Love Queen of Malabar: Exploring the Memoir of a Remarkable Friendship with Kamala Das

Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das, written by Merrily Weisbord, is a captivating exploration of a unique and profound bond between two extraordinary women. Kamala Das, a celebrated Indian poet, and Weisbord, a Canadian filmmaker and writer, embarked on a transformative journey of friendship that transcended boundaries of culture, language, and geography. This 1000-word article delves into the essence of their relationship, shedding light on the powerful themes and insights presented in the memoir.

Unveiling the Enigmatic Kamala Das: Love Queen of Malabar invites readers into the world of Kamala Das, a pioneering literary figure who defied societal norms and fearlessly expressed her thoughts on love, sexuality, and the human condition. Das, also known as Kamala Surayya, was a poetess with a prodigious talent that garnered widespread acclaim. Weisbord's memoir provides a deeply intimate portrayal of Das, capturing her essence as a woman who challenged conventions and fearlessly explored her desires and emotions.

The Power of Friendship: At the heart of Love Queen of Malabar lies the transformative friendship between Kamala Das and Merrily Weisbord. Their bond is characterized by a mutual understanding and respect, despite their differing backgrounds and experiences. Weisbord's memoir serves as a testament to the power of friendship that transcends barriers, be they cultural, geographical, or linguistic.

Weisbord and Das navigate their friendship through letters, phone calls, and personal visits, creating a tapestry of connection that crosses continents. They engage in heartfelt conversations, sharing their deepest thoughts, dreams, and vulnerabilities. Their friendship becomes a source of strength and inspiration, empowering both women to embrace their authentic selves and pursue their passions.

Themes Explored: Love Queen of Malabar explores various themes that resonate deeply with readers. One prominent theme is the exploration of identity and self-discovery. Das, known for her candidness in her literary works, encourages Weisbord to introspect and question her own beliefs and values, ultimately leading to personal growth and transformation.

The memoir also delves into the complexities of love and relationships. Das's unapologetic embrace of her desires challenges societal norms and exposes the limitations imposed on women. Weisbord, through her interactions with Das, gains a profound understanding of the power of love and the importance of embracing one's true desires.

Furthermore, the memoir sheds light on the concept of home and belonging. Kamala Das, torn between her Indian heritage and her longing for acceptance in the Western world, grapples with a sense of displacement. Weisbord, in her role as a confidante and friend, provides solace and companionship, ultimately fostering a sense of belonging for both women.

Love Queen of Malabar: Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das is a thought-provoking exploration of a remarkable friendship that transcended boundaries. Through her vivid storytelling, Merrily Weisbord captures the essence of Kamala Das, a fearless poetess, and the transformative power of their friendship. The memoir presents a compelling narrative that delves into themes of identity, love, and the search for belonging. As readers immerse themselves in the pages of this memoir, they are invited to reflect on their own connections, embrace their true selves, and cherish the beauty of friendship that knows no boundaries.

Really, here’s why you should read Proust

Marcel Proust's Biographer Makes the Case

In Search of Lost Time, like many great literary works, is a quest whose structure resembles that of a symphony. The novel’s major themes—love, art, time, and memory—are carefully and brilliantly orchestrated throughout the book. The opening pages, which Proust called the overture, state in a musical, intimate, and subtle manner the goal of the quest, which is to find the answer to life’s essential questions: Who am I? What am I to make of this life? As Proust’s title indicates, the main character, known as the Narrator or Marcel, is searching for his own identity and the meaning of life. As he tells his story, he speaks to us in a voice that is one of the most engaging and enchanting in all of literature.

I always tell anyone who might be intimidated by the many pages to be read that, although In Search of Lost Time is rich and complex and demands an attentive reader, the novel is never difficult. In spite of its length and complexity, most readers find it readily accessible. Vladimir Nabokov, who considered it the best novel of its era, described its major themes and effervescent, Mozartean style: “The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria—this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucent work.” In spite of its “enormity” and complexity, Proust’s book has never been out of print and has been translated into well over 40 languages. In Search of Lost Time has not been kept alive by the academy. The work is seldom taught in its entirety in university courses, but maintains its presence among us thanks to readers all over the world who return to it again and again.

Over the years, I have received unsolicited testimony from many such readers who say that Proust changed their lives by giving them a new and richer way of looking at the world. In fact, rendre visible (to make visible) is Proust’s succinct definition of what an original artist does. In Proust’s case, I think he helps us to see the world as it really is, not only its extraordinary beauty and diversity, but his observations make us aware of how we perceive and how we interact with others, showing us how often we are mistaken in our own assumptions and how easy it is to have a biased view of another person. And I think the psychology and motivation of Proust’s characters are as rewardingly complex as are those of Shakespeare’s characters. Just as the Bard describes Cleopatra, many of Proust’s characters are creatures of “infinite variety.” Speaking of Shakespeare, Shelby Foote, in an interview, placed Proust in the top tier of writers he most admired: “Proust has been the man that hung the moon for me. He’s with Shakespeare in my mind, in the sense of having such a various talent. Whenever you read Proust, for the rest of your life, he’s part of you, the way Shakespeare is part of you. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I truly feel that he is the great writer of the 20th century.”

