Sen and sensibility: Detectives Beyond Borders schmoozes three Nobel Prize winners

In honor of Nobel Prize announcement season, I bring back this post, which I promise to update the next time I have coffee with a Nobel laureate.

 ========= 

The number of Nobel laureates with whom I have exchanged pleasant words grew to three this week when I attended a lecture by Amartya Sen, who won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1998 for his work on poverty, famine, and welfare economics.

"You can't have a humane society without considerations beyond your own interests," Sen told his audience at the Free Library of Philadelphia, and if that's a surprise from an economist, consider Wikipedia's summation of the economics classic with which Sen began his lecture. That book's author

"critically examines the moral thinking of his time, and suggests that conscience arises from social relationships. His goal in writing the work was to explain the source of mankind's ability to form moral judgements, in spite of man's natural inclinations towards self-interest. [He] proposes a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior."

If you know as little as I do about the literature of economics, you may be surprised to learn that the economist in question is Adam Smith — you know, the invisible-hand, self-interest guy (The book is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Penguin Classics edition of which comes with an introduction by Sen.)

I won't bore you with statistics and numbers, because Sen didn't bore me with them. Rather, he made the simple case that social factors, ethics, and indices of social well-being and misery all have a place at the economist's table, and he did so without turning preachy or dogmatic. In short, he's the kind of professor who might have made me an economics major had we crossed paths when I was in college.

Sen moves beyond the traditional purview of economics when he talks and writes about India, where he was born in 1933. His essays in The Argumentative Indian make the case that dissent, heterodoxy, and respect for opposing viewpoints have been integral to Indian culture at least from the time of Arjuna's debate with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita and constitute a touchstone of India's present and its future. And that constitutes his rebuttal to the chauvinist, nationalist Hindutva movement in Indian politics, whose apparently organized campaign on Amazon has done so much to generate interest in Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History.

"Oh, yes! They have attacked me!" Sen said as he signed my copy of The Argumentative Indian.

"Be proud of your one-star reviews!" I replied. If the line of autograph-seekers behind me had not stretched a fair way down a hallway, we'd have high-fived.

 (My previous most personal contact with a Nobel winner came in 1986, when I sipped coffee with Dario Fo, the Italian actor/playwright, who ordered decaf because he needed sleep. He regarded his envelope of Sanka with suspicion before tearing, pouring, stirring, and sipping. Then he made a face, shook his head sadly, and said in the one language we could speak with something approaching mutual comprehension, "Détestable!"

(My third Nobel encounter was more memorable for the beautiful, philo-Semitic water polo fan in line behind me as we waited for Isaac Bashevis Singer to sign our books.  "Tell him something in Yiddish!" she said. Alas, the moment did not mark the beginning of a torrid fling.)

***

Sen's dynamic view of the Sanskrit classics sent me in search of The Mahābhārata. To my delight, the opening of that ancient book suggests that it may be as glorious a celebration of storytelling as The Thousand and One Nights.  I doubt if I'll write a complete review any time soon, though. The Mahābhārata is variously said to be seven, 10, or 11 times as a long as The Iliad and The Odyssey put together.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bollywood goes to Hollywood: DBB watches Kaante

I watched Kaante (2002) at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles this week. A few well-chosen and well-executed Bollywood production numbers helped make the movie's 2 1/2 hours fly by. Perhaps more heist movies should incorporate such numbers.

The major characters were all good, as were some of the minor ones. The solution to the movie's central mystery is arbitrary, but that's a red herring; the question drives the movie. The answer is beside the point.

The movie is in Hindi, liberally interspersed with English. All but one of the lead characters speaks both languages, and the script turns the linguistic duality into plot points both serious and comic. The film was shot in Los Angeles and incorporates several picturesque Los Angeles locations, among which is not, as far as I can tell, the Bradbury Building.

The New Beverly is Quentin Tarantino's theater, and Tarantino has been been quoted as rating Kaante high among movies influenced by his own Reservoir Dogs. I suspect that the occasional waves of what sounded like knowing laughter at the New Beverly reflected the audience's recognition of particular nods to Tarantino's movie, but knowledge of Reservoir Dogs is no prerequisite to enjoying Kaante.
 
© Peter Rozovsky 2017

You do that Urdu you sure do so well: A look at Indo-Pak crime writer Ibne Safi

As I continue my reading of Indian history, here's a repost about an Indo-Pakistani crime writer.

