Monthly Archives: September 2018

Staff Picks: Fireflies in the Mist

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Celia recommends Fireflies in the Mist by Qurratulain Hyder:

Qurratulain Hyder occupies a strange place in literary history. Critics who know her work compare her with Gabriel García Márquez and Milan Kundera in the scope of her masterful imagination, and cite her as a precursor of Salman Rushdie in her fierce anti-colonialism. In 1989, she won India’s prestigious Jnanpith Award for Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, translated in English as Fireflies in the Mist. Hyder translated her own work from Urdu—or, as she called it in reference to her magnum opus, Aag ka Darya (River of Fire, in English), she “transcreated” them, freely adding and subtracting passages, rewriting, and restructuring chapters. But, for all the praise that she received from those in the know, she hasn’t achieved the same place in the canon of world literature as many of her male contemporaries to whom she is most frequently compared. As I read Fireflies in the Mist, I wondered if there was not some bias at work here. For one thing, Urdu, despite its long and vibrant literary tradition, is not widely translated into English, and, like much Indian writing in translation, tends to be eclipsed by English-language novels from the subcontinent. For another, there’s the fact both the jacket copy and a number of English-language reviewers of Fireflies in the Mist seem to be under the truly puzzling impression that it is a love story—rather than a sprawling and incisive examination of women’s experiences in the Bengali independence movement.

A love story it is not, I am afraid—although there is love at work, romantic and familial, and marriage, and quite a bit about what happens after marriage, what makes it equal or unequal, successful or a failure. More than that, it is a story of the Quit India Movement in Bengal, its bravery and idealism, and also its disappointments and failures. Hyder’s erudite and lyrical writing draws on poetry, song, and dance from both English and Indian traditions, and her work deals with colonialism and its aftermath with both biting, clear-eyed anger and deep sadness. It is perhaps the most tragic bildungsroman I have read—the story of a generation’s attempt to make the society in which they lived anew, and of their dreams’ shortcomings.

At the novel’s beginning, the young women who will be its heroes are steeped in hope and idealism. All of them are budding communists, immersed in the Quit India movement, certain that the end of British colonial power will bring about a new era of justice, religious harmony, and social and economic equality. They make friends with each other across the lines of class and religion—Deepali Sarkar, the novel’s heroine, is a Hindu girl from an impoverished family, while her best friends, Rosie Bannerjee and Jehan Ara, are the daughter of a local Christian pastor and of a Muslim Nawab, respectively. For a while it seems like their bonds of friendship will be emblematic of the strength of the new political order. At this stage, the novel is full of exciting and slightly madcap adventures. Deepali dresses up as a veiled maidservant to spy on a British official and warn the local communist activists about upcoming police raids. She wins a scholarship to Santinekitan, the academy founded by Rabindranath Tagore, to study Indian classical music, and then fibs to her father about a student group collecting folk songs in order to travel to the Sunderbans to meet with another communist leader, the larger-than-life Rehan Ahmed, who crosses India disguised mostly as a wandering ascetic of various faiths—now “a gentle monk of Krishna,” now a Baul fakir who sings as he travels from house to house carrying secret messages.

Even at this point, however, there are clouds on the horizon. When Deepali carries a secret message to Uma Roy, a rich radical who has studied in England, Uma treats her with disdain, mocking her for her ignorance and suggesting that her political beliefs are mostly an excuse for her to chase boys. Deepali’s father, a doctor who runs a free clinic for the poor (and finds himself perpetually short of money as a result), lets her have her freedom, but Rosie and Jehan Ara’s families both disapprove of their political beliefs, and expect their daughters to be obedient, quiet, and to marry men that their families have chosen. For a while, the end of the British colonial regime looks like a path to a new kind of life for the three friends, encompassing not only racial and economic equality, but also new opportunities for women.

But even among their fellow radicals, there’s no consensus about what the place of women should be, just as there’s no real consensus about how far class equality should extend. Rehan Ahmed, the charismatic Marxist leader who falls in love with Deepali, idealizes his mother, who, having lost her fortune and married a man her uncle chose for her, spends her life serving her husband “in dutiful silence.” In his first love affair, he tries to convince his beloved to run away from her parents with him in the night, and, when she refuses, berates her: “If you do not have the guts to defy your autocratic father, how will you fight in the revolution alongside your comrade husband?” The idea that his would-be wife might simply be exchanging one type of autocracy for another does not occur to him.