Great texts are those that involve the reader to an extraordinary degree. We find ourselves placed at the center of the action. In Proust’s case, because of the intimate, engaging first-person narrative, we become the hero’s companion as he seeks to discover the truth about the human condition. In order to discover the truth about our experience and depict it in a novel, Proust brought to bear his extraordinary powers of observation and analysis. Joseph Conrad saw this endless probing as the key to his genius: “Proust’s work . . . is great art based on analysis. I don’t think there is in all creative literature an example of the power of analysis such as this.”

And how does In Search of Lost Time continue to speak to generation after generation in a voice that seems fresh and vigorous? Far from being the culminating opus of decadent literature, as some early critics believed, this novel constitutes one of the most dynamic texts ever written. Its tremendous energy acts as a rejuvenating force. All its narrative elements—plot, characters, style—create, as Iris Murdoch said of its effect, “the most intense pleasure which one does take in great art.”

Here are a few of the outstanding features of this novel: It is arguably the best book ever written about perception. (Proust’s legendary hypersensitivity is obviously linked to his skills as a writer.) He was the first novelist to analyze and depict the full spectrum of human sexuality. There are even passages that might allow him to claim to be the founder of gender studies and a proponent of gay marriage. And his sense of humor allows him to create comic scenes that satirize the foibles and vanity of his characters, especially those of high society. Proust fits perfectly Gilles Deleuze’s definition of a great author: “A great author is one who laughs a lot.”

My favorite quote by one famous writer about another is Virginia Woolf’s description of her reaction to Proust’s prose:

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.

Proust’s words have enchanted Virginia Woolf and many other writers, dramatists, filmmakers, and choreographers so that often his book becomes a central or significant element in their works. Here is one example: In Search of Lost Time and Albertine, one of its major characters, play a role in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice. Near the end of her novel, we find Edward, one of the main characters, resuming his reading of Proust:

“Oh—Proust—” Edward had been looking for the passage which had so amazed him . . . about Albertine going out in the rain on her bicycle, but he couldn’t find it. He had turned to the beginning. [Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.] What a lot of pain there was in those first pages. What a lot of pain there was all the way through. So how was it that the whole thing could vibrate with such a pure joy? This was something which Edward was determined to find out.

Although we do not know whether Edward found the answer, Murdoch’s tease at the end of her book is intended as an invitation for us to make our own investigation. This joy stems in part, I believe, from the compassion Proust shows for his characters, even those with whom he finds the most fault. He loves and wants to redeem them all, a sentiment that constitutes a powerful moral force, endowing his characters with life and making them seem real. Pamela Hansford Johnson, another British writer, sees this as his novel’s great lesson: “There is no novel in the world that changes its readers more profoundly . . . above all it teaches compassion, that relaxing of the mind into gentleness which makes life at once infinitely more complex and infinitely more tolerable.” And: “Proust makes the reader love [the Narrator] so that Proust himself, perhaps more than any writer except Shakespeare, becomes an intimate.”

In the closing pages, Proust urges each of us to comprehend, develop, and deploy our remarkable faculties. He intends his entire enterprise to persuade us that we are incredibly rich instruments, but that most often we let our gifts lie dormant or we squander them. The joy that so many readers feel at the conclusion of the book derives from the long-delayed triumph of the hero and the realization that we too can, by following his example, attempt to lead the true life. When the Narrator completes his quest, after many ups and downs and misunderstandings, the myriad themes—major and minor—beautifully orchestrated throughout, are gloriously resolved in the grand finale. This happy ending makes In Search of Lost Time a comedy of the highest order, one that amuses, delights, and frequently dazzles, as it instructs.

Shelby Foote, as a writer, had a unique relationship with Proust’s novel in that each time he finished one of his own novels or his vast history of the Civil War, he gave himself a special reward: “I’ve always given myself a reward when I finish something and the reward I give myself is always the same thing. I read A la recherche du temps perdu. That’s my big prize. C’est mon grand prix. I think I’ve read it nine times, now. It’s like a two-month vacation because it takes that long to read Proust. I like it better than going to Palm Beach.”

Why did Foote always give himself the same reward on finishing one of his own books? And why does he say that reading Proust is better than spending two months in Palm Beach? It is because he feels on each reading the rejuvenating power that we all experience in the presence of great art. In fact, Proust says that this is the seul bain de Jouvence, the only Fountain of Youth. All the labor and love that an author (or artist, or musician, or scientist—all examples illustrated by Proust) puts into such a creation has a powerful, rejuvenating effect on the reader. I urge anyone who loves books and who has not yet discovered Proust’s novel to pick up Swann’s Way and dive right in. I assure you that you will be richly rewarded.

(Source: Lit Hub) 

‘Reading her books in lockdown made me feel safe’: Why I’m saving to holiday like Agatha Christie

 Laura Horton and her friend agreed to visit Burgh Island every five years to follow in the footsteps of their favourite author

A stay at Burgh Island Hotel feels like leaving the modern world behind and going back in time, says Laura Horton. “When you’re there it’s like you’re in a time warp,” she says.

The art deco hotel was hugely popular during the 1930s, with many famous visitors including Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Edward VIII, and Wallis Simpson. “It was very glamorous in its day,” Horton says.

Guests can only get to the tiny island – which is off the coast of South Devon – by water tractor at high tide, or by foot when the tide is out. The hotel sits up above the rocks, overlooking the sea, and rooms are designed with period furniture. Guests often wear glamorous clothes, such as flapper dresses or dinner suits.

