Can the Subaltern Speak or the Queen of Scatology
10.22.08 (2:37 pm) [edit]The Man Booker this year went to anoher Indian author.
I have not read the White Tiger yet, but I found the author's interview interesting when I caught it a while back in BBC, so I will absolutely pick the book as soon as it becomes available.
This news automatically lead my mind to the whole lineages of the Booker winner Indian authors. The very one that hits me is Kiran Desai (the Inheritance of Loss), the booker prize two years ago.
I was quite intrigued by this novel's winning the prize, for I had been a great fan of another Indian female author who had won Booker almost a decade before, Arundhati Roy.
So maybe I got my hope too high up for the Inheritance of Loss.
I still remember that I finished this novel totally exhausted and half disappointed. The novel was OK, don't get me wrong, but I had to question if I would have bothered if this was introduced without a prize or any hype. The coverage of the underrepresented area, the Indian-Nepali border in the late 80's when the independence movement had taken place, was good. But the whole take of this narrative on the (Post-) colonial state and the devastating effects of so called globalization on the region was so simplistic and didactic that I thought it was the text book like one dimensional handle, like a student handing in one's employment of the theory. I would give the novel's effort B+ but having to assess the grade of the text deprived the reader of pleasure of reading quite a bit. Besides reading the whole text did not erase the impression that I had had initially; the novel was so similar to its predecessor, the God of Small Things, just messier and shallower. In other words, it was predictable.
I believe the author Desai chose the style---the textualized oral tradition in somehow deliberately fragmental sentences rather than exercting author's omnipoint's narrative like typical novels do---to challenge the postcolonial discipline that the world is destined to live in, and I believe we can't deny the style she chose just because the whole essence of the novel, or 90% of it, ended up, ironically, the author's grandiose and lengthy chat in fleeting impressions of each character's lives.
The most value of this text was ironically in the descriptions of each characters' inner conflics and interrupted meditations on the interpersonal dynamics with others through lenses from a microscope to the macro-est possible one. So the author was contradictory exercising fullest her very authority as the author: she was speaking of everyone class, race, gender struggling minds with her literay theory text books in her hands, looking them up frequently. Some of her observations were very insightful and wise that I could not agree more. But did we have to go through the whole redundancy to read those countable good ideas roughly eight sentences buried here and there like a treasure hunt? The story, therefore, succumbed to be very predictable. This novel defnitely could have been revised and slimmed down into one third of the actual text that is in print. I remember that I was really spent by the time when I finally reached the end, but I finished it anyway, cover to cover.
The reason that I am jotting this down here is because I happened to find an inspirational review on The Inheritance... in amazon.com a couple of days ago while I was on the search related to the latest Booker winner. It was one of those negative reviews with one star that reminded me of the laborious process of finishing The Inheritance...; the reviewer found the novel deplorable because "the author was obsessed with vomit and body fluid." I surely do believe it was full of puke and shit, but I never thought this would ever be a criterion to condamn a book. I might need to pay another kind of respect to Desai, who could be really the queen of that field.
posted by: namm (reply)
post date: 12.22.08 (1:24 pm)
gr8 :)!