============

  I don't know about you, but I can't resist a crime novel whose main action begins with a food fight in a night club:

"A couple of screws in Qasim's brain mechanism came loose, and the very next moment a plate full of meat and watery sauce hit the young man in the face."

 That's from The Laughing Corpse, sixty-second of the late Urdu-language crime writer Ibne Safi's 125 Jasusi Dunya ("The World of Detection" or "The World of Espionage") novels about the aristocratic Col. Ahmad Kamal Faridi (an inspector earlier in the series) and his acid-tongued sidekick, Hameed. (The name Qasim may be mere coincidence, but my favorite line from The Thousand Nights and a Night is "Your wit is as heavy as Abu Qasim's slippers!")

 Blaft Publications of Chennai, India; and Berkeley, California; has translated four of the Jasusi Dunya books into English. The Laughing Corpse has its slapstick moments, but it also has a cool, mysterious, manipulative protagonist in Faridi, and a surprisingly caustic sidekick in Hameed. Most of all, Ibne Safi knew how to create suspense and head-scratching mystery.

Ibne Safi began his writing in India in the early 1940s and continued from Pakistan after the partition of British India in 1947. He wrote through the 1970s and died in 1980. Like many pulp writers of the Indian subcontinent, he was prolific. He wrote more than a hundred titles each in Jasusi Dunya and his other main series, plus poetry and satire.

Read more about the author at the Ibne Safi site. Read more about the fantastically broad and colorful world of Indian pulp writing at Blaft's Web site and in the informative editor's and translator's introductions to the books.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Indian crime and proto-crime

(Eighteenth- or nineteenth-century painting
from a classic Hindu proto-crime story.)

I've neglected crime fiction recently in favor of Indian history in the form of Ramachandra Guha, both his essays about important persons and themes in India's 20th-century history and his fat, highly readable volume India After Gandhi. (Is it enough for weighty volumes of history to be "fat" and "highly readable," or is it mandatory that they be called "magisterial"?) In any case, while I burrow deeper into Guha's highly readable majesty, here's an old post about a prolific Indian crime writer that includes some thoughts on his country's literary classics.

===============

 More good ancillary material from The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, this time from a Q&A with Rajesh Kumar:

"Some people don't think crime novels count as literature. My answer to them is that the first crime novel in this world is the Mahabharatham — which has every imaginable sort of intrigue — and the next is the Ramayanam. The great epics themselves depend on rape, molestation, abduction and murder for their plots. It makes me laugh when I am accused of spoiling society with my crime novels."

It is nice to see that an Indian crime writer faces the same moralistic scorn that some of his Western counterparts do. It's nice, too, to see two Hindu epics in the ranks of the world's great proto-crime stories (click link, then scroll down).

Kumar also laments India's poor performance in the country's favorite sport ("Our cricket team is too busy advertising soft drinks, having affairs with film actresses and abandoning their families. Where is the time for practice?") and offers a disarming answer to questioner who asks: "I am suffering from hair loss due to stress. Do you worry about such things?"

"Why should I worry," Kumar replies, "about you losing your hair?"

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

United States of India

I'm reading a book about the formative years of one of the world's great nation-states. The discussion of that nation-states's constitution and how it came to be invokes tension between states' rights and centralization, and political schemes that sought to balance the ideal of democracy with wariness of that thing called "the people."

The word federalism finds its way into the discussion, and the author offers compelling portraits of the men at the heart of the country's formation. I learned who the thinkers were, who gave the most inspiring speeches, and who were the gifted administrators who held everything together.

The country's most revered figure is quoted as having said he would like to see a woman from the most despised class as the new nation's first president, however, so I knew I was no longer in the United States. In other respects, though, the process and problems of constitution formation were strikingly similar in India and the U.S.  It's no wonder that the book quotes one scholar as calling India's constitution "perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated in Philadelphia in 1787" — three short blocks from where I sit as I write this post.

The book — India After Gandhi, by Ramachandra Guha —  offers other surprises, as well (to me, at least). One that might resonate with readers today is that a leading voice against reserving seats in the Constituent Assembly for India's leading minority — Muslims — was herself a Muslim. That's right, herself.  Separate electorates, said Begun Aizaz Rasul, are "a self-destructive weapon which separates the minorities from the majority for all time."