The ending of Deepali’s love story, however, is comparatively bright. Her friends, Jehan Ara and Rosie, meet more chilling fates. Jehan Ara’s marriage is arranged by her parents, to a man they both know is a bad match for her. Rosie, in prison for her activism against the British government and abandoned by her family, meets a handsome lawyer with radical sympathies, who takes on her case and pays her bail. “I am going to take you home as my wife,” he tells her, the second time they meet. It’s not a question. She marries him. So each character must make her peace with a world that, in the end, is less revolutionary than she had hoped, and choose either to accommodate herself to society, or to rebel, and face the price: loss of stability, of a family, a home, a nation.

Towards the end of Fireflies in the Mist, there’s an image that begins to appear over and over: “Mother [Kali] sits in the marketplace of the world, flying her kites. She cuts off one of the millions of her strings and when the unattached kite flies, it reaches cosmic space. Mother claps her hands and laughs…” Is it an image of dissolution, or of freedom? There’s not much justice or resolution on display in Hyder’s novel, and what happiness there is, is as fleeting and fragile as those kites sailing into the void. There is, however, a new generation, who will carry on their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle—perhaps successfully, perhaps in vain. The novel’s original Urdu title, Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, translates literally as “Fellow Travelers into the Night”—and, like fireflies, they seem to be so, groping out the shape of things in a world full of enclosing darkness and mystery.

Staff Picks: Lone Star Noir

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Rebekah recommends Lone Star Noir, a collection edited by Bobby Byrd and Johnny Byrd:

As editor Bobby Byrd so aptly states in his introduction to Lone Star Noir, “Texas, in all its many places, bleeds noir fiction.” From its hot and humid Gulf Coast to its isolated backroads country and its sprawling metropolises, Texas, with all its diversity, harbors endless possibilities for mystery. Published by New York-based Akashic Books as part of their successful Noir series, the Lone Star edition features a range of Texas-native or Texas-enthusiast authors who capture the multiple facets of this state that make it the ideal setting for crime, violence, and intrigue.

The first installation in the collection, “Phelan’s First Case” by Lisa Sandlin is a perfect example of quintessential detective fiction. This story follows Detective Joe Phelan as he grapples with his first case, which eventually leads him to a rundown barn in the overgrown wilderness surrounding Beaumont. Sandlin’s evocative imagery is disturbing (she describes the missing child, the subject of Phelan’s search, as a “naked gargoyle” with “blinking eyes protrud[ing] from sunken holes”), which exudes major True Detective Season 1 vibes. Couple descriptions like that, which can make your skin crawl, with snappy dialogue that could belong in a hardboiled crime novel, and you’re in for a classic noir treat.

Moving south from Beaumont to Galveston, Claudia Smith gives us “Catgirl,” which may or may not detail the lives of a coven of witches (it’s never actually confirmed if they are witches though). Living in a shabby beachfront bungalow, this family of girls dances unnervingly around bonfires, recites creepy children’s rhymes, and sings Stevie Nicks songs. It’s demonic, it’s spooky, it’s weirdly beautiful, it’s totally matriarchal. And since it’s almost October, it’s the perfect way to start getting into the Halloween spirit.

But Lone Star Noir is not all serious. Tim Tingle’s sardonic voice shines in his story “Six Dead Cabbies,” which is told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old narrator who falls into bad company with a grizzled, slightly threatening, grown man named Denny. The fact that a middle-aged man would want to hang out with a bunch of teenagers seems like a bit of a red flag, and Tingle’s narrator humorously notes this as he reflects on his choice of companion, saying, “None of us ever questioned the logic of a forty-five-year-old man running around with teenagers. Bobby, Charles, Eddie, and me, we were cool teenagers, cool enough to be Denny’s buds, that was our reasoning.” Naturally, of course, the tale takes a darker twist once the narrator learns that Denny is, in fact, a serial killer, and not just his mentor in petty crime.

As Austinites, the location I’m sure we all want to hear most about is Austin, and Jesse Sublett’s “Moral Hazard” does not disappoint. It is clear from the start that this story is an ode to Cormac McCarthy, one of the most famous and stylistically unique authors within the Western genre. Sublett even goes as far as to name his Robin Hood-esque criminal with a heart of gold “the Kid” (likely a gesture to the character of the same name in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). Additionally, his main villain is obsessed with McCarthy’s gritty novel No Country for Old Men, which features a truly terrifying, ruthless hitman, if any of y’all have ever read the book or seen the film adaptation that came out a few years back. It goes without saying that if you’re a fan of McCarthy, you’ll appreciate the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) nods to the author set against a backdrop of familiar Austin scenery.

