The best novel I read this year was Garth Greenwell’s debut, What Belongs to You. It is a heart-wrenching tale of an American expat’s entanglements, sexual and otherwise, with a local man named Mitko B in Bulgaria. While any overt political leanings are absent from the text, I found the novel to be highly political. Greenwell’s point is that while confrontations during adolescence and young adulthood may teach gay men to come to terms with the validity of their desires, the residual shame and spiritual exhaustion has life long effects. The result is that feelings get scrambled, desire manifests in unique places, and not much is ever solved by anything. Greenwell’s achievement is in presenting this existential crisis as a direct outcome of the complications around gay men’s sexuality at an early age.
Another novel that had an impact as great as Greenwell’s, though in an entirely different way, was Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage. Put simply, the novel is about civilian suffering during times of war, though to put it like that does a disservice, for Arudpragasam’s presentation carries an extraordinarily sharp focus on the suffering of the individual, and in that too, on the suffering of the body. The tone is set at the beginning, as a scene of bodily dismemberment and amputation begins the novel. The time of the action here is the last leg of the Sri Lankan civil war. While the immediacies of that war might be over, the novel still seems a painfully fitting one to read after a year in which images of war-time atrocities from a different geography challenged our consciences repeatedly.
Back home, the work of fiction that stood out for me was Manu Bhattathiri’s debut collection of short stories, Savithri’s Special Room & Other Stories. In the book, Bhattathiri’s imaginary South-Indian town of Karuthupuzha comes alive in a vivid way that is perhaps an improvement on how RK Narayan’s Malgudi has been alive for two or more generations of Indian readers. The most exciting thing about Bhattathiri’s style is his ability to weave some small absurdity into the telling, eg. a tree giggling at the plight of a person, and still retain the sense of reality of the tale. Bhattathiri’s small town is in fact endowed, like all real Indian towns are, with all sorts of complications that we normally regard as urban, such that it becomes clear that the writer creates a small town is only to slow down time and to enable observation, to present the universal through the particular.
The standout book of poetry was Rohan Chhetri’s Slow Startle. Sadly, the Nepali-Indian poet’s book is not well distributed in the country and carries a rather atrocious price tag on Amazon. That said, true lovers of poetry will find it justifies even the price. Chhetri is a blazing talent, his poems capable of radiating meaning even after dozens of re-readings.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)