Tag Archives: books

Review: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

In September 2006, in the thick of the United States’ war in Iraq, a man stands day after day in the shadows of a room at the Museum of Modern Art, watching an installation of Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down and stretched to a 24-hour videowork. When the book opens, it is the second to last day of the screening, and he is watching the infamous shower scene with a devotional, and yet dispassionate, engrossment. He has spent five days immersed in this altered reality. We don’t encounter this man again until the epilogue, when weeks have passed in the lives of our protagonists, but he is still there, in decelerated time. It is the sixth and final day of the installation and when he leaves this room, his reality isn’t the only one that will be permanently lacerated.

At just under 120 pages, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega has the effect of a small, slick razor – the cut itself is brief, the sting far more lasting. A disturbing yet remarkably accessible novel, it leads to ponderings about human consciousness and conscience, heavy and even dark subjects, without resorting to labored rhetoric. The “war intellectual” Richard Elster has retreated into the desert upon retirement, which is where an experimental filmmaker named Jim Finley seeks him out. Finley wants to make a single-take documentary featuring an unscripted monologue by Elster, who in spite of his reluctance has invited the filmmaker to visit. The visit runs into weeks of dialogue and Scotch, and Finley stops counting the days, until Elster’s daughter Jessie also comes to stay, and an inexplicable event throws things into disarray.

Slim in pages and sparse in its prose, for a story largely about the distortion of time and space, Point Omega zips by rapidly. This makes it all the more successful; unlike the prolonged Psycho of its prologue and epilogue, it saturates the mind far quicker – densely packed as it is with ideas that might be described as almost post-apocalyptic. Having left his work under the Bush regime disillusioned (“They think they’re sending an army into a place on a map”), Elster’s mind turns increasingly toward concepts of reality and how it is experienced. Once a scholar who wanted the profound simplicity of a “haiku war”, and who traced the etymology of conflict jargon, he has begun to believe that language itself has lost its purpose, and that humanity seeks to devolve into a point of lower consciousness. Out in the desert, he aspires to a sort of disappearance into the landscape – a wish that proves to be ironic.

What this novel owes to cinema is reflected not only in elements of plot detail, but in its entire mood and pacing. It is not so much the gothic horror of Hitchcock that DeLillo takes as influence here, but modern films with a dystopian sense of foreboding, evoking, among others, the surreal desert landscapes of Bruno Dumont’s 29 Palms, or the unnerving noir of a David Lynch work.

Point Omega is a formidable novel, and deceptively enjoyable. Absorbed by the concepts of modern existence it presents, one forgets that the realities and probabilities it describes are neither fictional nor of a time other than ours. Like Elster, who believes that cities are built to keep out “the terror” (even as they are the arenas on which terror, as we know it today, plays out in the world), and yet is utterly unprepared to see it magnified and manifested in the desert, one emerges from this book disoriented by its power.

An edited version appeared in today’s The New Sunday Express.

News and Poems

First, the poems.

“August, The Year After” is in issue 1.3 of White Whale Review, an online literary journal.

“Possession” is in Volume 7 of A Cafe in Space, a print journal on and inspired by Anais Nin, out February 21. Although I hadn’t written this piece with Nin in mind, she has been a big influence, and I was honoured that the editor solicited my work.

“Chennai” appeared in The Lit’s Muse quarterly, also a print journal, in November.

“Cassandra’s Ghazal” will appear is in the third issue of Clementine, a web journal of persona poetry and photography some time this month. I’ll update this link when it does. (updated)

The Poetry With Prakriti Festival has also just published its first anthology, a collection featuring work by poets who read in its 2007 and 2008 editions. I have three poems, “This Hummingbird Heart”, “How To Eat A Wolf” and “Frida to Sharanya” (all of which were in Witchcraft) in this book, which will be launched later this month.

And the news: I was shortlisted for a Toto Award in Creative Writing this year. I didn’t win, but I did have a nice weekend in Bangalore, attending the awards ceremony, hanging out and shopping, and just enjoying the little break. I also received a nice Special Jury Commendation, which reads as follows: “[her poems are] sensitive and insightful, with strong images and metaphors… moments of intense beauty… a lot of promise, a lot of passion”. The winners were playwrights Abhishek Majumdar and Ram Ganesh Kamatham; the other two shortlisted nominees (from 158 applicants) were Joppan George and Hemant Mohapatra. The Totos are given annually to Indian artists under 30 who show potential in creative writing, photography or music, in the memory of the late Toto Vellani.

