50books_poc | Entries tagged with south asia

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee is a mystery written by a Scot of Bengali descent, taking place in 1919 Calcutta: "Desperate for a fresh start, Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up an important post in Calcutta’s police force." I agree with this book's politics but it really shows that the author had never written a novel before, in particular in the dialogue. Characters speak their subtext or otherwise exposit in that "unrealistically monologue coherently about national politics for six paragraphs" kind of way. I am a little interested in reading the next books in the series, because maybe the writing will improve.

opusculasedfera

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
An academic survey of a wide variety of types of texts that discuss FF eroticism/love in the Caribbean. Her argument is that a queer/wlw culture has always existed in the various Caribbean islands and that there is a local language in which one can talk about it, refuting claims that queerness is something imposed by Europeans or North Americans onto Caribbean people. I personally found the anthropological work done on actual communities of queer women more compelling than some of the literary analysis (and I like literary analysis!), but Tinsley does a great job of demonstrating how it all fits together. (Also her usage and analysis of terminology for these groups of women is way more detailed and thoughtful than I'm achieving in this capsule review, but I'm using queer to get the general point across.)

Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism by Umair Muhammad
A short book discussing how we need systemic change to solve the big problems of our time rather than individual action (e.g. switching out our power plants as a whole rather than everyone using slightly less energy individually). Not terribly original, but not a bad overview, and it might be useful as a book to give people who were just edging into the topic for the first time, though you'd probably want them to be at least somewhat receptive to leftist ideas. A bit marred by an afterword to this second edition that mostly consists of complaining about bell hooks' lack of relevance to third world women, which is a bit rich from a guy who talks about Marx all the time and doesn't mention gender at all in his own analysis, but the author is quite young and I hope he will grow out of it.

Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
A collection of poetry, mostly about the author's experiences as a First Nations trans woman in Canada (specifically she's Anishinaabe and Metis). I highly recommend it and I'm looking forward to her collection of essays that is to be published later this year, but definitely trigger warnings for sexual and colonial violence throughout.

Transgender China ed. Howard Chiang*
A collection of academic papers that each cover some aspect of cross-gender activity in Chinese history. The topics range from oral history conducted among trans people in modern Hong Kong, to analyses of classic literature with gender-bending characters, to a paper that argues quite convincingly that eunuchs in China have always been socially considered men rather than a third sex or a genderbent alternate sex as they are sometimes represented in Western historiography. Interesting stuff, though definitely aimed at specialists more than the general audience.

*My interpretation of the rules here is that this collection, which is edited by a Taiwanese man and features many Chinese authors, is eligible for the challenge. However, some of the authors included are white, so I'm willing to defer to the group if there's disagreement on this question.

tags: non-fiction, poetry, china, south asia, anishinaabe, metis, caribbean

brainwane

I've been recommending this book to friends recently and realized I never posted my review of it here. It's a mimetic/realistic fiction novel set in modern-day Bangalore, with two main plot threads: a guy who wants to expand his business honestly but faces the impossibility of doing so without bribing creeps, and a servant in his house who walks multiple figurative tightropes to maintain some sliver of personal autonomy and keep her son from falling in with creeps.

I'd previously read Sankaran's short story collection The Red Carpet, which I also recommend. (I picked it up in the Manhattan public library when I was looking for Dorothy Sayers and saw Sankaran's book near Sayers alphabetically. Most English-language Indian fiction isn't about Bangalore, so this is an ultra-specific YES YES SO RIGHT YES. Sankaran hooked me a few pages in by using the Kannada/English slang "one-thaara" ("a kind/type of"), which I'd never seen written down before. The title story is so sweet! I see

rydra_wong also liked it and

glitter_femme liked it too.)

