Sea of Poppies

I'm really enjoying Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. Ghosh is one of those writers who seems to write some very good books and some very pedestrian ones. Like I said before, his prose is prosaic, so to speak, and lacks the kind of flair achieved by Salman Rushdie and attempted by Arundhati Roy. It's very correct, but I found it a bit too bland in The Glass Palace.

However.

Sea of Poppies is a book that Just Works. You don't notice the blandness of the prose because you are dazzled by the profusion of archaic and obscure yet deliciously recognizable words that Ghosh keeps weaving into the conversations and sentences in this book. This book is worth reading for the language alone.

One of the greatest things about Ghosh, and I noted this in my review of his book, The Hungry Tide, is his ability to let a story tell itself. He doesn't try to force his opinions down the reader's throat, something that some other authors do, sometimes quite directly through infodumps and at other times obtusely through conversations or events in their books. Ghosh tells the story with an even keel, and you can make your own judgements. This is true of Sea of Poppies.

Another thing I really appreciate about this book is it's not targeted at Euramericans. A great many Indian authors, presumably worried about their bottom lines, write exactly what the fashionable parts of the West want to hear: exaggerated stories of caste conflict, language that's carefully non-heathen and uses Western idioms instead of Indian ones. Ghosh eschews all that. Nothing against Euramerican-style literature, but it's nice to see a more Indian flavour in a book. Although you might guess at the meanings of half the archaic words in the book without a knowledge of Hindi, those who do know Hindi can understand it better. This is a real Indian book.

And unlike some other authors, Ghosh doesn't sugarcoat the problems the British created. In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh brings out the terrible privations that British Rule forced upon India. There are Brits who still persist in the belief that British Rule wasn't a disaster for India, and reading this book would quickly disabuse them of such notions.

I'm halfway through the book. Let's hope the rest of the book retains these qualities.

Anita Jain

So I just got done reading Anita Jain's Marrying Anita.

I'd heard about Marrying Anita at the Ultrabrown blog. It's an interesting book about the author's attempts to find the right guy to marry in both New York and Delhi. It's been described as chick lit, and after reading it, I agree -- its main subject matter is the heroine/author's dating/romance sentiments. It's just that this book is a lot more than just chick-lit. Anita Jain does something I find very interesting: she writes about trends, patterns in society that she observes. While I don't think all of the social patterns she puts forth in her book are 100% representative or factual (not all Indians omit articles from their English), many of them are a good succinct precis of what seems to actually be happening. I'd go so far as to describe this book as a sort of romantic Maximum City Lite. It does talk mostly about the author's emotional ride through New York and Delhi, but you actually learn a but about Delhi during the reading of it.

I recently heard an interview of Anita Jain at NPR. It was interesting, but it was also quite amazing how the host, Jane Clayson, seemed to completely miss the point of what Anita kept saying. She also didn't seem to have read the book. She seemed fixated on her opinion that Anita had been trying the arranged marriage route. Excerpts like this one dominated the mood of the interview:

The pressure on me to find a husband started very early. A few days after my 1st birthday, within months of my family’s arrival in the U.S., I fell out the window of a three-story building in Baltimore. My father recalls my mother’s greatest concern, after learning that I hadn’t been gravely injured: “What boy will marry her when he finds out?” she cried, begging my father to never mention my broken arm—from which I’ve enjoyed a full recovery—to prospective suitors out of fear my dowry would be prohibitively higher.

Though you'd never guess it from this interview, the book is really 95% about Anita's love life, not so much about the high-shock-value nitty-gritties of arranged marriage.

To be fair to Jane Clayson, I get the feeling Anita herself provides these anecdotes as a publicity element to shock her American readers, who expect to hear precisely such things in connection with arranged marriage. They can conveniently gasp at the delicious backwardness of certain parts of the world, be reassured that their stereotypes about India hold good, and get on with life, safe in the notion that their worldview needs no adjusting. Anita's dad's hours spent on Shaadi.com are probably no different than what thousands of Americans do on Match.com, but if you throw in the words "Arranged Marriage", it suddenly becomes shocking.

