If you clicked on “play” before starting to read, you must be wondering why you’re listening to me yammer on about an episode from the Mahabharat. This is actually from a class I conducted recently, in which I was talking about the importance of making sure the message that you want a story to convey doesn’t overshadow the storytelling. While I was preparing my notes for the class, I was reminded of just how creative and dynamic reading can be, which is why I thought I’d share this snippet with you.

A lot of people think reading is a passive activity that demands nothing from the reader beyond understanding the meaning of the written words, but if you think about it, that barely scratches the surface of reading. We’re never “just” reading. The act of reading goes hand in hand with imagining what-if scenarios, interpreting details and delving into the possibilities that are hinted at in a text. Basically, when you’re reading a story, you’re also becoming a storyteller because as you look for the meaning of a story, you’re actually retelling it to yourself — which is why everyone says that if you really want to become a writer, you have to be a reader first.

It’s not just wannabe writers who are interested in storytelling. Telling ourselves stories is basically how we survive the wretched chaos that is the real world, as Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler tell us in Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. The basics of storytelling — sifting through data to figure out the important bits and then arranging them into a recognisable pattern — inform some of our most fundamental actions. For instance, here’s how Vedantam and Messler explain sight or the act of seeing:

“In any given second, the human eye collects about a billion bits of information. This flood of data is compressed a thousand times, and only one million bits of information are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The brain keeps just forty bits of this data and discards the rest. … The amazing thing is [that]… your brain gives you the illusion that you are seeing everything… . It turns out there are excellent reasons for your eyes and brain to do all this filtering. Indeed, to see reality clearly would leave us worse off, not better. Our eyes and brain are not in the truth business; they are in the functionality business… .”

The central point of Useful Delusions is that we as humans are prone to storytelling, which often goes against the rationality and reason — and that may not be a bad thing. The book is not suggesting being delusional is the way to go, but that in certain circumstances, the fictions we tell ourselves may ensure our wellbeing. The book looks at a range of delusions, from the placebo effect to optimism and elaborate con jobs. One of my favourite stories in Useful Delusions is about an experiment in which a surgeon only pretended to carry out a surgery to see whether the theatre of surgery — the operating theatre with its lights, the noises of surgical implements being used, the anaesthesia, etc — can convince the brain to heal the body (obviously this only applies to very specific medical conditions). It’s fascinating to see how the need to feel in control of one’s situation can push us to believe the most ridiculous things and how ultimately, appealing to emotion works more effectively than appealing to reason.

If you’re a regular listener of Vedantam’s excellent podcast Hidden Brain, which explores human behaviour from a science-y point of view, you’ll recognise most of the cases he writes about in the book. I have basically been devouring Hidden Brain for the past few years, so the book felt a little repetitive to me. However, in most cases, Vedantam goes into more detail in the book, which is great. If you haven’t heard Hidden Brain, I highly recommend you make yourself a cup of coffee/ tea/ vodka-tonic (hey, it’s a pandemic out here. No judgements), and let Vedantam and his team tell you stories that will leave you feeling wiser and smarter. Which may well be a delusion, but in the words of one Sheryl Crow, if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.

What will not leave you feeling happy is Jamlo Walks, written by Samina Mishra and illustrated by Tarique Aziz. I was sent this book by the publisher, Puffin (which is part of Random Penguin, sorry, Penguin Random House), and the first time I sat down to read it, I had to stop midway. It’s a 30-paged book, written for kids, and by page 15, my heart was breaking. When I finally did manage to read till the end, I wept. The book has since been sitting on my desk for weeks because I just don’t know how to write about it.

So instead of trying to explain the emotions evoked by this work of “faction” (a work “based on fact, embroidered and distorted in order to project the character herein”), let me tell you the bare facts of what this book is about. Jamlo Walks tells the story of a group of children as they navigate their lives through lockdown. Some of them live in city apartments and have to do school on Zoom. One of them, Jamlo, is carrying a bag full of dried chillies and she’s walking a long road home.