Burgh Island Hotel is reached by a water tractor at high tide. Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

Horton has been saving for a return trip to the hotel with her friend Ella once restrictions are lifted. “When you’re there it feels like you’re existing out of time,” she says. “It’s nice when you’re talking to people, to imagine them as characters.”

Modern-day guests can sip 1920s-style cocktails over dinner, or bathe in big roll-top bathtubs with views of the sea. “I remember having a bath with a glass of champagne,” says Horton. They can then head to the beach, or take a dip in the mermaid pool, a natural sea lagoon nearby. “It was hot when we went before, so we sunbathed and sat outside and had crab sandwiches,” she says.

Burgh Island is a dream destination for anyone who loves Christie, and Horton has been a fan of the famous crime writer from a young age. “I found her books strangely comforting,” she says. “There’s always order resumed after the chaos and there will always be an answer at the end, which you don’t often get in real life.”

Horton says she’s found herself rereading Christie’s crime books during the lockdown. “While we were in this turbulent period I was looking to do things that made me feel safe and comfortable,” she says. “And I feel safe and comfortable reading Christie, weirdly, even though her stories are all about murder.”

Horton and her friend Ella bonded over their love of murder mysteries

Horton met her friend Ella several years ago and bonded over their mutual love of murder mystery. “At first, I didn’t think we had a lot in common. Ella works in gaming and is very tech-savvy and I’m absolutely not,” Horton says. But then the topic of Christie came up. “I said I love her books and Ella’s face lit up,” Horton says. “After that, we became really good friends.”

Christie’s books are often set in beautiful locations – from the Orient Express to the Nile River, or in old manor houses in the English countryside. The book Evil Under the Sun was even set on Burgh Island itself. “It’s the perfect place for a [fictional] murder,” says Horton.

The characters in Christie’s books are usually interesting and eccentric. “They always murder for love or money,” Horton says. And the big reveal at the end is always satisfying. “I love those scenes where they get everyone in the room [to reveal the murderer], it’s very theatrical.”

Horton says she can imagine Christie on Burgh Island, where the author used to come and write. “There’s a room with a big peacock glass roof and I like to imagine her sitting there,” Horton says. “I can imagine her being a bit like [her fictional detective] Miss Marple, keeping herself to herself.”

Every five years, Horton and Ella stay on Burgh Island together – they stayed there for their 30th and 35th birthdays. “You want to be there with someone else who’s enthusiastic about it,” Horton says.

Holidaymakers at the hotel in the 1930s. Photograph: Reg Speller/Getty Images

And now that travel is permitted, they’re hoping to go back. Horton is saving for the trip by selling clothes she’s collected over the years. “I’m selling old clothes on eBay,” she says. “When things open up, I’m planning on getting a stall somewhere.” She’s aiming to save £350 for the trip.

It’s been good to save for a glamorous trip during the lockdown, Horton says. “It feels really nice to be saving for an experience I’m going to enjoy,” she says. “Especially something as decadent and lovely as Burgh Island.”

Knowing you have savings ready to pay for a treat such as a holiday can be a great comfort, says Jill Waters, NS&I’s retail director. “Having a savings pot ready for the unexpected will also provide the assurance that you’re ready for ‘just-in-case’ days too,” she adds.

Horton says that Christie would have been a big people watcher, getting inspiration for characters from the guests. “To be a crime writer you need to understand people’s psychology,” she says.

This is why it’s her ultimate dream to spend a week on Burgh Island writing – just like Christie herself used to do.

(Source: The Guardian)

How Virginia Woolf’s work was shaped by music

 Many of Virginia Woolf’s early reviewers noted parallels between her literary innovations and those of contemporary composers, such as Claude Debussy. Woolf’s interest in music was overlooked after her death. However, 80 years on, we are now beginning to explore how her extraordinary experimental uses of narrative perspective, repetition and variation derive from her close study of particular musical works and specific musical forms.

Music provided Woolf (and other modernists including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield) with a vocabulary to imagine and describe their creative practice and formal innovations. Woolf, for instance, compares her diary writing to a pianist practising their scales. She describes her reading as a process of “tuning up” for her writing. And in 1940 she famously observed:

It’s odd, for I’m not regularly musical but I always think of my books as music before I write them.

Virginia Woolf listened to a wide variety of music, including Russian ballet music which she heard when the Ballets Russes visited London in 1912. Wikimedia

Music in Woolf’s life

Woolf grew up immersed in music. As a young woman, she attended operas and concerts at the Royal Opera House three or four times a week – sometimes, every night. Like most women of her age and social class, she had received basic music education in singing and piano. But her passion as a listener far outstripped her abilities as a performer.

Her letters and diaries repeatedly convey her love of classical repertoire – particularly the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. But she heard a wide variety of music in varied settings. She heard folk music as she travelled in England, Scotland and continental Europe. Took in comic and patriotic songs in music halls. Delighted in the work of Arnold Schoenberg and another avant-garde repertoire through her subscription membership of the National Gramophonic Society, and Russian ballet music when the Ballets Russes visited London in 1912.

Woolf’s Hogarth Press also published studies of contemporary music, composers and popular books of music appreciation. Her understanding of – and in some cases intimate friendships with – leading composers, music critics, conductors and other musicians of her time gave her an insight into professional musical life, too. Friends included the composers and critics Eddy Sackville-West and Gerald Berners, the conductor and educator Nadia Boulanger, and the composer and feminist Ethel Smyth.

