RaveThe Hindu (IND)There is a gentle quality to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s prose; it makes no linguistic leaps or pirouettes but simply sits down, draws a deep breath, and slowly unfurls the tale. Gradually you realise that even as Gurnah foregrounds ordinary people and their stories of struggle and love and fear, what you are actually hearing is the low hum of the continent. Africa looms over the book, overshadowing the individual players, thrusting its troubled history into your consciousness, creating a disquiet that lingers long after ... The politics of dispossession is never overtly stated ... the book strides, encompassing multitudes in the telling. And it’s perhaps the shifting perspective that universalises Gurnah’s writing. The stories of Khalifa, Afiya, Hamza and Ilyas don’t come from the margins but from within the core of a colonised nation that is yet seemingly at peace, celebrating an unfussy survival that defies the festering barbarisms of the colonial project.
Perumal Murugan, tr. Aniruddhan Vasudevan
RaveThe Hindu (IND)... a book marked with the same quality of luminous integrity and beauty seen in Maadhorubaagan (One Part Woman). What a world of hidden treasure is being unveiled by this writer and his sensitive translator. Like the creepers and tendrils of the Kongu land he describes so lovingly, it twines around and holds you fast ... I find myself instead being grateful in a grotesquely inappropriate way to the poisonous controversy that brought Perumal Murugan within my ken ... In reading someone like Murugan, there is always a sense of wonderment and mourning at the resonances lost in not reading in Tamil, but Aniruddhan translates with a fine ear that preserves beautifully the music of the original ... I have yet to read an Indian author who writes of love as beautifully as Murugan does ... the love between man and wife glows with a sweet, strong passion that draws you into its folds like the drowsy buzzing of bees on a heady summer afternoon...the tenderness pours off the pages like golden honey ... This is Murugan’s rich Kongu land, which he has mined so deeply and well. It’s a barren, sun-scorched and unforgiving land but it comes blazingly alive in the writer’s eloquent voice ... To classify Perumal Murugan’s books as vattaara ilakkiyam or sub-regional literature would be tragic, because he succeeds in universalising Kongu Nadu to such a degree that place and person fall away and all that remains is a hard and glittering gem of a story.
Svetlana Alexievich, Trans. by Bela Shayevich
RaveThe HinduThe Nobel Prize winner proves why she is one of the most significant writers today with this gut-wrenching whirlpool of a book that sucks you into the days just after the crumbling of the Soviet Union ... Alexievich has created a powerful alternative way of chronicling history that is easily more searing and multifaceted than a straight account ... By focussing on ordinary people living through extraordinary times, Alexievich redefines what has traditionally been considered ‘worthy of telling’... The leitmotif of this almost Wagnerian opus is of a displaced future; of a people emerging from a dark tunnel into a much-awaited epoch to realise, bewildered, that it is not \'standing in its proper place\' after all ... Past and present and the absent future fuse into several terrifying dystopias that make this book a harrowing read at times ... I had to put the book down frequently to collect myself and gather the spirit to continue reading ... the sheer volume of narratives makes the book repetitive and overwrought at times, forcing it to lose steam towards the end ... Finally, though, it is enormously appropriate that this story should be told through monologues. In communist USSR, the word was the deed ... Today, in Russia as in the rest of the world, there is no word. You can say anything but it means nothing because the word has been devalued. It has fallen through the gaps of the shopping trolley.
