Publishers Weekly, that venerable (and some say dated) institution, has compiled its best books of 2009 list, and the top ten authors are all men. Interesting, given that the Booker and the Pulitzer (fiction) prizes both went to women this year. 

The list has resulted in predictably divided responses, with one camp arguing that perhaps no women-authored books were worthy of inclusion this year (justice is blind!), and the other asserting that this lineup is but the latest manifestation of the (often unconscious) gender bias in the literary world (you suck, PW).

Register your approval/howl of outrage at the WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) website.  You can also add your picks to their list of favorite books by women in 2009.   

Here’s the PW list in full: 

PW Top 10

Cheever: A Life

Blake Bailey (Knopf)

Bailey, who was given access to the journals Cheever kept throughout his life, shines a new light on Cheever’s literary output, making possible a fresh reappraisal of his achievement. In addition, Bailey offers up juicy, appalling, hilarious and moving anecdotes with verve, sensitivity and perfect timing.

Await Your Reply

Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

Chaon was a National Book Award finalist for Among the Missing, and this gripping account of colliding fates, the shifty nature of identity in today’s wired world and the limits of family is easily as good, if not better. It’s a literary page-turner, a cunningly plotted and utterly unputdownable novel.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

Neil Sheehan (Random House)

The development of the ICBM as a key part of the cold war arsenal wasn’t inevitable. In a splendidly reported and narrated account, Sheehan credits Air Force Gen. Bernard Schriever with the foresight and shrewdness to triumph over powerful Pentagon opponents and develop the crucial and terrifying weapon.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

An NBA finalist (we found him first), Mueenuddin delivers Pakistan through the stories of its people: yearning, struggling, plotting, in a heartbreaking story collection that is specific and universal all at the same time.

Big Machine

Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

LaValle’s brilliant second novel is unlike anything else out there: Ricky Rice, an ex-junkie African-American bus station porter, gets sucked into the bizarre machinations of a rural Vermont cult dedicated to studying “The Voice.” The narrator is blisteringly funny in chronicling his bizarre quest, providing both a blazing story and an astute commentary on race.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

In a thrilling narrative of scientific discovery and the spirit of an age, Holmes illustrates how the great scientists of Britain’s romantic era gripped the imaginations of their contemporaries and forever changed our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Stitches

David Small (Norton)

A graphic novel to bring us all back to comics, Small’s account of his terrifying childhood is amazing. The drawings of his parents and the small suffering boy who doesn’t quite understand until much, much later will pull you along panel by panel and tear your heart out.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Crawford makes a brilliant case for the intellectual satisfactions of working with one’s hands—and why white-collar work is the assembly line of the new millennium. Crawford is catholic in his tastes (references range from Aristophanes to Dilbert), unsentimental and irresistible as he extols the virtues of “knowing how to do one thing really well.”

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Dyer creates an aging hipster grinding it out as a freelance journalist who pursues the girl instead of the story: covering the Biennale. Then, depending on your point of view, he either loses or finds himself when he’s sent to Varanasi. Dyer has many books to recommend him, but all you need is angst-ridden Jeff: funny, frank and utterly charming, and if you haven’t walked in his shoes, you’ll wish you had.

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

David Grann (Doubleday)

In this classic adventure tale, New Yorker writer Grann—who gets winded climbing the stairs of his New York City walkup—follows in the footsteps of early–20th-century Amazon jungle explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared along with his son on a 1925 expedition. Grann expertly and energetically weaves the story of Fawcett’s explorations with that of his own.

And for further reading, here’s a link to a NYT article about gender bias in the (American) theater world.

The linchpin of Vikas Swarup’s  Q&A (better known as Slumdog Millionaire) was coincidence — twenty of them, to be exact. The readers, however, were not required to suspend disbelief, for they could share the authorities’ scepticism (about coincidence providing the answers to the protagonist). By making the credibility of the events central to his narrative, Swarup elevated Q&A from thriller to genre-breaker. The novel’s in-your-face ingenuity ensured that the coincidences never dwindled into obvious literary devices.

Six Suspects, Swarup’s much awaited second novel, is again held together by the notion of coincidence. This time around, however, the author expects us to swallow it all with no explanation. But while far less convincing than Q&A, Six Suspects is wildly, shamelessly entertaining. Swarup is the Dan Brown of India, with the advantage of not having to look to history for inspiration; modern-day India, with its gaping social chasms and colorful political landscape, provides ample material to conspiracy theorists.

