov follows Turgenev and achieves a veritable literary crescendo in a novel that is merely 140 pages long.

Technorati Tags: Literature, Books, Andrey Platonov, Russia