I loved The Hope Factory -- what a specifically Bangalore story, getting the texture of class, gender, and location so right. (I wonder whether the flashback chapter about one protagonist's day laborer past would work as a standalone story; it sure has a Crowning Moment of Awesome that I will remember for a long time.) I honestly do not know whether I should recommend this book to non-Indians or even desis who are not Karnatakan or Kannadiga, whether it will sparkle quite as bright to people who have never been to that particular dosa restaurant, who don't think "wait I think I have relatives in that square mile of Mysore." But if you're looking for an English-language novel set in modern-day Bangalore, spanning rich and poor, family and business and politics, check this out.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

2. Sarita Mandanna, Tiger Hills

Devi is a beautiful, strong-willed young girl, growing up in Coorg, a rural, mountainous area of South India, in the late 1800s. She's in love with Machu, a warrior famous for having killed a tiger single-handedly. Devanna, Machu's younger cousin, is a quiet, intelligent boy, studying to be a doctor, who's in love with Devi. As you might expect, things don't turn out well.

This novel has some beautiful descriptions of scenery (apparently Coorg- spelled Kodagu today- is known as 'the Scotland of India'), but the plot is a bit over-the-top, with tragedy following tragedy. I enjoyed reading to pass the time on a long bus trip, but I'm not sure I can genuinely recommend it, unless you're looking for something to read that won't require a lot of thought.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

1. Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India

Anjali Bose is a small town girl in rural India who has big dreams. Her teacher, an ex-pat American, encourages her to make something of herself by heading to Bangalore, which they both see as the best new city in India. Anjali eventually heads there, and ends up in more trouble than she anticipated.

The writing in this novel is quite good, very poetic, in the first few chapters, but gradually heads downhill and becomes very pedestrian by the end. The problem, I think, is that there is just way too much plot in this book. The main characters deal with rape, international terrorism, false charges of murder, police brutality, arranged marriage, teenage runaways, divorce, gay men in India, botched back-alley sex change operations, prostitution, art theft, suicide, the role of outsourcing in the Indian economy, riots, the art of photography, homelessness, telecommunication centers, and more. By about the fourth major plot twist, there's no time for poetry anymore, and even for much of a reaction from the characters, because there's just too much happening. I think it could have been a much better book if it had just focused on a few of these issues instead of all of them.

That said, many of the characters here are quite appealing, particularly Anjali. And it certainly seems to be a very current look at Indian society (I learned, for instance, that the cool new dessert is cold coffee with ice cream, which I promptly went out to try, and I can inform you that it is delicious). Overall a fun read, but not a particularly deep one.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

14. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

A sort-of fantasy novel about Tilo, a 'Mistress of Spices'- immortal, mystical women, trained in magic and secret knowledge, sent out into the world to help people. Tilo is sent to Oakland, California, where she slowly becomes personally involved in the lives of the people around her, and begins to reveal her own backstory.

This novel is very hard to describe, because it doesn't have much of a plot for most of its length. Instead, it's full of beautiful, poetic descriptions of spices and food, magic, Oakland and imaginary places like the Island where Mistresses are trained. Some parts are very realistic; others involve rampaging pirate queens or singing sea serpents. It took me a while to get into this book, because the beginning is very slow, but by the end I was in love. The language is incredibly evocative, and the resolution felt just right. I really grew to like the characters, particularly Tilo, who shows herself to be much more of a flawed human than any mystical fairy.

Highly recommended.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: "Naomi" Neutral Milk Hotel

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

11. Farahad Zama, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People

Mr. Ali, a recently-retired Muslim man living in a city in South India, finds he has too much time on his hands. So, what to do but open a marriage bureau? It's sort of like a dating service, but with an emphasis on caste instead of personality-matching quizzes (emphasis on looks and occupations are universal, though). Secondary characters include Mr. Ali's estranged son, Rehman, who is a human rights activist; Aruna, a poor Hindu girl he hires as a secretary who is secretly worried about her own marriage prospects; and, of course, Mrs. Ali.

This book is being marketed to fans of "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series, and I have to agree that if you like them, you will almost certainly like this new book as well. They share a similar simplistic-but-charming writing style, a focus on traditional values, and evocative descriptions of the beauty in rural and natural scenes. Zama's book is a bit marred by a heavy reliance on "As You Know, Bob" language to convey information about Indian weddings and marriages to the reader, but hey, if you don't know much about that topic, it's certainly an easy way to learn.