Those are just a few examples of the stories included in this collection, and there’s so much more, ranging from tales about bounty hunters and gambling to kidnapping and prostitution. In each, the things that make Texas Texas, things like the famous pecan trees, the expansive landscapes that seem to extend for miles and miles, the laidback molasses-like pace of life, are all vividly painted. In each, Texas becomes a character in itself. And just like the Lone Star state, Lone Star Noir has something that will satisfy everyone’s craving for a good mystery.

Staff Picks: The Hospital

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Celia recommends The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani:

“Would it surprise you if I said that one day I transformed myself into a spider, a weeping willow, and a cyclamen flower?” Ahmed Bouanani asks somewhere in the middle of his novel The Hospital, translated this year by Lara Vergnaud and published by New Directions. “On the whole,” he continues, “we’re talking about a stolen life.” Like a prisoner who, shut inside four walls, invents his own world.

There are books that you’ve never heard of before that, nevertheless, cast a spell of mystery over you once you’ve picked them up, and The Hospital was one of these for me. As soon as I’d finished reading, I wanted to know who Ahmed Bouanani was and why I hadn’t heard of him before. While The Hospital itself is a slim book, it feels as if it reaches out to the hidden network of a life’s work, as vivid and arresting as a long still shot at the beginning of a film. In 1991, Bouanani, known in Morocco as a director, author, and artist, would be called “the memorialist of a cinema without memory,” but by his death in 2011 most of his work was out of print or unfindable, in danger of being forgotten—if it had ever been published at all.

While Bouanani published only rarely during his life—one novel and three books of poetry—his daughter Touda and his friends describe a dozen unpublished works and claim that the published one had to be nearly pried out of his hands. Part of his reticence about publishing may have been political, for after a promising early career as a filmmaker, during which he won international acclaim for The Mirage, he was blacklisted by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain, which suspected him of being a communist. Shortly before his death, he confided to a young journalist for the Moroccan weekly magazine TelQuel that he had sometimes given his pieces to others to sign, in order to evade censorship.

Bouanani spent the last years of his life in seclusion, in the remote Moroccan town of Aït Oumghar. A few years earlier, one of his daughters had died. When he moved to Aït Oumghar after her death, a fire caught in the papers stacked in his apartment, and destroyed or damaged a collection of his unpublished manuscripts. In Aït Oumghar, he rarely went outside, and rumors circulated that he was drunk, or ill, or traveling in secret, or already dead.

Based on Bouanani’s own experience of being treated for tuberculosis, The Hospital unfolds in the closed cell of an inpatient ward, where the sick drop in and out of treatment, always tumbling back into the hospital’s enforced stillness, its dreams and frustrations, as the outside world spits them out over and over again. As I was reading, I’d find myself murmuring lines over to myself. Of a dream: “I was able to recognize the different butterflies my naked body attracted like a light: Urania, Vanessa, Bombyx, Argon, Machaon, and Phalene specimens, countless teeming larva and caterpillars.” Of waking: “Light the color of incurable sadness filters through the room’s broken windowpanes.” Of a long-ago memory of killing flies: “I lived like this for a long time, on the margins of a strange childhood, my monstrosity protecting me with its extraordinary warmth.”

It’s a line that, while used to describe the narrator’s own childhood, could easily apply to the younger patients of the hospital as well. Orphans or petty criminals, abandoned by family and society, they reinvent the world outside the hospital in their conversations, which are scatological, sexual, violent—but also convulsively powerful in their vividness, full of a kind of nightmarish play. One boy, called Guzzler, makes a game out of putting the other patients off their food at mealtimes, competing to offer the most revolting descriptions of the food they’re going to eat, of the patients’ various maladies, skin conditions, and scatological complaints. Another, Rover, invents a series of deaths in his family in order to have a night of freedom in the outside world, then returns with his illness to death’s waiting room. Another young man tells a story that explains their lingering existence in the hospital ward thus: the angel of death is a bureaucrat, and they are much too poor to bribe him into doing his job. Both their food and their wine is imaginary. They live on dreams.

The Hospital’s narrator appears to be Bouanani himself. He is writing a novel about the young men on his ward, spinning out the hope that he, at least, will live. They, by turns, mock and entreat him. “Write, for the fun of it, to piss off the world of neckties and hypocrisy,” advises one, and then later, having thought about the question a little more, he clarifies, “Whatever you do, don’t mention my diarrhea, it won’t leave a good impression, and, come on, what will future generations think about a guy like me?” Meanwhile, the narrator compares himself to “those long-ago voyagers who landed on islands on the fringes of the known world; their curiosity dulled quickly when faced with the impenetrable customs of a people hastily judged at first glance to be primitive and savage.” What can you say about the dead and the dying, when you yourself are destined to recover? How can one know which dying vision may turn out to be true?