Vicky Rai, the corrupt son of a corrupt politician, kills a young woman in a fit of rage. Despite the presence of several witnesses during the murder, Vicky is acquitted by the Indian judicial system. When Vicky is shot dead at a party celebrating the verdict, six suspects emerge: a Bollywood actress, a tribal, a petty thief, an American visitor, a bureaucrat and a politician. Each has a motive, each has a gun, and each one’s life is filled with coincidence. The American is named Larry Page (just like the Google guy)! The actress has a doppelganger! The thief is in love with a suspect’s daughter! Each sentence describing these six characters deserves an exclamation!

Sadly, the characters themselves are stereotypes; some more than others. The Bollywood actress is an intellectual; we know this because she quotes Nietzsche (“my Master”) and Sartre in her diary, and mentions Heidegger and Malamud in an interview. More troubling, however, is the intellectually-challenged Texan who works at a Walmart and says things like “Me and Mom are closer than ticks on a hound,” who references the Rose Bowl, Miss Hooters International, and the Starplex Cinema at Waco in his introduction. Swarup is on very thin ice here indeed.

And as for the plot: at times, it seems this frantic tale should be shelved under fantasy –the story lurches about crazily, moving from Kashmir to Chennai to the remote Andaman Islands to New Delhi. But it’s all strangely addictive, and makes for a cracking good read. Questioning Swarup’s style and plot developments while reading is like thinking about kinesiology during sex. Why spoil the fun?

Six Suspects is nothing if not ambitious, seeking to encompass each of modern India’s many issues in four hundred seventy pages. Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and endemic institutional corruption all find a mention. Terrorism in Kashmir: check. The Bhopal gas tragedy: check. A shamefully inadequate safety net for the underprivileged: check. A growing economic divide leading to escalating crime: check. Centrist policies disenfranchising those away from the seats of power: check. If I’ve left out any of India’s manifold woes — well, you’ll find them in this novel. After all, Swarup’s combination of feel-good emotion in the midst of grim Indian reality is a proven winner. It should surprise no-one that the film rights to this novel were snapped up long ago.

(A slightly modified version of this review appears in The Asian Review of Books.)

Jil Wheeler’s Letter from Mumbai isn’t offensive  this time around,  just poorly informed. In “The Expat’s New Clothes”, she writes:

If there is one overarching, overwhelming “plus” to living in Mumbai, it is the ability to wear sandals at any time, to any event, no exceptions. At some point in the West, it became cool to hate your feet—to be icked out by toe hair and to insist on wearing socks for sex. We’ve made sandals on men something of a running a joke [sic], and women are warned about the dangers of too much toe cleavage in the workplace.

In India, however, the foot is just fine. Sandals, or chappals, are not only de facto footgear, they’re intimately tied up with national identity. When Gandhi’s pair went up for auction a few months ago, the controversy wasn’t over selling his personal items, it was over selling his sandals. Gandhi made them himself—no musty British footgear for him—and when they sold for over a million dollars, they went to an Indian entrepreneur. India equals sandals, at least in a few minds.

Make that a few half-baked minds. Could Indians prefer sandals to shoes because the climate is so hot and humid?  And maybe lace up boots aren’t popular because the country’s cultural norms require the frequent removal of footwear? And perhaps  sandals are worn anytime, anywhere, because many Indians don’t own multiple pairs of shoes? No, Indians like sandals because we have these quaint ways.  

The rest of Wheeler’s piece isn’t half-bad–there’s a nice bit about learning to tie a sari by watching YouTube–but dear Morning News: please won’t you reconsider Wheeler’s assignment? Or at least halve her per diem till she decides to research her subject before hitting send? 

I’d argue that the representative national footwear of India (if there is such a  thing) is the flip-flop. Specifically, the rubber Bata Hawaii chappal with blue straps and a white inner sole which, over time, wears away to reveal the blue impressions of  big toe and heel.  When the straps give up the fight, you can mend the piece at the cobbler’s for a  nominal sum. (I tried but failed to work in a reference to Rubber Soul here.)

(Picture from www.bata.in. The pair will set you back by 79 rupees, less than 2USD.)

In The Namesake, when Gogol and his sister visit India, upon reaching the family house, they “have their feet traced onto pieces of paper, and a servant is sent to Bata to bring back rubber slippers for them to wear indoors.” I rest my case.