Jamlo is a child worker and she’s one of lakhs of migrant workers, young and old, who were forced to literally walk home, across the country, when the lockdown was announced without warning last year. This 12-year-old girl had to cover 200 kilometres to return to her parents and as she makes her way past highways and through forests, the kids in cities live their lockdown lives, looking out of windows and into computer screens. Jamlo Walks is very much a story about privilege and the lack of it, but Mishra writes without judgement and with empathy. It’s not that the apartment-bound children are thoughtless or “bad”, but that our society is so terribly divided that it feels like Jamlo lives in another world rather than in the same country as the privileged kids.

This story is a far cry from the fluffy, escapist happiness that we usually associate with kiddie fiction, but it’s one of those books that I hope will find a place in every child’s bookshelf. I also hope that parents or elders of some sort will make the time to go through Jamlo Walks with the kiddie reader and talk to them about the issues touched on in the story. It’s difficult enough to process as a grown-up because what the migrant workers were put through was senseless cruelty and most of us have done our best to forget all that happened last year (especially since this year has brought only more horrors and misery). This is not a book I would want any child to read on their own because it is devastatingly sad.

Thinking back to my childhood — which was full of stories because I was fortunate to be raised in a home stuffed with fabulous storytellers — some of my most cherished memories are of my grandmother helping me understand the darkness that layered so many of the stories she told me. My grandmother was a battle axe of a woman and she had no time for anyone who thought children should live sheltered lives. She believed knowing things helped children be empathetic and that in turn made them better human beings as adults. The kids she raised certainly do make a good case for her theory. I think she would have loved Jamlo Walks and she’d probably have wept too if she’d read the book with me — as much for Jamlo and others who walked that long walk, as for the heartbreak of knowing that the India that her generation had hoped for is far from being realised.     

As I write this, the clock is about to strike the witching hour, which makes it the perfect time to write about CL Polk’s The Midnight Bargain, a fantasy story about magic, stubborn women and mischievous spirits set in a world reminiscent of Regency-era England. The Clayborn family has pinned all its hopes on Beatrice finding a suitor during the “bargaining season”, which is when unmarried women are trotted out at parties and other public events, in the hope of attracting an eligible bachelor. Unless she can find a rich husband, the Clayborns are doomed because Daddy Clayborn has made some extremely bad investments and is deeply in debt.

Here’s the good news — the most eligible bachelor in town is interested in Beatrice. Here’s the bad news — Beatrice has absolutely no intention of getting married because she wants to become a mage, which is a male-dominated world and entirely out of bounds for married women.

Beatrice’s decision to stay single isn’t a temperamental whim. Married women are not allowed to practice magic because it involves interacting with the world of spirits and that can result in a spirit taking possession of an unborn child in the womb (which is basically the worst thing to happen because once born, the infant may be recklessly violent). So, the established practice is to collar a woman once she is married. This is not a euphemism. An actual collar is put on her, which suppresses her magical abilities and she has to wear that collar until menopause is upon her. One of the most haunting parts of the novel is when Polk describes the effect of the collar and how it dulls a woman’s every sense, from sight to smell to sensation.  

The Midnight Bargain was nominated last year for the Nebula Award, which is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). While Polk struggles to balance the different storylines in her novel and a lot of her characters feel two-dimensional, what Polk excels at is world-building. Of course, it is easy for us to imagine Regency-era settings because we’ve seen and read so many stories set in that time, but that familiarity also raises our expectations. There are a lot of examples of the Regency period being used half-heartedly (*cough* Bridgerton *cough*), but Polk’s world worked for me because it felt familiar but also new. The conservatism of that time is very well portrayed in The Midnight Bargain and Polk makes sure they don’t romanticise the women’s powerlessness.So, for instance, there’s no positive side to collaring, which is such clever way to explore misogyny and patriarchy in a fantasy setting. Some of the most enjoyable parts of the novel are when Beatrice lets a minor spirit named Nadi possess her. Nadi’s hedonistic desires make Beatrice realise simple pleasures, like running on a beach, and it’s a great reminder that freedom lies as much in epic fights as in everyday details.

So that’s all I have for you in this newsletter. I hope you’re taking care of yourself and finding small joys to light up these dark times, even if it is only for a few fleeting moments. Be kind to yourself, stay safe and take care.

Thank you for reading (and listening). Dear Reader will be back soon.

I truly had the best of intentions of getting this to you before February ended, but it’s been a hellish month for us in India and the last week has brought home terrors like we haven’t experienced in a while.