On the flip side of the coin, I judged IIT Saarang’s poetry competition this year. I tell you, this side of the coin is far less stressful. Hehe. Can’t remember if I mentioned being a featured poet at the first Poetry With Prakriti Slam in December, but ditto – I wouldn’t have wanted to compete. I always balk at the thought.

I’ve becoming increasingly lazy about my blog, which explains why I’ve just collated all these new links and happenings into a single post instead of letting you know what’s new as I go along. The fanpage on Facebook gets updated more quickly, and most of what’s above has already been posted there. And then there is Twitter. I’ve been meaning to redesign the blog – perhaps that might motivate me about it again.

Finally, I’m always open to doing small readings, if I’m in your city, and interviews for your personal blogs. If you’d like to discuss either, please drop me a mail at sharanya(dot)manivannan(at)gmail.com(dot)com. I’m a little curmudgeonly, and if you just leave a comment or (god forbid) tweet at or Facebook me, I will probably ignore it.

Review of Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories edited by Ruchir Joshi

Erotica out of South Asia, or South Asian erotica? The two are certainly different categories: and one of the nice things about Electric Feather is that it coquettishly skirts the labeling. Its stories are both culturally contextual and culturally irrelevant – and that is as good erotica should be: a dance between fantasy and the familiar.

Fittingly, then, the collection opens with that staple of the Indian erotic imagination – the wedding night. But it isn’t newlyweds securing their “official penetration permit” who romp through Samit Basu’s story – in fact, we hardly meet them at all. Most of the stories remain quite close to home in that regard – for instance, Sonia Jabbar’s “The Advocate” deals with communal tensions and the allure of the other, but in perhaps to political a way to incite pleasure. Sheba Karim’s “Heavenly Ornaments” is powerful; while it deals with the typical setting of women within a patriarchal home, it is subversive – and the subversive always carries the potential to excite.

The theme of the familiar and the fantastic continues in Electric Feather’s best story, Paromita Vohra’s deliciously delivered “Tourists”. Here, the perfectly ordinary Paolomi and a Bollywood star find themselves transported and time-warped to a lush holiday destination in 1977, where they fall into a sweet and steamy liaison. Vohra clearly writes for the female reader, with a deeply knowing sensuality – instantly recognizable and very rewarding.

Joshi’s own “Arles” is also straightforwardly hot, with surprisingly lyrical turns: “She moves his hand away from his penis, holding it herself now and moving the point of its arch – under the jaw, then on to her long neck, and then touching it to her earlobe, unseeing, as if putting on an earring without a mirror”. Deconstructionism and desire meet in Parvati Sharma’s “The Quilt”, a cute and clever nod to the written word as sex toy: the women make love while discussing Ismat Chugtai.

Niven Govinden’s “The Cat” and Rana Dasgupta’s “Swimming Pool” are both edgy pieces, and bold editorial choices. Govinden’s story of lovers in Amsterdam has violence, a hint of bestiality, and more; Dasgupta’s novel excerpt carries similar strains of contemporary hipness. They are inclusions which give the anthology a well-rounded feel: an admission that sex is never just about bodies and arousal, that it is complicated, cerebral, perverse and pervasive.

Jeet Thayil’s “Missing Person Last Seen” might be regarded as sexy in the way that New York City, where the story is set, is regarded as sexy, in its aesthetic sensibility, but the angst of its characters is anything but. Kamila Shamsie’s “Love’s Sunset” plays with poetic metaphor quite beautifully – but ultimately sticks to too cloyingly predictable a romantic storyline to stir the senses. Abeer Hoque’s “Confessions”, the collection’s only essay, disappointed only because a voice this forthcoming and engaging could write terrific erotica, but for some reason settled instead for a brief sketch. In a post-blogosphere world, the mere insinuation of autobiography alone shouldn’t be enough to titillate.

It’s interesting then that two authors whose previous works have been noted for their sensuality and/or sexuality, Tishani Doshi and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, both surprise us with new terrain: non-confessional stories about inexperience. In Madhavan’s story, a 27-year old man loses his virginity, courtesy of a colleague. In Doshi’s, a matronly woman in her first relationship pleasures herself on a train, text messaging her married lover through the night.

Electric Feather has its ups and downs, but this is also its strength: it is a nice mix of the hardcore and the highbrow. The erotic is an intensely subjective thing, and there seems to be enough here to tickle most (but not all) fancies. But above all, there is aplenty here for the reader keen on some good, light literature from the subcontinent.

An edited version appeared in today’s The New Sunday Express.