Music in Woolf’s writing

Woolf’s feminism, pacificism and cosmopolitanism were significantly shaped by her enduring, passionate love of music. The social conventions surrounding music education, performance and composition catalyse some of her wittiest and most acerbic social comedy but also inform her critiques of, for example, women’s unequal access to music education.

In her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Woolf references specific musical works to challenge the established expectation that men and women should play different repertoire. The novel’s female protagonist, who is an accomplished amateur pianist, plays Beethoven’s late piano sonatas. These works were frequently characterised as too technically and intellectually demanding for women performers. Essays addressed to amateur female pianists characterised the works as “simply unattainable”.

Virginia Woolf painted by Roger Eliot Fry. Leeds Museums and Galleries, CC BY-NC

Music also influences Woolf’s creative innovations. The double narrative structure of Mrs Dalloway, for example, which contrasts and entwines the lives of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway and traumatised veteran Septimus Warren Smith, may well be modelled on the double form of musical fugues (“fugue” was a contemporary term for shell shock).

Woolf observed in 1909 that, “We are miserably aware how little words can do to render music.” But this difficulty frequently catalyses and becomes a subject of her writing.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that her prose has been a rich source of creative inspiration for composers. For instance, her work inspired Dominick Argento’s 1974 song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and more oblique responses, such as Max Richter’s music for the 2015 ballet Woolf Works.

In the last 15 years, musical responses to Woolf’s writing have proliferated, from the string quartet and songs premiered by the Virginia Woolf and Music project, to the recent announcement that composer Thea Musgrave is writing an opera inspired by Orlando.

In a 1905 essay, Woolf invited contemporary writers to remember words’ allegiance to music and take inspiration from that. Scholars of Woolf’s work and composers are now, it seems, doing just that.

(Source: The Conversation)

Salman Rushdie on the notion of truth, and life after death threats

Author Salman Rushdie has been famous in literary circles for decades, for his writing, certainly, as well as for the fatwa that was very publicly declared against him after his book The Satanic Verses incurred the wrath of Iran’s religious leader in the late 1980s. In the years since, he has received a long list of awards, published more novels, stories, and works of non-fiction. Now 73, he has an active Twitter account, where he recently announced he’s working on a new book set in India. We sat down with him when he was in Vancouver for the Writers Festival in 2017, for this feature from our Spring 2018 issue.

Author Salman Rushdie. - Grant Harder

Salman Rushdie is about to board a Harbour Air flight from Vancouver to Victoria and is remembering all the times he has seen parts of Canada from above. As a 24-year-old copywriter for an ad agency working with Air Canada, Rushdie was flown around the country, arriving first in Vancouver then taking in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto.

His most recent image of Canada was also from a high-up vantage point. A friend sent him an imaginary map, drawn up after the election of the current U.S. president; New York and California were blended into an expanded Canada.

That’s a country Rushdie says he would like to live in.

Location matters to him. He cannot write his books without knowing first where the setting is for his characters. For nearly two decades, he has lived in New York, after spending most of his adult life in England, the last few years of which were spent in hiding. All three cities he has lived in have been attacked by terrorists over the last 20 years: London, New York, and Mumbai, which he precisely, deliberately, calls Bombay.

In the first chapters of Rushdie’s latest book, The Golden House (Penguin Random House), patriarch Nero Golden forbids his family from mentioning Mumbai, the place they are fleeing. “Tell them we are snakes who shed our skin. 

Tell them we just moved downtown from Carnegie Hill. Tell them we were born yesterday,” Nero orders his sons as they leave the airport for their new home in New York. “Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, American.”

The facade set up by Nero is dismantled quickly for the reader. What was supposed to be the grand reveal of the novel—a tragedy involving the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that drove the well-heeled Golden family out of their country to seek an even more decadent life in America—is uncovered early on, signifying to the reader that there is a much darker mystery still to unfold.

Rushdie says he knew he wanted to write something about the Mumbai attack that killed 166 people right after the incident took place, but wasn’t sure exactly how. The character of Nero was also taking shape in Rushdie’s mind years before he knew he wanted to put them together in the same novel.

It was in his youth that Rushdie first heard about Domus Aurea, an opulent golden house built by the fiddling Emperor Nero after a fire destroyed most of ancient Rome. So lavish was the home that Nero’s successors, embarrassed and angered at the scale of it, stripped and buried the palace. Within 40 years of Nero’s death, Dominus Aurea had been obliterated, built upon, and hidden from view.

“The question with a mystery is: what do you tell the reader when?”

Although Rushdie didn’t know how The Golden House would end, he knew there were a few separate ideas that would eventually come together to make sense. “That’s normal for me,” he says. “I suddenly see how they’re all pieces of the same jigsaw and how they all fit together. It’s happened so often, I almost expect it to happen. The last missing piece was the location.”

He found that location in a spot he knew well: a Greenwich Village townhouse once briefly occupied by Bob Dylan, where his friends, the artist couple Alba and Francesco Clemente, currently live. Rear yards of individual homes on a block below Bleeker Street open to form a communal space known as the MacDougall-Sullivan Gardens.

The apartment and gardens became a stage. Rushdie could imagine looking out the back window and across the yard, gazing into someone else’s window. Peering into private lives is how narrator Rene first encounters the Golden family, then deliberately inserts himself into their world. “It was a private world surrounded by a public world. What I’m doing is telling a story inside a story,” Rushdie says. “Here is this story about this family inside the tragedy. All around it is the larger catastrophe of America.”