Another surprise was in store when I read the comments on the interview webpage. There were a lot of listener complaints about her articulation or lack thereof. It's true that Anita seems to punctuate every sentence with "Umms" and "Aahs", but it didn't annoy me nearly as much as it did some of the commenters. The predictable Harvard-envy type comments really bothered me though. You have all these people who would love to hate Harvard students simply because they went to Harvard, wait for any mistakes made by Harvard graduates, and then pounce. "What do the folks at Harvard teach their students," one might hear them grouse, "Even my 5-th graders speak more articulately." Harvard-bashing is pretty popular, even though Harvard is much more egalitarian these days.

The book is a very courageous one. I'm surprised all of Anita's various, um, acquaintances in Delhi acquiesced to have their names in it. They might have had their names changed. Either that, or this brave new India is more daring than I imagined. It must also have taken something out of Anita herself; the first question that sprang to my (admittedly parochial) Indian mind is how her parents reacted to her exploits. It's interesting that she lays her own thoughts out so openly; I'm not sure most people could do that!

So, I'm curious about two things: how did Anita's parents react to the book? And how is her new love life after publication of her book?

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is an interesting author. So far I've read only two of his books: The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace. I really like The Hungry Tide, but The Glass Palace was a huge disappointment. I'm about to read the recently released Sea of Poppies, maybe I'll post my impressions.

Ghosh is supposed to be historically very authentic. Problem is, he's also a master of insipid writing. He's at the opposite end from Salman Rushdie or even Arundhati Ghosh. Prose in The Glass Palace is earnest, sincere, grammatically perfect -- but not brilliant. The moments of brilliance in that book derive from the vivid detail, not from the prose itself.

Somehow, he managed to make The Hungry Tide a great book in spite of this. Perhaps it was the subject: the dark, dank, dangerous Sunderbans. The Glass Palace is unsatisfying, though. Ok, his ideas may have been good, but it really doesn't feel like a finished product. While it starts very well, I got the impression Ghosh got tired of the book midway and just wrapped it up somehow. Parts of the book spend several pages on the description of events in a single day or hour. Other parts skip several decades in a paragraph. Parts are intensely detailed, other parts are totally textureless. Entire subplots are introduced and then fizzle out without any consequences in the book. I mean, who cares about an intimately detailed illicit encounter one of the female characters has if she hardly plays a role in the rest of the book? The book isn't really meant to have a plot, it's just a succession of events in the lives of some families. But it just didn't work for me.

Having said that, it wasn't a total loss either. I did get a good deal of interesting historical detail from it, and I think I understand conditions in those days better than I did before I read the book. It also has some interesting studies into the British army in India. Overall, I think it's worth reading just for the historical perspective.

Hopefully Sea of Poppies will be a more coherent read.

Costly Indian Books!

I just bought a few books in Delhi, and some of their prices made my eyes bug out. Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies was Rs. 600 -- about $15! This is just 25% less than the $20 or so that you pay for typical hardcover books in the USA. Anita Jain's Marrying Anita was Rs. 500 -- in paperback!! Assuming a purchasing power parity of 5:1, that is the equivalent of an American mass market paperback costing about $100!

Surely books in India should be much cheaper for people to be able to buy and read them? Publishing costs in India should be much lower, and Indian publishing houses (including Penguin) seem to have very little publicity compared to Western publishing houses; this should drive down price even further. What is the reason for the high cost? I tried to think of some:

1. Low Volumes Sales might be much lower, so publishers have to increase margins. But then why not change things around and do things like release paperbacks right at the beginning, so people can buy them?
2. High Publishing Cost Maybe my assumption is wrong and publishing costs are almost as high in India as in the West.
3. Inefficiency? Maybe the publishing houses spend a lot on marketing but still don't realize enough sales increases?
4. Apathy It's also possible it's a "because we can" attitude; in other words, greed prevailing over good sense. But isn't that shooting themselves in the foot?
   

Or could it be some other reason?