So here I am, in March, to tell you about my February reads in the hope of distracting myself (and perhaps, you) from the nightmare — state-supported pogrom; global pandemic; which horror do you fancy more? — that is wrapping itself around us like a straitjacket.

This time, I thought I’d try something a little different so if you click on the play button, you’ll hear me reading out passages from three books that I really enjoyed. I figured this is a better way to give you an example of the writing. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel like audio word soup.

But before I talk about those books, let me start off with the book from which I haven’t read in the audio bit. The Corset, by Laura Purcell, was a decent read, but nowhere close to being the masterpiece that the blurbs on its cover promised. Not that I picked the book for the blurbs. Pro tip: Never, ever pick a book for its blurbs. They are by far the most misleading signals ever because most of the time, it’s one author doing another author a favour either out of the kindness of the first author’s heart or because the two share a relationship that makes both of them biased about the other person’s writing. Neither is a good basis for a recommendation.

Coming back to The Corset, which is a Gothic thriller, set in Victorian England, revolving around two young women. One is a teenaged seamstress named Ruth Butterham who believes her perfect stitches are harbingers of death. The other is the wealthy Dorothea Truelove, who considers herself a woman of science. Dorothea is a phrenologist and visits the women’s prison to study their skulls as part of her research. Part of the book is Ruth telling Dorothea the story of her life, which is one misfortune piled on another (but entirely credible, especially if you know the miserable conditions in which the poor survived in that era). The other part is Dorothea discovering how she herself is at the centre of a sinister plot.

Ironically for a book that’s named after a device that constricted its wearer, The Corset felt a little flabby and overwritten to me. But Purcell does come up with an absolutely brilliant term: “a gauntlet of girls”. Just for that, I’m grateful for this book because that, dear reader, is as perfect a collective for girls as anyone could imagine.

Monty Lyman’s The Remarkable Live of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Surface is the kind of science writing I love. It’s full of trivia, written in a style that’s elegant but simple, and presents the science as something that is comprehensible rather than impregnable. While telling the story of skin, Lyman picks up shiny bits from history, literature, travel — Lyman seems to have traipsed all over the world, from Nagaland to Tanzania — and creates this magpie’s nest of a book.

I’d actually expected that the skin would be the subject of an intense amount of research — the cosmetics industry is a behemoth that benefits from this research — but it turns out that the skin holds its secrets very close to its hypodermis. Also, while there is the research into anti-ageing etc, there is also curiously delightful research like the project I read about in the audio segment. Who’d have thunk that there could be a connection between your favourite pop song and your skin? Also, Cleopatra may have been onto something with her idea of bathing in donkeys’ milk. She’s believed to have had a stable of 700 donkeys that provided milk for her daily bath and a few hundred years later, science would figure out there are molecules floating around in that milk that do have a positive effect on the skin’s ageing process.

On to far grimmer topics, like murder and child sexual abuse. Usually, when I see the term “creative non-fiction”, I roll my eyes because do you really need to “create” with non-fiction? Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body is proof that sometimes there are gaps that aren’t filled by evidence and you need the imagination and creativity to light up certain shadowy bits.

The Fact of a Body is a memoir of sorts. As a young lawyer, Marzano-Lesnevich was asked to work on a death-row hearing for Ricky Langley, convicted of murder and child molestation. The case is horrible and Langley’s personal history is grotesque in its own way. One of the most haunting bits in the book is the backstory involving Langley’s parents and the circumstances under which Langley was conceived. Langley’s case is full of questions and surprises, not the least of which is the victim’s mother asking the court to show Langley mercy.

Running alongside Langley’s story is Marzano-Lesnevich’s own family history, including dark secrets that no one wants to put on record. Dead siblings, phantoms in bathtubs, abusive patriarchs — the smiling photographs of happy families mute so many stories.

There’s enough in terms of story to keep you interested in The Fact of a Body and Marzano-Lesnevich is dedicated to the cause of ending chapters and sections with devices that are intended to up the ante as far as intrigue goes. I found this need to push the reader’s buttons a little tiresome after a bit, but for most part, Marzano-Lesnevich’s prose is just beautiful. She doesn’t need to worry about holding her reader’s attention using plot devices because her language is so evocative. The images she crafts stay with you, like the idea that the police search lights make a cat’s cradle in a forest. Marzano-Lesnevich also uses long, complex sentences expertly (like in the bit that I’ve read out) and that takes a lot of skill. Not once in the book does a complex sentence become a tangle of fragments.