I see no reason yet why anyone who admires the great-spirited secular idealism of the American founders should not admire the similar qualities and the people who advanced them in modern India. As for what eventually happens to those qualities, well, don't spoil my fun. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Satyajit Ray, crime writer

You may know Satyajit Ray as India's most famous movie director, but he was also a crime writer, composing a series of wildly popular novels and stories about a sleuth named Feluda. The stories, which appeared from the mid-1960s on, combined wit, liberal sprinklings of Holmes and Poirot, and a sharp eye for contemporary social problems.  I suspect one could do worse than reading these stories as an introduction to modern India. Or at least I think so based on the novella A Killer in Kailash, which first appeared in 1973

First, the story's form. Ray read and admired Sherlock Holmes, and A Killer in Kailash is full of delightful nods to Holmes and to Hercule Poirot. Feluda's cousin Tapesh narrates the stories in an amused, sometimes bemused, manner, like a Bengali Watson. Feluda, surprised by Tapesh's  failure to grasp a clue's significance, tells him that "Even the few grey cells you had seem to be disappearing, my boy. Stop worrying and go to sleep."

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

So Ray was a Christie-loving, Doyle-worshiping Anglophile, right?  Not so fast.  A Killer in Kailash is about the despoiling of India's cultural heritage for gain, specifically the theft of a yakshi's head for sale to an American collector. (This made rub my chin thoughtfully, for only weeks before I had ogled and taken pictures of a gorgeous example—in an American collection, above/right.)

So Ray was a Hindu nationalist, right?  Not so fast. At various times in the story, Feluda admits he can't speak Hindi, and Tapesh overhears two men arguing, but "They were probably speaking in Marathi, for I couldn't understand a word."  When Feluda and company board a plane for Bombay, Tapesh notes that none of them had visited that city before. Without anything like didactic intent, the story is a refreshing reminder of the glorious d-------y of Indian society.

A Killer in Kailash offers amused references to Hare Krishnas,  and, quite naturally, a vocabulary lesson or two. Chowkidar (from the Urdu language) is a fine word for night watchman. I'd always liked cheroot, but I never knew until looking it up that the word derives from Tamil, yet another language spoken in India (also in Sri Lanka).  How can a simple detective novella be so thought-provoking, so educational, and so much fun?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Talaash, India, and language(s)

The 2012 Indian suspense/noir/police movie Talaash includes too much supernatural wiffle and at least one crappy pop song. I’d have known the song was crappy even without the English subtitles – soaring bathos comes across just as well in Hindi as it does in English.

English also comes across in Hindi, the actors' lines sprinkled with please and thank you and investigation and case and Shut up! Just shut up! in a way that makes me not chauvinistic about the primacy of my language, but tickled by the flexibility of theirs.The mix of languages is beguiling. I love it as much as I love those multilingual, multigenerational conversations I hear in which the elders speak Chinese or Spanish, and their interlocutors answer in English, and everyone speaks in calm and perfect mutual comprehension.

I'm not sure what India's ruling Hindu nationalists think about such matters, but I like the headlines that accompanied an essay by the author Vikram Chandra some years ago: "The Cult of Authenticity: India’s cultural commissars worship `Indianness' instead of art." (Read about Chandra in these Detectives Beyond Borders posts about language and India.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Mahābhārata, Part I: The big ... everything

Photos by your humble blogkeeper

The Mahābhārata consists of 100,000 verses plus long passages of prose and, by one account, 1,660,020,000 people die in it. Complete translations, near as such a thing is possible, fill 18 or 19 volumes.

My favorite character so far (Dhritarāshtra, a king in one of the two family factions in the war that forms the work's core), starts to complain, and, this being the Mahābhārata, he goes on complaining for 60 verses, each ending with: O Sanjaya I had no hope of success. The song is a kind of reverse "Dayenu," and the rhythm induced by the repetition is beguiling. Complaints are a marvelous way to tell a story, invested each reported fact or incident with urgency.

Indian have always loved big numbers, so no surprise in any of this. (They also loved grammar [they were thousands of years ahead of the West in the study of linguistics], and ancient Indian art and literature have more sex in them than any other ancient literature and art I know.) 

What is the biggest number you know of in literature or science? (If it ends in -illion, it has so be a real number. No bajillions allowed.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Cop shows that get too personal

John McFetridge would likely disagree with that sign's sentiment, at least if talk turned to TV cop shows.

His latest post at Do Some Damage has me shifting uncomfortably in my seat because it hits hard at the cop-show myths of the bad-ass loner and his apparent opposite, the empathetic hero. This entails questioning the primacy of the lone-wolf maverick hero and the assumption that being a police officer is a bad job, among other crime-television commonplaces.

