Tag: Book reviews

Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: The enduring relevance of “go East, young man”

Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu: The enduring relevance of “go East, young man”

Pico Iyer did for the travel genre what Anthony Bourdain did for the culinary arts. With thoughtful reflections on world’s most enduring attractions (as far as the Western gaze is concerned, at least), executed in impeccably eloquent prose, Iyer has traipsed around the globe, from revolutionary Cuba to aethetically minimalist Japan, discussing airports, jet lag, diaspora, cultural appropriation, displacement, identity, and the very essence of global spirit under assault by winds of history.

Today, reading Video Night in Kathmandu, written in early mid-80s, is an interesting exercise. This travel narrative is an echo from a time when the geopolitical theatre was playing a decidedly different movie: China hasn’t entered the WTO yet, Hong Kong was still the crown jewel of the British Empire, USSR was still alive and kicking, and Rambo and Madonna were at the zenith of Pax Americana pop culture. Other things were already as par for the course then as they are now: Thai sex tourism, Bali’s it’s-already-spoiled-paradise kitschization, Tibet’s enigma, Myanmar’s isolation. In Iyer’s Asia, globalization is already in bloom but still fresh enough to still get you excited about being able to order burgers and Pepsi in Nepal.

Travel according to Iyer is both an elegy and a eulogy, a love emoji from Othello to the unfortunate Desdemona, a guilt-laden sentiment only amplified by a thousandfold in today’s age of Instagram hyper-tourism. Today, forty years later, we have moved a wee bit further on the spectrum from a Babel present to a homogeneous Esperanto future (to use Iyer’s gorgeous expression), but we are not fully there yet (and who knows if we’ll ever get there).

Video Night in Kathmandu is an Hieronymus Bosch iconostasis of Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Myanmar (described as “a malfunctioning guinea pig of fundamentalist socialism”), Hong Kong, India, Thailand, and Japan. The verdict on these lands is complicated:

“Bali drew its strength, its magic and its eerie purity from the ancestral currents that pulsed through its soil, currents that Westerners could sense, perhaps, but never touch; just so, the moving yet unwavering faith of Tibet would withstand the ravages of tourists, I hoped, as surely as it had withstood the vicious assaults of the Chinese. Burma had calmly closed its door to the world, and China had opened it up just enough, so it planned, to take what it wanted, and nothing more. Prodigal, hydra-headed India cheerfully welcomed  every new influence from the West, absorbing them all into a crazy-quilt mix that was India and nothing but Indian; Japan had taken in the West only, so it seemed, to take it over. As for Nepal, and Thailand even more, both gauged Western tastes so cleverly and adapted Western trends so craftily that both, I felt, could satisfy foreigners’ whims without ever becoming their slaves. Even Hong Kong, the last pillar of the Western Empire, was now getting ready to return to Asian hands.” 

Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Pico Iyer, a product of Indian, English, and American heritage and, being keenly aware of this legacy, cannot talk about the East without the Raj, the Foreign Office, and Rudyard Kipling. Globalization, some would say, is simply a mutated colonization, a virus adapting, so to speak, to better feed off of its host. As such, the jury is still out on whether “a Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

Image: Beyond Street by Swarat Ghosh.

Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast: deceptively simple Scandinavian wisdom

Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast: deceptively simple Scandinavian wisdom

Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke had a complicated  but colourful life. Reared in a conservative monarchist family in a stately manor house on the outskirts of Copenhagen, she fell in love with some kind of a dashing equestrian, but, rejected, married his rogue twin brother instead. Then, fate threw her to a coffee farm in Africa, where she experienced financial ruin, infidelity, illness, death of her second big love, and a disgraced return to the native shores. And then there was war, and another war, and a sprinkling of successful books under various pseudonyms like Tania Blixen (for Anglophone audiences) and Isak Dinesen (for German-speakers). At the zenith of her literary fame, Blixen journeyed to the United States where, as a bona fide aristocrat, she subsisted on oysters, grapes, and champagne while giggling up a storm with the likes of Marilyn Monroe…

But before all those accolades there was the mysterious French Babette, a culinary therapist, a dark-eyed saviour of prudish Norwegian spinsters, and overall a much-beloved character of Blixen’s Babette’s Feast, immortalized on screen in an 1987 Academy Award laureate.