In the book, Rushdie explores the criminal history of the Golden family and the deceptions they create to cover their past. It’s the closest to a mystery novel as anything he has written. “The question with a mystery is: what do you tell the reader when? When I was first working on it, I didn’t reveal anything about their past until very late in the novel, then I thought, ‘That’s going to annoy people to have this empty space where the truth is,’” Rushdie says. “The fact is, they have to keep a secret. There’s no reason I need to.”

Rushdie has been famous in literary circles since his second novel, Midnight’s Children, was published in 1981. Seven years later, he became the most well-known writer in the world when The Satanic Verses was published and incurred the wrath of Iran’s religious leader, who ordered a fatwa on him. He had to live in hiding and with protection, but others associated with the book did not have the same security. The Japanese translator of the book, Hitoshi Igarashi, was fatally stabbed; a translator in Italy was attacked; and in a targeted fire set by zealots aimed at Turkish translator Aziz Nesin, dozens of people were killed in a hotel, though Nesin survived.

Today, Rushdie travels on subways, goes to see baseball games, attends concerts. The death threat against him is not perceived as a danger any longer, and indeed, has even become a pop culture joke: the 2017 season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which includes a cameo by Rushdie, centres around a musical that Larry David’s on-screen persona wrote about the fatwa.

When Rushdie arrives at the Cactus Club Coal Harbour, just a handful of people recognize him. There are no visible security guards accompanying him, although at a reading for the Vancouver Writers Festival at the Chan Centre the night before, the RCMP were there along with security staff. At the event, after Rushdie spoke, a man approached the author with a box. It was empty, but the word “Dye” was on it—an incident that organizers at the Vancouver Writers Festival say was a poor, insensitive, and worrying joke. But at no time, says Rushdie, was he concerned for his safety. “It’s been over for 20 years. It’s not a factor,” he says. “It went on for nine years, I’ve lived in New York now for 19 years and there’s no security issue there, nor is there here.”

The last seven of those years have been a particularly productive period for him, with The Golden House being his fourth novel since 2010. It started with his second children’s book Luka and the Fire of Life, followed by his memoir, Joseph Anton, two years later in 2012. Then, two novels: Two Years Eight Months and 28 Nights published in 2015, and The Golden House published in September 2017.

His novel before The Golden House was all about genies, spirits, and other mythical creatures, along with allegories and illusions. This new book is decidedly different. “The notion of truth and what is truth is so under attack now,” Rushdie says. “It made me think one of the reasons why The Golden House doesn’t contain any fantastic elements is that I thought this may not be the time for this kind of writing.” Reality is his unshakeable focus now. He believes his readers want the truth, and they can handle the truth.

(Source: Montecristo Magazine)

Writer retreats to a Kabul that lives only in his memories and books

 FOUR large clocks tick out of sync, puncturing the silence of his Soviet-built apartment. A half-burned candle sits next to a stack of books. A small television is covered in soot.

This is where Rahnaward Zaryab, Afghanistan’s most celebrated novelist, locks himself up for weeks at a time, lost in bottles of smuggled vodka and old memories of Kabul, a capital city long transformed by war and money.

“We live in a vacuum, lacking heroes and ideals,” Mr. Zaryab reads from his latest manuscript, handwritten on the back of used paper. The smoke from his Pine cigarette, a harsh South Korean brand, clings to yellowed walls. “The heroes lie in dust, the ideals are ridiculed.”

The product of a rare period of peace and tolerance in Afghan history, Mr. Zaryab’s work first flourished in the 1970s, before the country was unraveled by invasion and civil war. Afghanistan still had a vibrant music and theater scene, and writers had a broad readership that stretched beyond just the political elite.

“Art, culture and literature have been forgotten completely,” said Rahnaward Zaryab. Credit... Bryan Denton for The New York Times

“I would receive letters from girls that would smell of perfume when you opened them,” Mr. Zaryab, who is 70, remembered fondly.

Mr. Zaryab’s stories are informed by his readings of Western philosophy and literature, the writer Homaira Qaderi said. He was educated on scholarships in New Zealand and Britain. But his heroes are indigenous and modest, delicately questioning the dogma and superstitions of a conservative society.

“He is the first writer to focus on the structure of stories, with the eye of someone well read,” Ms. Qaderi said. “We call him the father of new storytelling in Afghanistan.”

But after he became the standard-bearer for Afghan literature, Mr. Zaryab was forced to watch as Kabul, the muse he idealized as a city of music and chivalry in most of his 17 books, fell into rubble and chaos.

Some of the chaos has eased over the past decade, but that has caused him even more pain. He loathes how Kabul has been rebuilt: on a foundation of American cash and foreign values, paving over Afghan culture.

“Money, money, money,” he said, cringing. “Everyone is urged to make money, in any way they can. Art, culture and literature have been forgotten completely.”

FOR some Afghans, though, there is tragedy in the fact that one of their most renowned and enduring writers has largely withdrawn into his own memories, unable or unwilling to visualize a new identity amid a confusing and traumatic time for his country.

“Zaryab is enchanted by the past that to him is a symbol of the ideal life,” the critic and poet Mujib Mehrdad said. “He can’t disconnect from that past, he lives in the past.”