Book Review: My Name Is Will by Jess Winfield

One of the best things about Shakespeare is that he isn’t a sacred cow – rather, he is more like the last carcass in a shortage. Every bit of his body of work can be put to use in some way – his writing finds extended life in everything from parody to purist portrayal, allegory to animation. You must forgive this slaughterhouse imagery – in the brilliantly blasphemous My Name Is Will, we find the young Shakespeare in much similar circumstances: chasing daily after hens in his father’s butcher shop, which are promptly decapitated, divided, and dined upon by his family.

We also find him, invariably, disarming the tunics off medieval lasses, lost in the arms of a hallucinogenic trip or taking up arms against persecution. But the teenage William isn’t the only one whose misadventures with politics, women and drugs we encounter. Enter William Shakespeare Greenberg, aka Willie, American graduate student in 1986 California, who’s having trouble getting his thesis on his namesake finished. His distractions include his professor’s alluring assistant Dashka, an unfettered relationship with the activist Robin, Oedipal issues and making sure that he gets a giant psychedelic mushroom delivered and paid for without getting incarcerated.

Cleverly juggling the plot between William and Willie in alternating chapters, My Name Is Will finds the two young men at stages when they are about to come into their own. Both are at turning points with women – will duty or desire make the decision? Professionally too, both linger at the threshold of their destinies. And both are deeply engaged in the politics of their time. As with all eras in which those in power wield it without moderation, the counterculture thrives – and both Will and Willie are fortunate to be a part of these dissident environments, and indeed it shapes their fates.

And there is drama aplenty – serious cliffhanger-style drama at that. Winfield is astute in his construction of the novel, leaving protagonists dangling so precariously between chapters that the book is rendered utterly unputdownable. With its ingenious, engrossing narrative style and its generous servings of sex with a side of wit, the book strikes a winning note.

William finds himself in the possession of a sacred relic that leads him to uncover a clandestine network of Catholics in the authoritarian Protestant Elizabethan regime (centuries later, Willie’s thesis postulates that Shakespeare was secretly Catholic). Willie has his own sacred relic – the giant mushroom, which he too must ensure gets delivered into the right hands – at the risk of losing his own freedoms under President Reagan’s crackdown on illicit substances. Though running on different trajectories in space and time, at points, largely owing to the transcendental effect of the said illicit substances, the two lives entwine and intersect.

My Name Is Will is a delight from start to finish. Its puns are deliciously bawdy in true Shakespearean style – Winfield never overshoots the humour, and in fact the most audaciously wicked joke in the book is such a subtle one it might escape a less dirty-minded reader.

Also to the author’s credit, the impressive amount of research into the Bard’s works and milieu that clearly went into this novel, as well as his own extensive study of the texts, never overbears on its entertainment value. And rare is a funny book that raises legitimate questions about civil freedoms, free speech, moral policing and government (even twenty and four hundred and twenty years after its protagonists struggle with them), without losing its punchlines to polemics. My Name Is Will is a terrific novel – funny, incisive and original. Despite its irreverence, or perhaps because of it, it captures the spirit of Shakespeare’s enduring appeal and comes closer to greatness than many self-proclaimed tributes.

An edited version appeared in today’s The New Sunday Express.

Review: Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong (trans. Howard Goldblatt)

Published as part of The Myths series, which retells timeless classics from around the world in the words of some of the best contemporary writers, Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong recreates a two-millennia old legend from China about a woman who travels hundreds of miles in search of her husband, who has been conscripted in the construction of the Great Wall.

Like all of Peach Village, the orphan Binu was brought up to believe that tears are taboo, a conviction that took hold after 300 of its residents had been executed for having wept at the funeral of someone who had fallen from the favour of the King. The women of the village devised new ways to cry, which would leave their eyes dry but their breasts, ears, lips (or which ever body part was most beautiful) wet with tears. Binu wept through her hair, as she does on the day that she discovers that her husband Qiliang has disappeared.

When she learns that her husband has been taken to Great Swallow Mountain, to work on the construction of the staggeringly ambitious Great Wall, she becomes determined to take a coat to him so that he can stay warm through the winter. Warned that this act will carry her death by sorceresses and shunned and envied by her co-villagers for her stubbornness and peerless devotion, Binu sets forth on a journey of a thousand li.

Along the way, she is assisted by a blind frog, whom she suspects is a reincarnated mother looking for her missing son. But she is also accosted by a group of half-deer children, encounters cities where people are sold as “large livestock”, and is chained to a coffin, having been sold off herself as a dead man’s wife. Her weeping takes on legendary scope – she is hired at one point to weep into a vat because her tears contain the five tastes needed for a pharmacy. It overwhelms her to the point where every part of her body begins to cry, and she journeys the thousand li with “eyes dripping like house eaves after rain”, leaving a stream wherever she walks or crawls. As the story proceeds, we understand that Binu did not set out on her adventure under any grandiose illusions of success, but because it was the only thing that, in the face of her loss, she knew how to do.