The personal narrative that Marzano-Lesnevich shares in The Fact of a Body is deeply painful and that she wrote it is an act of bravery because many in her family were determined to not acknowledge the facts she writes about. There’s one moment in which Marzano-Lesnevich’s father laughs and tells everyone at a Christmas party that Marzano-Lesnevich is writing about something that only she recalls — effectively saying that his daughter imagined the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a child — because he can’t admit to the shame of admitting that the young girls in his family were preyed upon by a patriarch. For Marzano-Lesnevich, it’s important that she write what happened into reality because it’s been pushed out of sight for so long.

Also, as she shows in the course of the book, lived experience doesn’t always fit simple and simplistic formulae. What do you do with an almost infantile memory of having seen your sibling drown in a bathtub? How do you process the conflict between the genuinely-affectionate grandfather who, in secret hours of the night, becomes a predator? What do you say to counter him when he says that those violations are not a big deal because he survived similar abuse and turned out fine, so why can’t you just keep your mouth shut and grow up?

It seems a little wrong to call a book that is so heavy with abuse beautiful, but that’s actually true of The Fact of a Body.

And finally, Chats With the Dead by Shehan Karunatilaka, whose debut novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is still one of my favourite novels ever (and I don’t give two hoots about cricket). There isn’t much humour in literary fiction, particularly the stuff that comes out of South Asia. This isn’t surprising considering the state of most nations in this region, thanks to their politicians. Karunatilaka is one of the few writers who can pack a punch and a punchline simultaneously. It’s almost unsettling how his writing trips lightly between humour, horror and cynicism, like it’s playing a macabre version of hopscotch.

At its most superficial level, Chats with the Dead is a murder mystery. Malinda Albert Kabalana — raised by single mother; war photographer with a finger in every camp’s pie; homosexual and promiscuous — wakes up to find he’s a ghost. Now for the minor detail of figuring out who killed him and to get a spot of revenge, while offering the reader a bird’s eye view of the mangled mess that was Sri Lanka in 1989. There’s a little bit about the basic set up of the book in this interview with Karunatilaka.

There’s nothing particularly new about using ghosts to tell stories of those who have been silenced. Toni Morrison did it in Beloved; George Saunders did it in Lincoln in the Bardo (which also features ghosts in limbo, like in Chats with the Dead). But Karunatilaka’s Maal is among the funnier and more bitter ghosts you’ll encounter in literature. He’s also incredibly ambitious. Maal may be dead, but he’s going to do everything he can to expose those who have profited from Sri Lanka being plunged in chaos.

It’s a curious fact that invariably, authors who use the supernatural do so to make sense of the normal that shouldn’t be the norm. Devices like ghosts operate at a distance, familiar with the world that the living can survive only by being comfortably numb. It’s in death that these characters are finally empowered to reject the normal and acknowledge everything that’s wrong. Also wrapped in the supernatural is a sense of desperate hope. When everything goes to hell and you feel an absolute lack of agency, perhaps there is comfort in imagining things could be set right because there is something out there, looking out for us.

Chats with the Dead is spread across seven moons, with each moon being a chapter in which Maal encounters different characters and recovers fragments of his life as memories. For Maal, death is a revelation even if he can’t remember crucial details. To begin with, the afterlife turns out to be essentially a government office. Then there’s Colombo, which is a decaying but magical city of the dead, swarming with ghosts of people who have died violently because of the long-standing unrest. From the machine that stops working or the accident that can’t be prevented, there’s literally a ghost in every malfunctioning machine.

To add to his woes, Maal does have a deadline. At the end of the seven moons, if Maal doesn’t go towards the light, then he’ll be stuck in the In-Between, resigned to haunting the living world and being chased by creatures who are hungry for his soul. This gives Maal seven days to figure out what happened to him, why he was killed, say his goodbyes, and also organise an exhibition of photographs designed to expose pretty much every political hyprocrite in Sri Lanka.