(Ste. Catherine Street)

And once that's been done, what's left? If I wrote crime fiction, especially police procedurals, and I read McFetridge's piece, I'd be thinking, "Am I nothing but a human recycling machine?" I've read the man's three novels, and I now understand a lot better why they have group protagonists.

For reasons of full disclosure: I know McFetridge, he's a Detectives Beyond Borders friend, and we are fellow natives of the city that produces the world's best bagels. Connoisseurs know that if it's not from Montreal, it's just a hunk of dough.

***

Over on the other side of the world, if you happen to be in New Delhi on Friday, Blaft Publications and Tranquebar Press invite to the release of four English translations of novels by the late, great Urdu author Ibne Safi.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Discarding the Post-Colonial Other: A Vindication of Plain Speaking

I'm going to quote two excerpts today, and I hope their bracing common sense will excuse the fact that they have nothing to do with crime fiction:

"For at a time when ten thousand dissertations and whole shelves of Subaltern Studies have carefully and ingeniously theorized about orientalism and the imagining of the Other (all invariably given titles with a present participle and a fashionable noun of obscure meaning—Gendering the Colonial Paradigm, Constructing the Imagined Other, Othering the Imagined Construction, and so on—not one PhD has ever been written from the Mutiny Papers, no major study has ever systematically explored its contents."

and

"The British histories, as well as a surprising number of those written in English in post-colonial India, tended to use only English-language sources, padding out the gaps, in the case of more recent work, with a thick cladding of post-Saidian theory and jargon."

Those are from the introduction to William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal, about the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the fall of India's Mughal empire, and the touching fate of its last emperor. I had not previously been interested in that part of history, but a colleague recommended the book, and it looks so far like a vindication of how thrilling history can be when buttressed by solid research and free of reductive intellectual bullying.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Tamil pulp

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction promises "mad scientists!", "hard-boiled detectives!", "vengeful goddesses!", "murderous robots!", "scandalous starlets!" and "drug-fueled love affairs!", and if that doesn't sound like hours of innocent springtime pleasure, I don't know what does.

I'll get to the authors later, the prolific Rajesh Kumar among them. For now, some highlights of translator Pritham K. Chakravarthy's immensely informative introduction. The author Sujatha's detectives, she writes, "were suddenly speaking a kind of Tamil that was much closer to our Anglicized language than anything we had seen before on paper."

Tamil pulp stories were published in weekly magazines, and "households would meticulously collect the stories serialized in these weeklies and have them hard-bound to serve as reading material during the long, hot summer vacations."

The introduction takes brief excursions into the ancient history of the Tamil language, its revival in a twentieth-century literary renaissance, and separate traditions of the British "penny dreadful" and the American crime novel that all contribute to the Tamil pulp tradition.

"From the days when our English reading consisted of Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys up until we grew out of Earl (sic) Stanley Gardner, Arthur Hailey, and Hadley Chase," Chakravarthy writes, "we also had a parallel world of Ra. Ki. Rangarajan, Rajendra, Kumar ... "

Parallel worlds. Literature that readers like so much, they collect and bind it themselves. An ancient language revivified by contact with English. Sounds to me as if interesting things are happening in Tamil fiction.

==========

(Read an excerpt from The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction and browse Detectives Beyond Borders' discussion of Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A beyond-borders crime event I'd have liked to see

(National Portrait Gallery, London)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Rajesh Kumar: Man of (more than) a thousand novels

(Detectives Beyond Borders is not an official site for Rajesh Kumar's novels; the photo is from emagaz.in)

Monday's post about Surender Mohan Pathak's The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist led to a nice note from Rakesh Khanna of Blaft Publications about a truly prolific author.

Rajesh Kumar is said to have written more than 1,500 short novels and 2,000 stories. Here are some snippets from an article about “the superstar of the Tamil pulp fiction industry”:

"The classic Tamil pulp novel runs between 100 pages and 150 pages and is printed on cheap paper as a monthly magazine. ... The flavours of this genre are uniformly sensational but otherwise eclectic. They can include the science-fiction thrillers—more fiction than science—of Kumar, the romances of Ramani Chandran, the detective knockabouts of Pattukottai Prabhakar and Suba, the religious tales of Indira Soundara Rajan and the social dramas of Pushpa Thangadorai.

“`But many authors have, of late, shifted to writing for films and television,' Kumar says. `Not me, though. I’m allergic to cinema, and I don’t want to move to Chennai. Plus, I find these movie producers highly immoral people.'”