For his part, Mr. Zaryab insists that he is still looking at the problems of the day, though at times his allegories go unrecognized.

In one of his latest novels, a pompous gallant from Kabul’s old city in the early 1900s gives up his mundane routine after a chance meeting with a wise bird who introduces him to the philosophy of Socrates. He is thrown into meditation and soul-searching.

Mr. Zaryab says the bird is a symbol of the enlightenment push here in the early 20th century, and in the book, it is ceaselessly hounded by the city’s rulers and clergy — a clear and continuing theme in modern Afghanistan as well.

“Unfortunately, no one understood that part,” he said. “They thought it was an imaginative fantasy.”

For someone who reveled in his early fame, and whose international peers became global voices, translated across languages, the disconnect from an audience has not been easy.

Mr. Zaryab still enjoys minor celebrity status in public, and it once inspired him to try to reconnect to fans through a Facebook page. But he soon considered it a waste of time: Their interest was superficial, he felt; they were not after a deeper understanding of his work.

“In reality, I write for myself,” he said. “There is something inside that needs to come out, otherwise it bothers me. Not important whom I write it for.”

Born in the Rika Khana neighborhood of old Kabul in August 1944, Mr. Zaryab was one of three children. Neither his mother nor his father, a china trader, could read. A large age gap between him and his siblings meant that he grew up mostly a lone child.

After graduating from Kabul University with a degree in journalism, he went to Wales for postgraduate studies. His first job after his return was as a crime reporter for Zhwandoon Magazine, one of the prominent publications at the time. He sought the job because the details of the crime scene gave him inspirations for his stories, Mr. Zaryab said.

He continued to work as a reporter and editor for newspapers and magazines, as well as taking senior positions in the Culture Ministry, even after his fiction found acclaim.

Mr. Zaryab at his home in Kabul, where he shuts himself in for weeks at a time. Credit... Bryan Denton for The New York Times

When the civil war intensified in Kabul in the 1990s, Mr. Zaryab was briefly exiled to France; his wife and three daughters remain in Europe, not wanting to return to the violence and uncertainty of Afghanistan. After the Taliban were toppled, he returned to his old apartment in Kabul with more than 650 pounds of books and about $22 in his pocket, he said.

The city of his youth, of his stories, however, no longer existed. “I have this attachment to this place, I don’t know why,” he said. “I know there is poverty here, lies, hypocrisy, but still my heart is here.”

LITTLE of a readership culture remains these days, even in Kabul. Bookshops are saturated with bootleg copies of Iranian books. Local authors make no money from publishing their work. In return for a manuscript, Mr. Zaryab gets a number of copies from the publisher to distribute to friends.

Consider his latest work, “Qalandar Nama,” a collection of minimalist vignettes that he submitted in return for 150 free copies. The book has sold only 100 copies in the three months since its publishing, said the publisher, Wasim Amiri. In contrast, Mr. Amiri picks off the shelf a slim collection of poems by Fazel Nazari, a young poet from neighboring Iran. In its 32nd reprint over five years, the book has sold more than 80,000 copies.

Since Mr. Zaryab’s return, his daily routine has been simple, much of it spent reading and writing in his sixth-floor apartment. In the mornings, he goes for a walk around the block. If the air is too polluted already, he does yoga at home.

In the afternoons, a driver picks him up for his part-time job: For two hours a day, he edits news for Tolo TV, the country’s largest private channel. When he disconnects from the world during his weeks of solitude, his employer understands.

Mr. Zaryab’s desire for solitude has roots in his childhood. He fondly remembers walking alone along the Kabul River. “It had beautiful, clear water at the time,” he said. “Fishermen would fish with nets, not hooks. I would spend all my day along this river.” Not only has the river changed, he lamented, but also the city’s people. In a shrine on the same river, a mob recently accused a young woman of blasphemy and beat her to death in daylight. They dragged her body to the riverbed, now filled with trash, and set her on fire.

“In old Kabul’s Rika Khana, one shopkeeper had said something rude to a little girl once. Without a collective decision, the residents stopped buying from that shop and he was forced to move,” he said. “Do we have such people anymore? Today, they kill a girl and then burn her.

“How could I not be attached to the past?”

(Source: NYT)

William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno

 Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him …

—William Gaddis on writing a novel

A magnificent example of rant. A perfect example really. The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s first novel, was seven years in construction. J R, his second, took more than twice that long. In each case the invalid miraculously arose and, with commanding vigor, transformed and transforming, entered the realm of great literature.

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WILLIAM GADDIS. PHOTO: JERRY BAUER. COURTESY OF NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS.

Back in 1957, Malcolm Lowry kept trying to deliver his enthusiasm for The R through a mutual friend, David Markson. “It is a truly fabulous creation, a superbyzantine gazebo and secret missile of the soul.” Mr. Gaddis did not respond. He had not read Under the Volcano (“It was both too close and too far away from what I was doing … ”). On the other hand, he wrote a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer and even sent him a copy of The R and never received a reply.