Despite the supernatural crackle of Chats with the Dead, the novel is set in a meticulously-observed and unmistakably real world. I can’t say for certain that Cyril Wijeratne is modelled on Ranjan Wijeratne, the minister of defense to whom death squads reported and who eventually died in a bomb blast, but there certainly seem to be some resemblances. If I remember correctly, Ranjan Wijeratne’s son ended up going to the United States of America (Wijeratne was on his way to the office after dropping his son to the airport when his entourage was blown up), much like Maal’s boyfriend Dilan, who happens to be Minister Stanley Dharmendran’s son. (Not that Wijeratne was the only person sending his offspring to distant foreign shores for study by a long shot.) Much like in Chinaman, there is so much that is real and factual in Chats with the Dead that if this was my first Karunatilaka novel, I probably would have Googled “Malinda Kabalana, photographer”. However, having done that for one Pradeep Mathew, I am now wiser.

As Maal rode his way to different parts of Colombo, listening to and watching stories unfold, Chats with the Dead vaguely reminded me of the old Doordarshan show Vikram Aur Betaal. Not because Karunatilaka’s writing is as formulaic and melodramatic — it isn’t. His prose is exquisite — but because Betaal has a wickedness to him much like Maal. Also like Betaal, Maal wears a mask of wit and humour that obscures just how grimly determined he is. Everything may be going to hell and it may be unrealistic to hope he can make a difference, but he continues to document and plan for a future. Not even death can’t crush his desperate hopes.

Even though Chats with the Dead is set in 1989, I’m sure there’s enough in it for Sri Lankan readers to feel the novel is contemporary. The country and politics that Karunatilaka describes, full of corrupt and spineless politicians and helpless but angry citizens, certainly felt very relatable to me. This is a brave novel to write because for all the packaging of fiction, Karunatilaka is savage in his depiction of the political establishment that has nurtured war and unrest for its own selfish ends. I can’t imagine too many either writing a similar book about India or finding a publisher for it.

There’s so much carefully embroidered into Chats with the Dead that I already feel like re-reading the book even though I just finished it. However, let’s be clear: It’s not tipping Chinaman as my favourite Karunatilaka novel just yet.

In other news, my list of to-read books is piling up at a faster rate than usual. Ironically, this slump properly announced itself around the time that we released The Lit Pickers episode on kickstarting the reading habit. For those of you who have forgotten what The Lit Pickers is, it's a podcast on books on reading that Supriya Nair and I have been able to bring out thanks to the rather winsome people of Maed in India (https://www.maedinindia.in/). Our last two were on the Ramayana and Amitabh Bagchi's Half The Night is Gone (https://deepanjana.substack.com/p/half-the-night-is-gone-foxy-aesop) and the fantasy fiction of JRR Tolkien. Good fun, if I do say so myself. A new episode dropped today, on Jane Austen’s novels.

And that’s all I have for you this time. Thank you for reading.

Dear Reader will be back soon.

Thanks to Anshu on Twitter, I remembered that I had blogged about the Times Lit Fest session that we’ve discussed on the first episode. You can read it here.

If you’re not going to Jaipur Literature Festival but are on Twitter (like me), then the snarkiest coverage comes from the JLF insider, an anonymous account that spares nothing and no one. It isn’t up and running yet, but we live in hope.

Not really related to the podcast, but this was an interesting interview about book reviewing (something that I have done in the past and Supriya continues to do in the present).

Dear Reader will be back soon.

Fa la la laaa la la laaa

‘Tis the season of melancholy

Fa la la laaa la la laaa

For there’ll be awards and many bad choices

Fa la la la la laaa la la la

Good books jipped and some rewarded

Fa la laa la la la laaaa ♫

Don’t worry, I’m not singing this in the audio bit above. That has me venting about this year’s Booker Prize.

So yes, the season of literary prizes is indeed upon us, which means there’s so much to grumble about. Two seems to be the magic number, with both the Nobel and the Booker Prize announcing two winners.

In case of the Nobel, they picked two because there was no prize awarded for literature in 2018 after scandal rocked the Swedish Academy. “We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence ... before the next laureate can be announced,” said its interim permanent secretary Anders Olsson last year. (Love “interim permanent” almost as much as “delayed live”.)

Anyway, so this year we had two Nobel prizes for literature. Last year’s award went to Olga Tokarczuk of Poland and Austrian author Peter Handke.