And, perhaps most interesting:

"For those treading water financially, a teashop will even act as an informal lending library, charging Rs2 to take a book home for a day or two.

"It is heartening that people who cannot afford a Rs15 novel are still willing to put down Rs2 to read, and Kumar takes no little pride in that fact. `It was us writers who made sure that there were books hanging from shop ceilings instead of shampoo sachets,' he says. We led people to read, he preens ..."

Imagine that: Popular books at affordable prices in handy formats where readers can find them. Radical!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

विमल, or meet Vimal, India's pulp hero

Oh boy, have I learned a lot from The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist, fourth of Surender Mohan Pathak's many Vimal novels.

I have learned that the author tired of his first series after the first hundred books or so before he created Vimal. I have learned that Vimal is an elusive thief and a master of disguise, a kind of Punjabi mix of Richard Stark's Parker and Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell.

I have learned, among many new words, dacoit: "robber, usually one who attacks in broad daylight, in a group." I have learned that lakh in the novel's title means hundred thousand; the title refers to the 6.5 million-rupee bank robbery in which Vimal is stiffed by a colleague before embarking on a violent quest to recover what's his.

And I have learned that Surender Mohan Pathak had better slow down to a stately Simenon-like pace, or he'll soon have to express his own output in lakh. At age 70, he has written about 300 novels and translated Ian Fleming and James Hadley Chase into Hindi, the latter while working full-time for the Indian phone company.

Check out Vimal and more at the publisher's Web site, Blaft Publications. And check out this essay on Vimal by Brian Lindemuth, to whom I owe my acquaintance with Vimal.

ਬੱਲੇ!, which means, roughly speaking, "Vimal is one righteous dude!"

P.S. Vimal apparently means "clean, pure, spotless" in Sanskrit, and yet Vimal is just one of the hero's many names ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

What's with the pish? and other linguistic miscellany

Events have turned my mind toward language and its uses.

First, the good people at St. Martin's/Minotaur Books sent Inspector Ghote's First Case, a prequel to H.R.F. Keating's long-running series. Then a discussion here turned to the odd happenings when speakers of one language appropriate speech patterns from another. Finally a piece of Scottish slang reminded me of a treasured word from my un-Scottish youth.

As I did when I first read Keating, I noticed in the opening chapters of Inspector Ghote's First Case a speech pattern in which characters use only at the end of a sentence where North American or European speakers would use it in the middle. It transpired that at least one Indian critic had been ambivalent about Keating and unhappy with Ghote's "broken-English patois." You can follow the ensuing discussion here and here.

In the meantime, some questions for readers with knowledge of English as spoken in India: Is only in the end position ("I have been longing to see it since I was at college only.") particular to certain regions of India? And could that speech pattern be a carryover from any of India's own languages?

Finally, pish. The word was part of my youth growing up, a holdover, I assumed, from Yiddish. But it must be part of the Scottish lexicon, too. Christopher Brookmyre has used it in his books, and Allan Guthrie uses it several times in Two-Way Split, most pungently thus:

"Kennedy chucked the paper in the bin, since the journalist was obviously from the west coast and therefore everything he said was unadulterated pish."

OK, lovers of Scottish English. What's with the pish? How did it get into your language?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

How do characters talk?

A distinctive feature of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books for this North American reader was its characters' use of the word just. They often place the word at the end of a sentence, as against North American English's tendency to place it before the word or phrase it governs. Thus, in Sansom:

"So what is it you'll have?

"A mineral water just?"

where we in Canada or the U.S. would reply "Just a mineral water."

I don't know if this quirk of speech is Irish, Northern Irish, English, characteristic of one or another social class, or just a favorite of Ian Sansom's. (On second thought, I may have seen it in other Irish writing.) I do know it punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity or, God help me, texture.

Certain varieties of Indian speech use the word only in similar fashion. I first noticed this tendency in H.R.F. Keating's stories, where characters say things like "I am a simple policeman only." It was easy for me to condescend to Keating, to feel just slightly uneasy with this white Englishman's imitation of Indian speech.

Then I found that Vikram Chandra has several of his characters use the same speech pattern in Sacred Games. More recently, as I have read blogs from India, I find that the tendency to end sentences with only appears to be a living feature of Indian English, at least around Kolkata (Calcutta) and Mumbai (Bombay). This was a rich education for me, not least because it made me repent my own ignorance in having felt morally superior to H.R.F. Keating.