At forty pages of literary minimalism, Babette’s Feast is not to be underestimated, for it takes a mightier writing muscle to craft something meaningful laconically than it does through flowery diarrhea of verbosity. And so, in a simple story of a French refugee thanking her pious Norwegian hosts, the reader learns that 1) excess asceticism is not necessarily the truest path to righteousness and God and 2) when spiritual and corporeal realms are well-nurtured one gets the purest Nirvana.

“This woman is now turning a dinner at the Cafe Anglais into a kind of love-affair of the noble and romantic category in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety.”

Karen Blixen, Babette’s Feast

Babette, fleeing from the bloodbath of French Revolution, finds safety in the kind of place where split cod and ale-and-bread soup are the height of culinary sophistication. She is taken in by devout ecclesiastics who renounce the pleasures of this world, “for earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem towards which they were longing.” There is kindness here, true, but a lot of reservation. Open affection is scant, but regret is bountiful, and the scales ever more tip in its favour as wrinkles and grey hair make their inevitable advances.

Babette unwittingly throws a flaming Molotov cocktail right at the heart of this stoic philosophy by spending her entire fortune of a very lavish and very French feast for her benefactors and their uptight friends. There’s the fabled turtle soup with Amontillado sherry, Blinis Demidoff with Veuve Cliquot champagne, quail in puff pastry with foie gras and truffle sauce, and numerous other luxuries to impress even the toughest critic, let alone Babette’s unsophisticated guests. With each spoonful, with each glass of effervescent refreshment, their eyes glow brighter, their hearts beat louder, and all those putrid lumps of guilt, shame, submission, and denial melt away. They eat their way to God and emerge, with the last sip of their digestif, innocent like children.

There are clearly common themes between Blixen’s Babette and a 90s novel by Joanne Harris Chocolat (and its successful same-name film adaptation with the immaculate Juliette Binoche). Other adorably saccharine genre buddies such as Ratatouille or Julie and Julia also hammer home the same universally palatable thought – there is something patently magical about food, some artistry that leads to redemption, salvation, or at the very least self-actualization to be found at the tip of that brimming ladle.

Image: A still from Babette’s Feast film adaptation (1987).

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: A love sonnet to literature and all its students

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: A love sonnet to literature and all its students

A long, pained decade of crudely administered austerity medicine after the global financial apocalypse of 2008 has left opulent scars on academia. Fewer students today choose to embark upon the study of humanities and, specifically, literature, than ever before in history of democratized access to education in the West. Countless pearls of our common literary heritage are lingering untasted and untested, all the while the increasingly dwindling number of PhDs, associate profs, fellows, and other knights of assorted regalia continue firing off essays, articles, and books that even fewer leaf through. It’s bleak and it sucks, and while the fine craft of belles lettres is ghosted by policy-makers who robotically herd the young’uns into science, tech, engineering, and maths, we’ve got Elif Batuman, her golden feather pen, and the kind of unwilting love of literature that makes one miss grad school with its all-nighters, caffeinated seminars, ulcers, halitosis, and overdue library books.

Elif Batuman takes us on a journey of her Russian literature studies, with some quintessentially academic self-congratulatory circle-jerking, plenty of beautifully phrased intertextual tapestry of Tolstoy, Babel, and Dostoyevsky, and a curious passeggiata through mythical Uzbekistan (birds, melons, and Timurids galore). In an inadvertent nod to the hilarious father of the campus novel genre David Lodge, much of all this literary analysis with the side of Derrida is steeped in a grad school cocktail of beer-cigarettes-infatuation. Like billiard balls, these academic pilgrims stumble into bits and morsels of knowledge, beautiful and fragile, holding it “like a Christmas ornament without a Christmas tree.” Not in vain:

“If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” 