These slippers were meant to be worn indoors, but you saw them everywhere.  When I was a student in India, I had them on every single day, as did everyone; we swapped them for shoes only for job interviews. I wore them like moccasins over my sock-clad feet in the cold Ahmedabad winters.  During weighty lectures, we’d surreptiously slide someone’s pair along the room, and it was lovely to watch the victim hunt for the missing slipper at the end of class, unless you were the victim, in which case the whole thing became a malicious act by a bum-faced misogynist. 

As a child, I always though Bata was an Indian brand name, like Tata.  No, Tomas Bata was Czech, and it’s a Canadian company; the Bata Shoe Museum is near where I now live. Who’d have thought?

:: :: ::

Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio   by Gary Presley. University of Iowa Press; October 2008)

Even held to the most rigorous of definitions, Gary Presley’s life has been filled with suffering. A faulty Polio inoculation received in 1959, when he was seventeen, resulted in three months in an iron lung (a machine that enables those with loss of muscle control to breathe). Presley left the iron lung for life in a wheelchair. Every day since then, he has experienced physical pain—and sometimes indignity, when the world proves unaccommodating to the disabled.

Somerset Maugham once said that suffering does not ennoble the character—happiness, he claimed, sometimes does that, but suffering only made men petty and vindictive. The first part of Presley’s memoir  would seem to prove Maugham right. Succumbing to self-pity, Presley fought a “strange silent war” with the reality of his disability, challenging his parents with his intransigence and resentment. Unable to look beyond the unreason of his condition, an embittered Presley asked his father, “Do you think God wants me in this wheelchair?” The response was an honest if unhelpful “How should I know?” The tension between religion and reality, an omnipotent God and hapless subject, is one of the central conflicts in this work, and carried through till the surprising resolution near the book’s conclusion.

Over fifty years, Presley gradually travels the arc from rage to acceptance—a journey that I have come to understand (from reading this book) is by no means inevitable for the disabled. He describes his voyage with a salty humor that leavens an often-harrowing story. The danger in this sort of book, at least for me, is that the weighty (and worthy) subject matter might overwhelm the writing, but Presley the prose stylist has as much to offer as Presley the memoirist. Consider:

I had yet to learn that I had been drafted into an army that throughout most of human history had sustained itself by begging…[] I understood then, and still believe it now, that it takes a certain grace to accept charity, a grace I could not find within me during that period…

Presley states that the aim of his book is to “show that a life disabled is a life worth living.” But this work calls to my mind Socrates’ words—that the unexamined life is not worth living. Presley meticulously analyzes every instance where his actions and attitudes fell short of his own (very high) standards. At times, Seven Wheelchairs almost seems like an act of catharsis:

I found comfort in contriving a fantasy that my simple existence proved I had mined a heroic quality from within; I fancied I had survived through an act of will, and act of bravery. That contradictory delusion—heroic, even though dependent—overlooked the fact that I would wither and die in bed [...] if I did not have someone to watch over me.

Stop beating yourself up! I sometimes want to tell Presley. You’ve been through a lot, and you deserve some compassion. Not pity though; no reader would dare pity him, not when his life is filled with such spirit and wry self-awareness. Presley himself shuns the term noble, and I agree with his reasoning: he does not want to be extolled for spending his life in a wheelchair. Rather, all he demands is equal opportunities for the disabled. But in his capacity to find meaning in love and faith and work so his disability is but one facet of his life, in his view of the wheelchair not as constraint but an enabler of independence, in his insistence on his ordinariness, Presley to me is close to noble. Maugham should have remembered that the alchemy of suffering is selective; it takes a certain metal to make gold.

(This review appears in the current edition of Eclectica magazine.)

Writer Minal Hajratwala takes an in-depth look at the evolution of the global Indian diaspora through the lens of her own family’s migrations in her book Leaving India. In an interview with me for Bookslut , she talks about the Indian diaspora in America, the research that went into her book, and the place she calls “home.”

Here is an excerpt:

 In your book, you seem to discard the notion of the ABCD — the American-Born Confused Desi, a person of Indian ethnicity who is constantly forced to choose between America and India and confused as to her cultural identity. Do you think that image is irrelevant/dated now?

