Books, pt. 1: English, August

The next few posts have nothing to do with music - I just read a few books that I liked, all in a row, so I thought I’d write up a little something about them, one at a time, in the order I read them:

English, August: An Indian Story was a big hit in India when it came out in 1989, but never got any attention in the US. I don’t think it was even available here until this year, when it was published in the superb New York Review of Books series of reprints. It’s wonderfully unpretentious - not to suggest that Indian fiction has a tendency toward pretension, but the books that get famous over here, Midnight’s Children (great), A Fine Balance (sucks) and A Suitable Boy (pretty great) often have this big task of trying to encompass all of what supposedly characterizes India - every caste, every religion, every time, every place. Of course Indian literature, in English and other languages, is terrifically diverse, but that sort of omnivorous narrative is what’s sells here, I guess. English, August is not that kind of book. Much like the author, Upamanyu Chatterjee, the main character, Agastya Sen, is an educated, well-off member of the Bengali bhadralok, stuck with an obscure Sanskritic name, doomed to a dull and lonely civil service job in the hinterlands. He mostly spends his time masturbating, smoking pot, and reading Marcus Aurelius, and making tentative friends with the other outsiders in his own personal backwater. Chatterjee doesn’t shy away from the plain tedium of the Indian countryside as a lot of his contemporaries do, but neither does he lambaste it as many an urban litterateur does. The book is funny, yeah, but it’s also beautiful:

While Manik chatted with Pultukaku and elicited from him a few misanthropic monosyllables, the familiar feeling of the absurd, as much a part of him as his names, overwhelmed Agastya, and he wondered whether, when married, he would be able to exercise in front of his wife, and what he would do if, just when he was lunging for a push-up she were to say, For someone who exercises so much you’re in awful shape. And suppose she stole his money? And the all-important subject of kinky sex - she might not like sharing each other’s used underwear, then?

Eventually, he knew, he would marry, perhaps not out of passion, but out of convention, which was probably a safer thing. And then in either case, in a few months or years they would tire of disagreeing with each other, or what was more or less the same thing, would be inured to each other’s odd and perhaps disgusting ways, the way she squeezed the tube of toothpaste and the way he drank from a glass and didn’t rinse it, and they would slide into a placid and comfortable unhappiness, and maybe unseeingly watch TV every evening, each still a cocoon, but perhaps it would be unwise to be otherwise. And his once-secret life would be entombed in a mind half-dead to an incarcerating world, and he would remember, with a sense of bemused embarrassment, and in epiphanies flashes, brought on by uncontrollable jolts to his memory through a smell of some unexpected sight (perhaps the view from a train or an ad on TV), his this experience of Madna, that once the restlessness of his mind had seemed the most important thing in this universe, and that he had once been shaken by the profundity of an ancient Hindu poem.