The R sank like a stone in the sea upon publication. The scholar and excellent biographer Joseph Tabbi notes dryly that critics were “unprepared” for it. Some of the reviews are parodied (though not by much) in J R:

… so ostentatiously aimed at writing a masterpiece that, in a less ambitious work, one would be happy to call promising, for such readers as he may be fortunate enough to have …

… nowhere in this whole disgusting book is there a trace of kindness or sincerity or simple decency …

… a complete lack of discipline …

But Mr. Gaddis wasn’t keen on even the occasional good reaction. He disliked the Stuart Gilbert quote the publishers put on the back cover comparing him to Eliot and Joyce:

… long though it is, even longer than Ulysses, the interest, like that of Joyce’s masterpiece and for very similar reasons, is brilliantly maintained throughout …

He felt this gave reviewers an “escape hatch” and protested that “my Joyce is limited to Dubliners and a few letters.” He maintained throughout his life that he had never read Ulysses. He merely seemed to have read everything else. And as Ezra Pound said when an acquaintance showed him her copy of The R: “You should tell your friend [Gaddis] that Joyce was an ending, not a beginning.” The R with its thickets of allusions and transcendental questing was all ravishing encyclopedic ambition. It was new. J R was even newer. It employs none of the fictive habits, the prompts and crutches and connective tissue of narrative. Time slips around like an eel. Place is bulldozed. Characters have no identity save for the words they speak and they speak the speakable with tireless abandon. There is no communion, no closure. There are rants. Mad soliloquies. Offended ripostes, offensive parries. Almost everyone accounted for is indignant, baffled, enraged, duplicitous, misunderstood, or misunderstanding. There are dozens of players and voices—composers, writers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, financiers, deadbeats, and frauds. And it never lets up. Even the end is poised to start all over again. It is a riotous dizzying discomfiting success beholden to nothing that came before save for its elusive, more elegant daddy, The R, which was beholden to no one.

In 1956, nineteen years before the publication of this second novel, Mr. Gaddis wrote a registered letter to himself to protect his idea for it from copyright infringement:

In very brief it is this; a young boy, ten or eleven or so years of age ‘goes into business’ and makes a business fortune by developing and following through the basically very simple procedures needed to assemble extensive financial interests, to build a ‘big business’ in a system of comparative free enterprise employing the numerous (again basically simply encouragements (as tax benefits &c) which are so prominent in the business world of America today …

This boy (named here ‘J.R’) employs as a ‘front man’ to handle matters, the press &c, a young man innocent in matters of money and business whose name (which I got in a dream) is Bast. Other characters include Bast’s two aunts, the heads of companies which JR takes over, his board of directors, figures in a syndicate which fights his company for control in a stockholder’s battle, charity heads to whom his company gives money, &c.

This book is projected as essentially a satire on business and money matters as they occur and are handled here in America today; and on the people who handle them; it is also a morality study of a straightforward boy reared in our culture, of a young man with an artist’s conscience, and of the figures who surround them in such a competitive and material economy as ours. The book just now is provisionally entitled ‘SENSATION’ and ‘J.R.’

What a surprisingly unpromising précis! This letter to self gives not the slightest hint of the manner in which the earnest Bast, who just wants to compose music, the less than winsome J R, and “the figures who surround them” will be presented, which is in 770 pages of unattributed, intercepted, interrupted dialogue, in “speech scraps, confetti like wiggles of brightly colored cliché” (William Gass, admiringly), the occasional lyrically peculiar description:

For time unbroken by looks to the clock the only sound was the chafing of an emery board, and the clock itself, as though seizing the advantage, seemed to accomplish its round with surreptitious leaps forward, knocking whole wedges at once from what remained of the hour.

snatches of advertisements, radiospeak, and news fragments:

——selection from Bruckner’s eighth symphony brought to you by …

——like sending your mouth on a vacation …

——homes in America, many were trees …

and even the class paper J R wrote in cursive on Alaska:

Alsaka … There is about a hundred billion barrells of oil in Alsaka waiting these millions of years locked in the earth for the hand of man to release it in the cause of human betterment …

But mostly there is dialogue. Dinner is served in dialogue. Here is the unhappy diCephalis family. Dan diCephalis is a psychometrician at J R’s school; Ann, his deeply frustrated wife. They are both so miserable and distracted in their marriage that they harbor a flatulent drifter in their home, both thinking he is the other’s father. The children are Nora and Donny:

— … Nora I said get Donny for supper … Here, sit Donny here and you …

—But Mama Donny has to sit where the plug is so he …

—All right, my God it’s probably too late for a psychiatrist anyhow, we should take him to the electrician … stop talking and eat …

—What is it.

—What do you mean what is it, it’s your supper. What does it look like.

—It looks like lingam.

—Like what?

—Like a lingam.

—Like a lingam! How do you know what a lingam looks like.

—Because it looks just like this.

—Maybe she, maybe she saw that book you had …

Death, too, happens (of course) but is delivered at a remove:

—Jack look you’re spilling that all over the …

—I’m not spilling, it’s spilling. I’m not …

—Damn it just let me pour it will you!

—But about Mister Schramm is he, he’s all right isn’t he? I mean, where is he …

—Down the hall there look, he had an accident Bast he …

—I know it yes I was, you mean another one?

—Yes he, wait listen don’t go in there now!

or in the case of the unfortunate Mr. Glancy:

—Yes no go ahead Vern come in Mister ahm Major that was Gottlieb down to the Cadillac agency, he thinks he can put the financing on the car right into your name without repossessing it from Glancy’s estate to handle it like ahm, like a used car sale that is to …

—What was that about a smell.