 I think that image was always a lie, although like most lies it had some truth to it. Our generation was not particularly confused; we were a focal point for the confusion of others, both the white society around us that didn’t know what to make of Indians and the immigrant generation that didn’t know quite what to make of America.

To distill the complexity of a group of 1.7 million people of various socioeconomic levels, religions, languages, and regional backgrounds down to a single “image” is something that various forces both inside and outside the Indo-American community are constantly trying to do, but it’s an impossible and, to me, undesirable project. I’m much more interested in a multiplicity of images of who we are and can be. The diaspora is incredibly complex and diverse, and in the United States some desis have been here five generations, some arrived yesterday, and there are confusions and certainties in each situation. The best image for me would be one of those goddesses with a thousand and one different faces and arms and tools. No confusion, but lots of options.

…

You’ve placed much emphasis on the accuracy of your writing, stating explicitly that you have not fictionalized anything in the book. What significance does this scrupulousness about telling the truth about your history hold for you?

It’s interesting that, no matter how much I reiterate that Leaving India is nonfiction, people still call it a “novel.” On the one hand I think that’s a compliment, as people often say admiringly of nonfiction books, “It reads like a novel.” No one ever compliments the voice or pacing of a novel by saying “It reads like nonfiction”!

On the other hand I think we’ve just become very used to the dominant experience of South Asian literature in the United States being fiction. It’s lovely for readers to sink into an exotic world of spices, silks, and family dramas, and often those dramas are stripped of historical tensions such as colonialism and racism, or at least history takes a far back seat. To me the project of this book was to understand why and how the Indian diaspora formed, in a very personal way; why do I have 36 first cousins spread out all across the globe? And because I really wanted to understand precisely how political and personal circumstances conspired to affect our lives, it wouldn’t have helped me to just make things up. I have other fiction projects in the work, and fiction is a fine way of making sense of the world; it just wasn’t right for this material, for me.

You’re a poet, and a journalist. Did you have to work to reconcile these two sides while writing the book, or did they flow into each other?

My journalistic and poetic voices battled mightily, but it was a productive struggle in a sort of Hegelian sense. I hope the synthesis is as satisfying to readers as it was torturous for me.

Read the whole interview with Minal here.

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Uma Krishnaswami is the India-born, New Mexico-based author of several widely-praised children’s books (Chachaji’s Cup, The Broken Tusk ).  She talks about how racism has impacted her writing:

“A long time ago, I left a writing group in tears when someone in the group suggested I assume a pseudonym and write stories about “regular” kids. As if my name, and the South Asian kids in my stories were, you know, irregular! And I had to wonder, when I began to submit work to publishers in the early 90’s, whether there was some rule that people from my part of the world could only be shown as illiterate and barefoot-and far away.”

This interview is part of Amy Bowllan’s excellent blog series “Writers Against Racism” on School Library Journal.  Other South Asian YA authors Bowllan has interviewed include Neesha Meminger (whose YA book I’m currently reviewing), Mitali Perkins, and Rukhsana Khan.

You can read the complete author interview here on Bowllan’s Blog.

Wasafiri magazine polled 25 international writers (including Indra Sinha, Amit Chaudhuri and Chika Unigwe) to find the most influential book of the last 25 years. There’s a deeply satisfying diversity of responses–when was the last time one of these “best of ” lists wasn’t dominated by canonical white dudes? The authors named this time round include Ondaatje, Mildred Taylor and Raymond Carver (bet you didn’t see that one coming). The winner, with three votes, was Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sujata Bhatt has prefaced her choice (Marquez) with the words “I don’t think any book has shaped world literature to the extent that the internet has in the past 25 years.”  Hmm, interesting.

The article can be read in its entirety here.

Why do intelligent women who believe in the equality of the sexes, who would be enraged  at the notion that they are somehow less than men, hesitate to term themselves feminists?   Hilary Mantel talks about this phenomenon in this Guardian interview:

[Mantel]  is appalled by those who have forgotten what her generation, and her mother’s generation, encountered. “very annoyingly, you get women nowadays who are educated and have got on in their professions, saying, ‘Oh, but I’m not a feminist.’” Anger suffuses her face, an intensity almost indecent. “The only reason they can say that is that they’re standing on the shoulders of their mothers, who fought these battles, I think for a woman to say ‘I’m not a feminist’ is [like] a lamb joining the slaughterer’s guild. It’s just empty-headed and stupid.”

Perhaps they’re trying to distance themselves from a particular caricature of feminism?