A fun, breezy book, with a very predictable happy ending. However, it's clearly aiming itself at an audience who's only looking for light reading, and it achieves its goal of being pleasant read.

Current Mood: busy

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10. Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

If you ever wanted to know the Mumbai slang terms for 'motherfucker', 'ass-fucker' 'sister-fucker', or just plain old 'fucker', well, this is the book for you!

More seriously, this enormous novel is the story of two men: Sartaj Singh, a world-weary, slightly corrupt, recently divorced, low-level policeman; and Ganesh Gaitonde, the head of an organized crime syndicate, and probably one of the most powerful and wealthy men in India. The novel opens with Singh receiving a phone call from an unknown source, who tells him that Gaitonde is in Mumbai and gives an address. When Singh arrives, he finds a strange building, a sort of concrete bunker; a short conversation between the two men via intercom later, the police break down the door and inside find Gaitonde, dead by his own hand.

The rest of the novel follows two threads. The first is (mostly) Singh's, who is given the assignment to figure out why Gaitonde was in Mumbai and what he was doing in that building. This half of the novel is a crime thriller, particularly as it picks up speed near the end as consequences and meanings start to come clear and events take on an urgency (I admit, I didn't figure out the mystery at all, and once the truth comes out, it's genuinely scary and exciting). Despite that, other characters occasionally speak, ones usually related to the plot, but who fill out the world of the book. I found a chapter from Singh's mother, remembering her childhood during Partition, particularly moving. Partition and the violence then show up repeatedly throughout the novel as a recurring theme. The second half of the story is Gaitonde's; he speaks in first person, directly to Singh, though it's never clear if this is meant to be a ghost, the proverbial "life flashing before your eyes as you die", or what. He retells the story of his life, beginning as a child without a name or past, up through his struggles to get his first few followers, the growth of his mob, gang-wars with rival organizations, several stints in jail, advancing to become an international figure, his dabbles with Bollywood, his struggle with faith, and finally the explanation of how he ended up in a small building in Mumbai and why he killed himself. I liked the Gaitonde sections better than the Singh ones, if just because Gaitonde appealed to me more as a character; he has a incredibly engrossing voice and point of view. And his story is just more exciting, at least until the discoveries Singh makes at the end. The tone of the novel ranges from melodramatic gun shoot-outs or spy adventures to high-minded discussions of religion and the meaning of good and evil. There's lot of sex and violence, but just as many epiphanies and golden moments, and some seriously beautiful turns of phrase.

Highly, highly recommended, though be warned: this is seriously a massive tome of a book (my copy had nearly a thousand pages), so don't start it if you're on a deadline for something.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

9. Gita Mehta, Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India

Snakes and Ladders is a book of short essays (very short; I'd guess the average was three pages) on the modern history of India, written to celebrate the country's fifty anniversary in 1997. If you don't know anything about modern India, I think this would be a great place to start. If you already are familiar with the topic, this is probably not really the book for you, although it is certainly written in a very engaging style.

My favorite essays were the ones that didn't deal with history or politics at all, but recounted personal moments from Mehta's own life: how her mother was out at a club at 3am, dancing the foxtrot and the tango, when she went into labor to have Gita; the effect on her parents' marriage of their involvement in the Freedom Movement; how she grew up with a love of reading, thanks to the booksellers of Calcutta.

Recommended as a lighthearted but educational read.

Current Mood: cheerful

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8. Anne Cherian, A Good Indian Wife

Leila is a teacher in a small South Indian town, who's beginning to worry that she might be too old to find a husband. Suneel is a doctor in San Francisco with a white girlfriend and no interest in returning to India. However, when Suneel goes to visit his sick grandfather, family machinations arrange a marriage between the two almost before they know what's happened. Now Leila has to adjust to her new husband and life in America, while Suneel strives to change as little as possible (including continuing the relationship with the girlfriend) and plots ways out of the marriage.