And so it was that a few hundred essays on the wonder of Haruki Murakami’s prose returned to the dark corners of desks and computers whence they came. We don’t know how Salman Rushdie reacted to not getting the call from the Swedish Academy and discovering instead that the man he’d dubbed the runner-up for “international moron of the year” did get said call, but it’s not exactly hard to imagine.

More seriously, if this year’s decisions really are an attempt at “recovering public confidence”, then they’re particularly interesting because

a)     the “public” is clearly still Europe, and not much beyond that little continent,

b)    considering how different Tokarczuk and Handke are, it’s almost as though the jury is trying to appease the divided world of literature.

Handke has gone from being relatively unknown to the English-speaking world to being notorious for his belief that the Bosnian Muslims of Sarajevo massacred and brutalised themselves in 1995. Whether his writing is a conduit for his personal politics, I don’t know, but I must admit, I’m not particularly keen to find out.

Meanwhile Tokarczuk — feminist, dreadlocked, Left-leaning, lover of libraries — stands at the other end of the political spectrum. Her liberalism definitely layers her writing. Flights — it’s the only book of hers that I’ve read — is a weird, wonderful collection of 116 vignettes, all narrated by a nameless woman traveller. “Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray,” Tokarczuk writes at one point. This book is not a novel in the conventional sense. It’s more of a meditation on transitions, storytelling and fiction. If you like your fiction to have a recognisable beginning, middle and end, Flights is not for you.

If you’d like to read about her, there’s this lovely profile of Tokarczuk from the New Yorker and this one in the Guardian.

I enjoyed this essay on the Nobel prizes for literature which has a brilliant last line: “Perhaps the Nobel Committee’s main mission these days is not to diversify or evolve, but to troll.”

There were two winners for the Booker Prize too, which probably doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at first glance because the two authors are so totally awesome. Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo made history this year because Evaristo is the first black woman and first black British author to win the Booker. Sharing the Booker is a rebellion of sorts, it seems.

“Over five hours on Monday, discussions between the jury and Wood, who was acting as intermediary for the prize trustees, went back and forth. The jury won the day.

[Gaby] Wood [director of the prize] insisted she was resigned, rather than angry, about the “gesture”. “There was nothing unclear about my communication of the rules but that was the choice they made and you have to respect it.” She added that previous juries had entertained the idea of splitting the prize, but had accepted that it was not allowed.

It was the most dramatic act of Booker insurrection since the 1976 chair, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out of the window if his favourite book didn’t win (it did).”

The reason why the Booker insists on one winner is because when there are two, one book inevitably eclipses the other. Chair of the judges Peter Florence may be confident that sharing the prize with Atwood won’t mean Evaristo is overshadowed, but there can be no question that had Evaristo been the only winner, she and her book Girl, Woman, Other would have got a hell of a lot more publicity than they are now.   

I’m still reading this one by Evaristo, so I’m not going to talk about whether it ‘deserves’ to win or not, but I can tell you that I really enjoyed what she did in The Emperor’s Babe, a novel in verse set in London in the 3rd century AD, about Zuleikha, a child bride from Sudan who becomes the emperor’s mistress. It’s so well researched and so imaginative, full of as much wit as there is cruelty. The idea for the book came out of a conversation Evaristo had with curators at the Museum of London, who told Evaristo that there were no black people in London during the Roman empire (which is complete nonsense).

There were two books in the Booker Prize shortlist that really didn’t need publicity: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. Actually, I take that back. Quichotte probably did need that boost considering how close to unreadable Rushdie’s last two novels — Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House — were. Had Rushdie’s new one not been shortlisted, I probably wouldn’t have made any move towards either buying or reading it. As it turned out, I didn’t have to do the first because Penguin India very kindly sent a copy, which I promptly passed on to my father, who remains a Rushdie loyalist.

I eventually consumed Quichotte over a couple of days, not because it’s unputdownable but because I had a flight to catch and it seemed a little rude to kidnap the book that you have, days ago, proffered to your father. (Especially since he hadn’t finished reading it.) The good news is that Rushdie’s reimagining of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is not awful. It’s actually very enjoyable in parts and Quichotte offers glimpses of the old Rushdie with his swooping sentences, surreal situations and irreverent humour.

