shorshewitch's reviews
321 reviews

Like I said on the reading group some of the parts of the book are at such a mic-drop level that this can be a brilliantly good ironical (satirist) stand up comedy monologue.

This took me so long. It rambles way too much in some places. It is a very confusing book for me. Like there were several passages in it, that as a writer / reader, I wish I had written. But there are so many others that as an editor I think I might have edited out. I will probably write in detail later. But for now, it's a good book, except for maybe the need for tighter edits. But the Pulitzer has decided it's a great book, so who am I to contradict. 🥲

Special shoutout to the translation – So seamlessly done. Some sentences are so beautiful, it is hard to believe this isn’t the original language of the prose.
Some quotes:
/Death has hovered around her since childhood. A shadow that is always there. A ghostly white skull with touches of gray; gray, the color of fear, is ever-present in her life and a part of her. She is standing there alone beneath the angry sky and swirl of menacing clouds. Still a child, she has yet to grow into her face. When she grows up she will have Frida’s face. Again and again Frida will paint her own face over the white skull, proof that she is still alive./
/ I could not escape the pity or the cruelty of others. Pity had a smell to it, I always recognized it because I had grown up with it. Because it had followed me all my life. Sometimes I thought I would gag from the familiar reek of sweat that soaked the air./
/ Frida never asked herself why this had had to happen to her. She did not believe there was anyone who had the answer to such a question./
/ She did not kowtow to popular taste and still less did she try to win over the public. Except for that first self-portrait, all the others were unsparing of both the sitter and the viewer. As if she did not care whether they would appeal to somebody or not. She painted her life, why should it appeal to anybody? She painted a faint mustache on her face, something any other woman would have bleached, plucked, shaved, concealed. She was out to provoke, and why not? Who says a woman can’t sport a mustache above her scarlet-red lips?/
/ My situation looks so ridiculous and pointless that no one can understand how much I can’t stand myself, hate myself, I wasted my best years as a kept woman, doing what I thought was best for him and would help him most. I never thought of myself, and after six years together, his answer was that loyalty is a bourgeois value which exists only for the purpose of exploitation and economic profit./
/ The difference between us was that I was stronger. I wrestled with my demon by stripping him bare, revealing him, denouncing him. I was ruthless. I wore my illness down, sucked it dry, exploited it. I stubbornly resisted it. I lived in a state of permanent inner tension, waging a life-or-death struggle. I dragged my pain from its depths and brought it to the surface, exposing it to the light and to public scrutiny. Demons hate that. I displayed not only the face of that pain but also the body, its legs, its wounds, its heart, its stomach, its spine . . . And that gave me strength. My rebellion was scandalous because not only did I paint, but I painted pain and sickness! Sick people don’t do that. And my father? He sank deeper and deeper into his solitude. Toward the end, it was difficult to pull him out of it. I, on the other hand, refused to accept the sentence pronounced on me./
 

I've heard of the ant metaphor before, you know, where they say something on the lines of  "the ground was so crowded even the ants wouldn't get to move" in Marathi, but through one of the stories in this collection I learnt there is also one with mustard seeds in Tamil. It goes "the ground was so crowded even if mustard seeds fell off, they won't land". Languages! 

Bama's Harum Scarum Saar and other stories, translated by N. Ravi Shanker, was recommended to me a good while back by Aritra. I remember having bought the book immediately but then of course took long enough to read it. 

This has 10 stories that evoke diverse emotions and have a simple narrative style. The primary theme running across all stories is that of caste oppression. Discrimination with respect to clothing, food, living styles, education, type of work being done, is covered throughout in various ways. Some stories talk about really strong marginalized characters who defy the caste system with all their might, regardless of the cost they have to pay, and some stories have characters that have absolutely no opportunity to escape their oppression in any manner at all. In some, you feel pride on behalf of the characters, in others you worry for them. Bama's writing is matter of fact without hyperboles, except the use of metaphors in some places. N. Ravi Shanker has translated exceptionally well, retaining the Tamil in places, while keeping the style of portrayal as local as possible. For instance, a routine English reader might find some hypothetical questions offensive if read in the style of English language. But if you have the nuance of locally used English or even colloquial here in India, you will know it is simply a way of speaking for emphasis.

I cannot recommend this book enough. I think it's going to go in my re-read section.

Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano, translated by Sawad Hussain

This book, for me, is a prime example that sometimes even when you've read 80% of the book, you might not be able to judge it appropriately until you read till the end. The judgement may sometimes change throughout a book and can be vastly different from chapter to chapter, pov to pov.

I read this for @translatedgemsbookclub 's August read. It starts out with introduction of Maria-Edo, a Sudanese woman from a small village in South Sudan, and her fierce love for her dead children, her relationship with God fraught with the complexities of the life she lived. It then turns to Edo's only surviving child, Lucy-Eghino, and her husband Marco. The couple, fearing the violence that will be brought upon the village soon, decide to run for their lives towards Juba, and then further to the North, Khartoum. From there, we get to experience their lives with Peter and Theresa, a couple who becomes a huge part of the story. The book deals heavily with themes of patriotism, religion, migration, indigenous peoples, motherhood, feminism and family. It is a multi-pov book, that attempts to give us a holistic view of some situations and fairly succeeds in it. The translation is pretty accessible. Stella's strength of short stories reflects in how she forms narrative. My only grouse is not being able to catch the character povs till the middle of a chapter but one gets used to it after a few chapters. It packs a heavy punch, there are some beautifully poetic descriptions of memories and nostalgia, longish commentaries on military shortcomings and revolutionary ideas, and paints a fairly granular picture of a country ravaged by intense divisive politics. 

Safe to say now I am intrigued to read more by Stella Gaitano and shall be looking forward to more of her works.