—No well of course it was used since Glancy did use it to ahm, I think the Cadillac people prefer to say previously owned yes and he’d only driven it seven miles but of course he’d been in it for a week when they found him down in the woods there and apparently they’ve been unable to remove the, to restore the smell of a new car interior that is to …

We are … swept along. Mr. Gaddis confessed that he wanted us to be, in this flow of unremitting talk—“might miss a lot but that’s what life is, after all? missing something that’s right before you?” His characters can’t or won’t communicate in any meaningful way. “Can’t drive and I won’t ride,” pronounces Jack Gibbs, the stalled writer who is forever sifting through his boxes and boxes of paper, his research, his notes, his material, for his all-consuming impossible to complete definitive Spenglerian “work.” Gibbs is a churlish mess, it is the composer Bast, “a young man with an artist’s conscience,” who possesses a bit of pummeled purity. He so wants to create magnificent oratorios but the closest he comes to a commission is writing “zebra music” for the stockbroker/big game hunter Crawley who wants to make a film about African wildlife in the hopes that the government will import game—prey and beasts of prey—for use in National Parks.

— … wake up some people down in Washington to the idea of stocking our public lands with something more suitable than a lot of trailers and beer cans.

The reader enters J R not as through a dark wood but by way of the churning flush of the Big Commode—American capitalism. J R himself, a bright and slovenly boy, is all canny greedy play, affecting everyone, the good, the bad, and those simply not paying attention. He grasps the capitalistic model perfectly (Mr. Gaddis said he was fascinated by the concept of big business as a fairly childish affair), doing what he does “because that’s what you do!” Here he is in a phone conversation with the “general counsel,” a Nonny Piscator, he has acquired for his J R Corp Family of Companies:

— … see if it’s got any of these minerals in it we should get to take this here percentage depletion allowance the whole … I mean if we can get some tax benefit off depleting something why shouldn’t we … Okay so with these here futures I’m not telling you to do something illegal … I mean what do you think I got you for! I mean if I want to do something illegal what do I want with a lawyer I mean holy shit where do you think we are over at Russia? where they don’t let you do anything? These laws are these laws why should we want to do something illegal if some law lets us do it anyway …

Mr. Gaddis’s manner of composing his novels was amassment and rearrangement. He collected all matter of stuff, paper stuff, heard stuff. “Though I weep for order I still live in a world of scrawled notes on the backs of envelopes,” he admitted. Many of the scraps, fragments, musings, quotes made their way from book to book. A line from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel that he fancied—“the unswerving punctuality of chance”—appeared in all four novels as well as the novella Agapē Agape. He preserved an enormous amount of source matter, “barells and barells” stored in food and liquor boxes and now archived in the Special Collections at Washington University in St. Louis.

——homes in America, many were trees …

There was so much! There could be no end to it, to its possible significance or soulful worth (or lack of it). He well knew the entropy that chaos brings. He believed that America itself was a “grand fiction” exacting not only taxes from its people but more critically a continuing faith, or at least the suspension of disbelief, in its own existence. In a 1973 letter to the theologian Thomas Altizer, he wrote:

… it is this question what is worth doing? that has dogged me all my life, both in terms of my own life and work where I am trying now again in another book to fight off its destructive element and paralyzing effects; and in terms of America which has been in such desperate haste to succeed in finding all the wrong answers. In this present book satire comic or what have you on money and business I get the feeling sometimes I’m writing a secular version of its predecessor …

During all the years he worked on J R, he was dutifully laboring for a paycheck from the corporate machine—Kodak, Ford, IBM, Pfizer (“an operation of international piracy”)—writing ad copy and position papers, managing to stay employed though his efforts were sometimes found wanting. An executive chided one of his industry film scripts as “a little too profound and needed reshaping in a manner that would be informative at a shallower depth.” He knew the cant of marketing well and was ever alert to systems of speech, of persuasion, of obfuscation, seeing and portraying the American way of waste—the waste of nature, talent, energy, the waste that markets, systems, management demand for growth.

A great deal has been written about the works and intentions of Mr. Gaddis, much of it alarmingly erudite yet still interesting in its sort of meanly excluding way. Many are the ways he is perceived and read. Shortly before The R was published, Jack Kerouac met him in a bar and described him as “ironic looking, sporting a parking ticket in his coat lapel.” I picture him at the age of five when he was sent off to a “strict” boarding school, already Mr. Gaddis in my imagination, though small. Intelligent, neatly attired, comporting himself with all the seriousness a suppressed hilarity allowed.

In 1976, J R won the National Book Award—chance arriving with unswerving punctuality. As judges, Mary McCarthy and William Gass were instrumental in awarding it. The other judge, whoever and whatever his opinion, was deeply, deftly ignored. McCarthy found the novel “horrid and funny” and referred to it as Junior. The award provided a respectable amount of fame and increased readership, though not as much as might be expected for J R is not for the faint of heart and mind or the weak of concentration. J R is a rude demanding complex riotous uncomfortably edifying novel, a howling maelstrom of voices, a grabby talky disorderly inferno of the spirit. It is also remarkably knowing about the American character.

Somewhat early on (page 204!), a young boy appears for the first and only time. This is Francis. He has many questions and a few cautious opinions.

—You know what I used to think Mama? if I didn’t talk now, if I kind of saved it up and didn’t talk, that then I’d be able to talk after I’m dead.

How intriguing! But if true we would be unable to experience the figures of J R there (as we have so thoroughly, appallingly, enjoyably experienced them here) for how would we recognize them?

(Source: The Paris Review)