But this is a crime-fiction blog and not a confessional. I'll close with some questions: What role does speech play in creating setting? How far is too far when it comes to trying to capture the flavor of "ethnic" speech? How do authors strike a balance between maintaining an illusion of everyday speech on the one hand and creating memorable dialogue on the other? What happens when authors give up the effort at maintaining a balance? Who are your favorite writers of dialogue, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

At home in Bombay and Shanghai

How much does a writer’s choice of words contribute to the setting he or she creates – ordinary, everyday words, I mean, not words designed to conjure up exotic scenes. Qiu Xiaolong could have written about Shanghai’s “crowded multifamily dwellings” in his novels about Inspector Cao Chen , just as Vikram Chandra could have placed the Bombay (Mumbai) residents of Sacred Games in “houses” or even in “small, crowded houses.”

But they didn't. Qiu’s characters crowd into subdivided stone shikumen, where they share communal kitchen facilities, mingle in courtyards, and sleep in rooms carved out of spaces on stairway landings. Some of Chandra’s live in kholis, where they may roll out sleep mats in the kitchen at night, or subdivide the one open living area with curtains. By no means is every kholi wretched. A police officer compliments a murder victim’s mother on the nice kholi his son built for the family. An especially proper or upscale dwelling may be referred to as a pucca kholi.

It does not take long before the very words shikumen and kholi conjure up universes of connotations, colors, smells and sounds – and, for readers like me, strangers to the cities where the novels are set, an entirely new kind of space.

It occurs to me, too, that Qiu and Chandra, natives of China and India, respectively, write in English. This, perhaps, makes them all the more eager to make Chinese and a range of Indian languages part of the fiber and substance of their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:

Qiu Xiaolong
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games
Crime fiction, China
Crime fiction, India

Dialect-schmialect, or, more words, words, words

Two weeks ago, I noted the odd speech patterns H.R.F. Keating gives the characters in his stories about Bombay police inspector Ganesh Ghote. At the same time, I noted a comment from a blogger in India that "This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well."

I am now about 270 pages into Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and I note with interest that his characters use precisely the speech patterns by which Keating distinguishes his characters. Two of the most noticeable are a dismissive rhyming when a character is annoyed or impatient, and frequent use of the word only after the word it modifies.

Thus, a Bombay (Mumbai) constable, asked what he has found in a murder victim's purse, replies, "Lipstick-shipstick, that's all." Or a newly abstemious political candidate says: "No time now for drinking-shinking." A gangster explains his origins this: "I was born here in Mumbai, in GTB Nagar only, saab."

True, the British Keating used these linguistic devices far more frequently than the New Delhi-born, Mumbai- and Berkeley-residing Chandra. Therein, perhaps, lies the difference: For Chandra, speech patterns are one among a variety of ways to mark characters. For Keating, their frequent use can appear something like a mark of caricature. In fact, I don't think that was Keating's intention. But they do lend the stories a quaint, if not dated, touch.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
India crime fiction
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games

Words, words, (dirty) words

I am fortunate; my edition of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games lacks the glossary that American editions of the novel are said to include. That means I have the delicious pleasure of trying to figure out the meanings of its rich vocabulary of slang and swear words from context or by resemblance to words in other languages. You'll find discussions of two of those words here and here.

I'm swearing off the unusual volume of critical discussion generated by Sacred Games, a volume that perhaps reflects the novel's 900-page bulk or the size of Chandra's advance. Before I do, though, Jerome Weeks of book/daddy, in a comment here, cites a reviewer's comment that Sacred Games is limited by "genre thinking."

My vow of critical abstinence will prevent me from reading the review until I've finished the novel. For now, though, I will say that in the person of Police Inspector Sartaj Singh, Chandra seems to be creating a richer than usual version of that genre figure, the tired, divorced, middle-aged investigator.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Crime fiction, India
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games

Vikram Chandra

Today's mail brought my copy of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, and today's blogging brought a raft of news about book and author, thanks to Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. I have only 898 pages to go before I finish this tale of Mumbai (Bombay) and its underworld, but I was a fan of the author before I read a word of the novel, based on his essay "The Cult of Authenticity", whose heading declares that "India’s cultural commissars worship `Indianness' instead of art."

Reviewers have noted the novel's use of slang and untranslated terms. I find that prospect highly attractive. Such use of language brings a novel alive for me, the vividness more than making up for an occasional term I might not understand. And context almost always makes the meaning clear, anyhow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
India crime fiction
Vikram Chandra
Sacred Games