This book is a bit of a fairy tale, but despite that, it was a fun, quick read. I never felt very sympathetic to Suneel (HE'S TOTALLY A JERK, COME ON, HE DIDN'T BREAK UP WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND), but Leila is a great, interesting character, and I really enjoyed spending time with her. The writing is very good, and I was okay with the predictable plot for the sake of the vivid descriptions of food, clothing, sight-seeing, and Leila's gradual adjustments.

Not a deep book, but an enjoyable one. Recommended.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

5. The Mahabharata: a Modern Rendering by, um, it's complicated? Trditionally ascribed to Vyasa (who is also a character in the story itself), probably actually composed by multiple people at various points in time, this version translated and edited by Ramesh Menon.

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Indian epics (the other being the Ramayana), and I've been meaning to read it for ages. And I'm very happy that I've now done so! (Though I guess that means I need to read the Ramayana next.) I picked this translation off of a recommendation on this community, and though I can't compare it to any others, I did really enjoy it. It's quite long- two volumes of about 800 pages each- but it's a fantastic, compelling story, full of all kinds of awesome stuff: gods and secret identities and earth-destroying weapons and reincarnations and gender-switching and so much more!

To completely over-simplify the plot, there are two sets of cousins: the Pandavas, who consist of five brothers who are all the sons of gods, and the Kauravas, who consist of a hundred brothers who may be demons. The eldest son of each group wants to inherit the throne, and the machinations and secret assassination attempts and broken promises eventually lead to Kurukshetra and the Greatest War Ever, which causes the end of the age. My favorite characters were Amba, who holds such a grudge that she kills herself and is reincarnated as a warrior to kill her enemy; Draupadi, who marries all five of the Pandava brothers and is amazingly fierce; and Kunti, who is able to summon gods, and who uses this to sleep with them.

There's so many characters and sub-plots and side stories and so forth that it's hard to even describe the Mahabharata. But it's AWESOME, and I loved it.

Current Mood: cheerful

sumofparts.livejournal.com

( Cut for length and mild spoilers )

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

48. B. B. Lal, The Sarasvati Flows On: The Continuity of Indian Culture

A short, easy-to-read (except for one chapter which seems to come from another book entirely) pop non-fiction summary of the Indus or Harappan Civilization, a Bronze Age culture located in the modern countries of India and Pakistan, which had its own writing system, cities, and art, and traded with cultures as far away as Mesopotamia. This is a very nice introduction to the topic, which covers most of the main points and has lots of nice photographs. It's shorter and probably a better book for the non-academic audience than most other summaries of the Indus I know of; on the other hand, Lal is seriously influenced by his personal politics in choosing what and how to discuss. But for someone who is new to the topic, this would be a great book.

49. Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi's Nation: Homespun and Modern India

A really fascinating investigation of one aspect of the Indian Independence movement. Gandhi was highly in favor of khadi- homemade thread and cloth- and thought that everyone who wanted to see India out from under British rule should not only use and wear khadi exclusively, but should spend half an hour a day making it. He thought that this would restore dignity to the working class, as well as provide a way for India's economy to escape the influence of the British factory system. Needless to say, not everyone actually wanted to spend that much time spinning thread, and the debates around the topic resemble the modern arguments over buying local/fair-trade/organic/etc. Trivedi provides a great account of these debates, the way they changed over time, and how khadi continues to function in the Indian political sphere; she even includes political cartoons about it! This is a non-fiction academic book, but very accessible; highly recommended.

50. Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art

Calendar art (aka bazaar art aka chromolithographs aka poster art) is a particular style of vividly colored, mass-produced art popular in India, particularly in calendars and advertisements, usually depicting religious images. Jain's book takes this often-ignored art seriously, investigating multiple realms of the topic: who produces calendar art? who buys it? how has it changed over time? what do artists say about it? how does it circulate? Despite the subtitle, she really doesn't address the economy of it, but instead focuses on meanings and interpretations. This book is another non-fiction academic title, and one a bit harder to get into than Clothing Gandhi's Nation. But it does have lots of pretty pictures!

