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Dear reader,
The Canadian poet, essayist, and dramatist Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last week, for sending words afloat through genres, including mythology and tragedy, across history and geography, experimenting through prose and poetry. The Academy praised her “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
It is usually difficult to write about Carson because she transcends genre, but that is all the more so in a time of yearning for meaning and certainty. Yet the lived life transcends genres as well and Carson excels at revealing what the siloes of genre and form usually resist.
As the editorial points out, in Eros the Bittersweet, her first book, for example, Carson recast her doctoral thesis on the ancient Greek poet Sappho through literary criticism, philosophy and poetry to explore the roles desire and distances essay in the way we experience love. In The Beauty of the Husband (2001), she chronicled an imploding marriage as a semi-autobiographical work of narrative verse borrowing its imagery from tango after opening its sections with lines from John Keats. Autobiography of Red (1998), perhaps her best-known work, reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Geryon and Heracles as a queer coming-of-age story, using fragmented verse and abrupt silences to allow its protagonist a tender inner life he does not have in the original myth.
“She did not initially set out to become a poet,” Radhika Santhanam writes in her profile. Carson preferred to draw. “Her first book of poetry, Short Talks (1992), began, in fact, as a bunch of drawings. She put titles on them and eventually, the drawings disappeared altogether.”
As Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta puts it, reading Carson is an “intellectual delight”, a chance to go on journeys that a “world of borders” would rather deny us. “Carson’s writing pushes beyond reason, beyond language, beyond translation, towards mysteries that remain resistant to explanation.”
Books of the week
Tiger Memories: My Life in Wildlife Conservation (Penguin), by K. Ullas Karanth and co-authored by Joshua Mathew, traces the tiger expert’s lifelong passion for the natural world, his contributions to research and conservation in India. In an interview with Preeti Zacharia about the importance and significance of wildlife tourism, he says, “Wildlife tourism, in general, has not played a positive role in expanding our wildlife habitats. I think it has tremendous potential in India because it can boost the rural economy, which can help people who live around these protected areas.”
In her review of The Sunday Book Bazaar (Speaking Tiger), Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta follows author Kanupriya Dhingra into the famed book markets of Daryaganj and its place within the old city’s culture. “Interacting with booksellers, buyers, and regular visitors, [Dhingra] follows its evolution from the 1960s as a motley collection of vinyl records, artefacts, and used books, through eviction and legal struggle into a unique cultural institution in this century,” Mahadevan-Dasgupta writes.
Aditya Mani Jha pays tribute to Jeffrey Archer and to all the authors who have written from behind bars, from Jean Genet and Miguel de Cervantes to Louis Althusser and Jack Unterweger, exploring how they turned confinement into literature.
Fundamentals of Flavour (Chronicle Books) has molecular biologist-turned-chef Nik Sharma working through the science, culture and techniques that shape how we cook and taste, across a hundred recipes. In Nidhi Adlakha’s review, he talks about where the book took him in turn: “Science can explain what happens to food, but it doesn’t explain why a particular dish matters to someone, why we crave certain flavours, or why techniques travel and change. I wanted both forms of knowledge to coexist in the book.”
Nightstand
I am reading Sucheta Dasgupta’s Ladies’ Night (Running Head Books). A group of women exchange stories spanning fantasy and realism, exploring desire, sorrow, identity, and their struggles for freedom. So far I have mixed feelings.
For complaints or compliments, you can mail me at swati.ks@thehindu.co.in. Until next time.