In the preface, Su Tong says that “Binu’s story is a legend not so much about a woman at the bottom of society, but rather a legend about status and social class”. Perhaps this accounts for the matter-of-fact nature of his retelling, where another writer may have emphasized the mystical and metaphysical nature of events in the story including rebirth, animal familiars, prophecy and the like. Yet Binu’s loss, as all who have endured pain will know, is profoundly intimate. From the work of scholars such as Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Carl Jung, we know that myths exist for the purpose of deconstruction – not in a literary sense, but as a means of projecting our private lives onto narrative structures that allow us to see the bigger picture even as we endure intensely personal experiences.

The story of Binu, in that scheme of things, functions as an allegory on the necessity of grief, and how far one may need to go to truly access – and release – it, against every self-preservative instinct that may prevent it. The great wall that ultimately shatters under the weight of her loss is the one that had been raised by her upbringing, which forbade all but the most discreet, controlled displays of such emotion. Weep, the myth seems to instruct the reader. As Binu herself says to one who questions if she too is dead – “I am still crying, and that proves I am alive.”

An edited version appeared in The New Sunday Express.

My Friend Sancho And Amit Varma In Chennai

I’ll be in conversation with Amit Varma about his debut novel, My Friend Sancho, on Monday evening. My Friend Sancho was longlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. Amit Varma is a winner of the Bastiat Prize, was named one of Business Week’s 50 Most Powerful People In India, and publishes India Uncut.

Details about the event:

May 18, 6.30 to 9pm

Landmark Bookstore, Nungambakkam, Chennai

Prakriti Foundation and The Park Present… Witchcraft

Prakriti Foundation in association with The Park is delighted to invite you

for the launch of Witchcraft, a book of poems by Sharanya Manivannan

on Friday, March 13 2009 at 6 p.m.

Venue: Leather Bar, The Park, Anna Salai, Chennai – 600 006

Dress code: Black

Praise for the book:

“Sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife,” Ng Yi-Sheng, winner of the 2008 Singapore Literature Prize

‘Bloody, sexy, beguiling as in a dance with veils,” from the foreword by Indran Amirthanayagam, winner of the 1994 Paterson Prize and 2006 Juegos Florales

[Update: ABOUT THE DRESS CODE
I’ve been getting enquiries about the dress code. Why have one? Because we’re poking fun at the “Witchcraft” connotations. That’s why Friday the 13th and black outfits. Please remember that it’s *black* and not *black tie*, so wear a tee shirt by all means. It’s fine. :) ]

Sangam House Reading in Chennai

The second of our two public readings for the inaugural season of the Sangam House writers’ residency will take place today in Chennai at Pasha, The Park Hotel at 7.30pm. Special guest Tom Alter joins Salma, Joshua Furst, N. S. Koenings, Mridula Koshy and Sharanya Manivannan. Writer bios are here.

Witchcraft Is A Pick Of The Year!

The Straits Times, Singapore, asked several people what their favourite book from 2008 was. Ng Yi-Sheng, whom I hugely admire as a poet and performer, picked Witchcraft. Here’s what he said…

(The italics are mine — that’s a line that will sit under my tongue all day as I savour it slowly, grateful  for once that I had not thought of it myself, for then it could not be said about my book)

Ng Yi-Sheng, 28, writer and winner of this year’s Singapore Literature Prize for his debut poetry collection, Last Boy

“I hardly ever read books as soon as they come out, but my favourite among the few I did read was Sharanya Manivannan’s poetry collection, Witchcraft.
Manivannan is a poet and performer, born and living in India but raised in Malaysia, where she was involved in a lot of activism against the government’s destruction of Hindu temples.
Witchcraft is her first poetry collection. She and I bonded at the last Singapore Writers Festival, so she left me a copy at indie bookstore BooksActually where it’s also currently available ($25 without GST).
The book is sensuous and spiritual, delicate and dangerous and as full as the moon reflected in a knife. Manivannan manages to be deeply grounded in her Tamil heritage while also subtly digesting global iconography from the Chinese, Balinese and Mexicans.
Her voice sounds modern and ancient at the same time, supremely confident as it speaks of desire, the body and language.”

Talking Books In Tehelka

I did Tehelka‘s “The Word” bookmeme for their latest issue. The online link is here. The print one has yet another caricature of me in witch which I look older and pointy-chinned, as I always seem to in caricatures! :)