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: "Broken Glass" The Crystal Method

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

33. Gautam Malkani, Londonstani

This book was wonderful. The narrator is Jas, who used to be a bit of a geek, but now is very determined to be a true hard South Asian man, and the story is told through his inner monologue, complete with his worries with trying to fit in and learn the right slang. The slang gives the story so much rhythm and distinctiveness; it was really enjoyable to read. The beginning of the book seemed slow- lots of scenes about Jas and his crew hanging out, checking out ladies, getting into fights, making small-time trouble with stolen cellphones- but when the plot started to develop, it took off very quickly, bringing together threads I hadn't even noticed where developing.

Despite the very fun, rollicking plot, there are a lot of big themes developed: how tradition becomes tradition, cultural appropriation, youth rebellion and mainstream culture, the choices people make in terms of understanding culture. And the end! I did not see the end coming at all, but it makes me want to reread the entire book to look at it with that knowledge. I thought it worked really well with the themes of the book.

Very recommended!

Current Mood: busy

sairaali.livejournal.com

I'm awful at doing writeups, so this list has just been sitting on my desktop for ages making me feel guilty for not doing writeups.

Soo, I will just put the list up with brief one-liners on whether I liked it or not, and I'd be happy to discuss more in comments.

5) Silver Pheonix by Cindy Pon
Fantasy, adventure, romance, dragons, goddesses, intrigue! What's not to love?

6) Bodies in Motion by Maryanne Mohanraj
This is more of a series of interrelated short stories than a novel. The stories follow three generations of two families who immigrate from Sri Lanka to the US. It portrays a mix of different immigrant experiences, although nearly all of the characters are solidly middle or upper-middle class. The style is very ethereal and dreamy.

7) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
This has been reviewed here a million times. I enjoyed it, but found the casual sexism a bit grating.

8) My Life as a Rhombus by Varian Johnson
If I thought Oscar Wao had a few problematic scenes wrt to gender, holy wow, it was nothing compared to this. Neither the narrator nor any of the characters question the basic assumption that a woman needs a man to love her and that only a domineering man could possibly handle loving a strong independent woman. The story itself was well crafted and tightly written, but I couldn't get past the sexism.

9) Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor
Love! A young girl with the ability to speak to shadows struggles with her community's distrust and fear of female Shadow Speakers, a result of her estranged father's dictatorial and regressive policies. When her father is publicly beheaded, her world is turned inside out, and she embarks on a quest of self-discovery that takes her far away from home, during which she discovers a major military plot against her home.

Girls with cat eyes! Talking camels! Magic plants that grow into houses! A girl meets a strange orphan boy with his own powers and secrets on her quest without a queasy romance subplot being introduced! Again, what's not to love?

10)And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women Ed: Muneez Shamshie
Definitely would recommend this. Like any anthology, some of the stories are so-so, some are fantastic.

And I know this comm is focused on books by POC, but I know there are a bunch of SFF fans here and I'd like to make some anti-recs. I found the following books at the $1 ARC sale at Wiscon, and I suggest giving them all a miss for skeevy race issues.
Stone Voice Rising by C Lee Tocci - pseudo-Natives with magic powers just for being Native, and also misappropriational mishmash of at least six different tribes' religious beliefs, that I could recognize. Kokopelli become Popokelli, a demented fae creature who betrays his species and sells out to the (literal) Devil.
Kop and Ex-Kop by Warren Hammond - Locals on a backwater economically depressed planet are being murdered by a serial killer from the orbiting space station, which has technology centuries advanced of what is available planetside. Oh and incidentally, all the space dwellers have perfect milky white skin and the planet dwellers are all dark. Bleck.

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Entries tagged with south asia

"A Rising Man" by Abir Mukherjee

Misc non-fiction and some poetry

The Hope Factory, Lavanya Sankaran, 2013

2. Sarita Mandanna, Tiger Hills

1. Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India

14. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

11. Farahad Zama, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People

10. Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games

9. Gita Mehta, Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India

Anne Cherian, A Good Indian Wife

5. The Mahabharata: a Modern Rendering - Ramesh Menon

27-32 Rawi Hage, Octavia E Butler, Qiu Xiaolong, Shaun Tan, Aravind Adiga, Karin Lowachee

48-50: Three non-fiction books

Gautam Malkani, Londonstani

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