Set in America, the novel’s hero is Ismail Smile, a former pharmaceutical salesman and TV addict who decides he’s going to woo Salma, a famous TV star. Along the way he dreams into being a son who becomes the Sancho to his Don Quixote. Just as you think you’ve wrapped your head around Smile’s weird but epic road trip, it turns out that this is a book within a book. Smile’s story is actually being written by a not-so-successful crime fiction author. This author is estranged from his son and his sister, which explains a lot of what he’s putting Smile through. In the last section, Rushdie adds another twist to this tale. None of this is bad.

On the whole, Quichotte isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t bad despite lapsing into preachiness in parts. However, it’s arguably a lot less ambitious, accomplished and complex than, say, The Lost Children Archive, which also involves a long, hard look at contemporary America through the device of a road trip and surrealism. I’m still surprised it didn’t get shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The only other novel I’ve finished from the Booker shortlist is The Testaments, which I ended up buying because being an unabashed Atwood fangirl, I couldn’t wait for the copy that Penguin sent out. As far as the Booker Prize is concerned, I can confirm that my love for Atwood has grown after reading about both her reaction to winning and her decision to give her share of the prize money to a scholarship for indigenous students.      

If only I could say that my love for her grew after reading The Testaments. Here’s the thing: if you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale — which was a favourite to win in 1986, but got pipped by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Have you even heard of it? So much for prizes being for posterity and all that — or if your exposure to Gilead is limited to the web series, then I’m sure The Testaments is an absorbing read. I’m equally certain that the novel is a little more chilling if you’re in or familiar with the current state of affairs in America.

However, on its own, I found The Testaments competent but a little disappointing, especially as a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The language doesn’t have the sharp, rhythmic force of Atwood’s prose at its best and the plot was thoroughly contrived. I kept thinking it would get better with the next chapter until I realised I was on page 400 of a 414-paged book.

The novel is told through three narrators: Aunt Lydia and two teenaged girls. One of the girls has grown up in Gilead and the other, in Canada.

SPOILERS AHEAD

We discover eventually that both of them are Offred’s daughters and that Aunt Lydia has basically been conspiring to overthrow the regime at Gilead from pretty much the moment she was made a founder Aunt. Aunt Lydia has not only been helping out the Mayday group, she goes on to figure out a way to bring Offred’s two daughters together. When they make it out of Gilead, they are reunited with Offred. It’s almost like a Bollywood moment.   

SPOILERS DONE

(Please please read The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t. It’s brilliant. Also the Madaddam Trilogy. And Cat’s Eye.)  

The Testaments doesn’t hold a candle to The Handmaid’s Tale. The older novel was laced with menace. You were constantly afraid for Offred and Gilead, a place of shadows and secrets, felt like a dangerous labyrinth. There’s none of that in the sequel. What we do get is an astonishing number of coincidences and convenient twists in the tale. Aunt Lydia’s backstory is obviously meant to humanise her, but that she’s explaining her every move and thought felt painfully artificial. Particularly in the last section of the novel, which rushes to conclude the story – it was almost as though Atwood was like, “Here, I’m telling you EVERYTHING of what happened to Offred and her girls. Do not pester me to write a third part” —The Testaments felt like well-written fan fiction.

Sure, The Testaments is a decent read, but it’s not a prize-winning novel by a long shot. I can only hope no reader ‘discovers’ Atwood through this book. If you have read her before, it’s pretty daunting to think that this story, which despite its flaws moves with swift and elegant grace, is Atwood’s imagination playing at ordinary.

While on the subject of the Booker shortlist, one moment’s silence for all those who read the 1,020-paged Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman in the hope that it would win. I do intend to read it eventually and will totally award myself a cupcake if I manage to do so before the end of the year.

Because, dear reader, we’re in the middle of October and  there are just two and a half months left to this wretched year. Rejoice!

Thanks for reading, and Dear Reader will be back soon.

LINKS:

* Two television ads, one featuring new dads bungling comically while looking after their babies and the other a woman sitting next to a pram, have become the first to be banned under new rules designed to reduce gender stereotyping.

* Hidden Brain: Nature, Nurture And Our Evolving Debates About Gender.

* The concept of toxic masculinity encourages an assumption that the causes of male violence and other social problems are the same everywhere, and therefore, that the solutions are the same as well.