“Yeah. Well, they need to inform themselves. Women now take a great deal for granted…”

I’m totally rooting for Mantel to win this year’s Booker.

Update: And she did!!
See a video of her win here

And here’s an oldish review of Mantel’s wonderful, eerie, and altogether masterly Beyond Black

While reading a thriller, I anticipate — and usually get — a twisty, testosterone-ridden plot. If I’m lucky, there’s a strong female character; really lucky, a good sex scene. What I don’t expect: a theory of socio-political hegemony centered around the idea of dissent. But Rana Bose’s The Fourth Canvas is a novel of ideas as much as a thriller, with enough red herrings to make Agatha Christie proud, and enough progressive ideas to satisfy the most ardent activist.

 Claude Chiragi, a doctoral student at McGill, has just received a birthday present from his girlfriend Clara. To his relief, the large flat package isn’t an Ikea piece in malevolent wait for assembly. Rather, Clara has come up with the goods — a painting by the political philosopher Guillermo Sanchez, who also happens to be the subject of Claude’s research. Sanchez, who died in 1974, was the author of a few articles, and a book on Mexican history — slim pickings for a thesis. The hitherto unknown painting will provide Claude material for his floundering PhD.

The canvas depicts a city landscape full of characters seemingly in fear of an impending calamity. Only one woman seems exempt from the malaise; her face is calm, even eager. Hidden in the painting are the words “Two periods of rise, followed by two periods of decline.”

Apparently, a theory of empire has been painted into the canvas, which seems but one in a series. And if further incentive to explore the canvas’s provenance was needed — the calm-faced woman in the painting seems to be moving. And so Claude and Clara set off on a quest to unearth all of Sanchez’s canvases. First stop: Cuba, where they’ll meet a friend of Sanchez.

In the manner of all good thrillers, the adventure is also a voyage of self-discovery. This being The Fourth Canvas rather than The Fourth Protocol, Claude and Clara don’t realize an unexpected affinity for grenade launchers or a talent for blending into foreign locales. While Claude plunges deep into Sanchez’s intellectual argument, Clara rediscovers her Argentinean roots — her father and brother disappeared during the country’s Dirty War, and Clara had hitherto suppressed these memories in favor of a cool citizen-of-the-world Montrealer persona. As Sanchez’s theory of the role of dissent in the collapse of empires becomes clearer, Claude and Clara are unable to lead their former passive lives. The canvases have changed not just their worldview, but their notions of their own roles in the fight for social justice.

The Fourth Canvas also features several secondary narratives, including that of one Diana McLaren, a professor of political philosophy in Montreal who is Claude’s father’s partner, and another featuring Sanchez’s sister Lydia. Bose gathers these seemingly random threads together by way of an abduction, a misty mountain hop through the Andes, and a case of mistaken identity, through to a satisfyingly dramatic (and devious) denouement.

Rana Bose is an engineer, a magazine editor and playwright, and The Fourth Canvas showcases each one of his métiers. In his acknowledgement, Bose states that his theatre background leads him to “launch torrents of ideas on the stage,” and indeed, The Fourth Canvas at times is all but submerged under expositions on every possible idea or event, from the film Ghost Dog to The Beastie Boys to cricket. Many of these riffs are at best tangentially related to the plot, and often take place on the flimsiest of pretexts; the only reason I forgive the author such self-indulgence is because everything he has to say is so damn interesting. Consider Bose’s description of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris:

“If a cemetery could, however, be accused of name-dropping in a display of turf arrogance, this would be the place…Chopin has a muse weeping, Oscar Wilde has a winged messenger calling him away…[There] lie the graves of Laura Marx, Karl’s daughter, and Paul Lefargue, who committed suicide together in 1911.”

If this doesn’t send you haring off to Wikipedia, nothing will.

But Bose the novelist is perhaps closest to Bose the editor of the alternative webzine Montreal Serai, a publication whose stated aim is to give a voice to people at the margins. As a character in The Fourth Canvas says “Legitimacy is hogged by the mainstream. [But] the people on the periphery are just as legitimate.” Bose’s novel not only reinforces the importance of dissent, but presents a vision for a new wave of popular resistance that co-opts people from the peripheries of every country on the planet. That he’s chosen to convey his ideas in such an accessible literary genre is altogether fitting. Even thrilling.

(This review appears in the current issue of rabble.ca.)