Elif Batuman, The Possessed

In order to find these answers, Batuman’s character first needs to answer the two fundamental Russian problems (“What is To Be Done?” and “Who Is To Blame?” of course). She also has to figure out, after all these linguistic, literary, and logistical acrobatics, What Is Russia? Sadly, she never does, her gaze always already corrupted by the kind of apologist lens Nabokov himself would get pissed about when confronting some Oxbridge Russophiles who waxed poetic over Bolshevism. It’s all fun and games when your character dreams about playing tennis against Tolstoy, but when it comes to truly unpacking the toxic sediment of imperialism, colonialism, and a plethora of other -isms of the Russian Empire/USSR, The Possessed bashfully skirts around the hard stuff, and traipses away. Maybe next time. As such, the original question still stands very much open, even after some very sincere epistemological exercises:

“I became aware of a deep flaw in my understanding of the world and human knowledge. I had previously thought of knowledge as a network of connections that somehow preserved and safeguarded the memory of what they were connecting. But of course it was only people who remembered things; words and ideas themselves had no memory.”

Elif Batuman, The Possessed

Words and ideas have no memory? The entire field of etymology (along with millions of post-colonial peoples of this planet) beg to differ. One shouldn’t fault Batuman’s character too harshly though. She is, after all, a student (and a bloody good one), passing the flaming torch to the next generation of curious spirits with appetite for learning and love of beauty. And that’s the point.

Image: Portrait of Tolstoy and Wife by Ilya Repin

Amara Lakhous’ multicultural Italy, or how to be suckled by Rome’s wolf without getting bitten

Amara Lakhous’ multicultural Italy, or how to be suckled by Rome’s wolf without getting bitten

Do you think yourself civilized enough to use an elevator? And how about pork – would an image of a genuine Piedmontese piglet with a Juventus scarf encircling its lovably rotund head evoke any particularly strong emotions? These are not some extravagant conversation ice-breakers. These are litmus tests for racism, identity, and belonging, intermittently passed and failed by a flavourful assortment of characters inhabiting, by birthright or through labyrinthine journeys of immigration, the merry chaos of Amara Lakhous’ two thrillingly playful novels. Straight from the titles, we know we are about to seep through an alluring oyster shell crack of contemporary folklore : Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet and Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio.

Inside, it’s a veritable cornucopia of sights, smells, languages, and people, a pungent stew of stories and places peppered with satire, melancholy, and drama. Calabrian matriarchs, Albanian and Romanian mafiosi, a sagely madame from Casablanca and a pizzaphobic cook from Shiraz – all of them scale the walls of the Eternal City, their knees scraping against millennia of brutal and glorious history. Moscow does not believe in tears, but Rome doesn’t believe you period. Like an eye-rolling auntie, Rome has seen it all. It may permit some nomadic urchin to suckle from its live-preserving teat, but that’s not a ironclad contract. Rome is forever. Its deals? Ça dépend:

“By now I know Rome as if I had been born here and never left. I have the right to wonder: am I a bastard like the twins Romulus and Remus, or an adopted son? The basic question is: how to be suckled by the wolf without being bitten.”

Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

As the Old World clumsily dances around racial and ethnic tensions, Lakhous breaches these dynamite themes with candour and satire that work. Too often in contemporary fiction these topics are stillborn, suffocated by unhelpful sanctimoniousness, their death only accelerated by political urgency (especially in contemporary Italy, with . Everyone rushes to talk about the vibrancy of multicultural life without stepping back and giving space for said life to bloom. In steps Lakhous whose characters are not sieves for political themes. They are their natural engines:

“I know a proverb that the Italians often repeat: “Guests are like fish, after three days they stink.” The immigrant is a guest, no more or less, and, like fish, you eat him when he’s fresh and throw him in the garbage when loses his colour. There are two types of immigrants: the fresh ones, who are exploited inhumanly in the factories of the north or the agricultural lands of the south, and the frozen, who fill the freezers and are used only in an emergency.” 

Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

After an entertaining merry-go-round of the novels’ city life scenes, the reader is not sated. The Piedmontese piglet is saved, the baddies meet their just desserts, and life goes on, with cornetto or with kubideh kebab, no matter. A Fellini sunset. We still don’t know though what to do with this identity problem of ours. Perhaps, after all that’s been said and eaten, it’s not a problem at all.

“It’s marvelous to be able to free ourselves from the chains of identity which lead us to ruin. Who am I? Who are you? Who are they? These are pointless and stupid questions.” 

Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

Image: Artnet.