Kushanava Choudhury's Reading List

"Ali was a polyglot and lived a peripatetic life. He also opened up a whole new genre of writing in Bengali, which was non-fiction prose that resembled ‘storytelling’ in the sense that Walter Benjamin writes of the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov in his classic essay on modern literature, “The Storyteller”. In fact the only work of literature that Ali every translated into Bengali, that I know of, was Leskov’s novella, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . Ali was one of the most erudite Bengali writers of his generation. He had a PhD in Comparative Religion from Bonn, had taught all over the world, and spoke over a dozen languages. But no matter what subject he wrote about, whether it was a war in Afghanistan or German philology, it seemed like he was just a guy telling you a story over a cup of tea at a cafe. In fact one of my favourite short pieces by Ali is an essay on the city of Cairo, where he had lived and taught, told entirely as an account of the happenings of the characters and conversations in one Cairo cafe. I learned a lot from him. His classic book, Deshe Bideshe (In a Land Far from Home) is about his stint in Kabul in the 1920s during King Amanullah’s rule. It shows you a whole alien society but its also fun to read and extremely funny. I haven’t read the translation, but I hope it’s good. Amitav Ghosh openly acknowledges his debt to Ali in writing In an Antique Land , which is his genre-defying travelogue on Egypt. In an Antique Land, and Ghosh’s early novel Shadow Lines , which is set in Calcutta and deals with Partition, both had a significant impact on me as a writer. So the Ali influence comes directly and also in this diffuse way through Indian English literature."

"The paradigmatic novel of New Jersey for me is Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact I write about it in the Calcutta book. It sets up the basic problem of immigrants – the failure to assimilate into a normal American life because the past keeps sabotaging you. In Portnoy , as in most Roth novels, that past is the Jewish world of Newark, and the doomed and absurd attempts to recover it, in Israel, through sexual conquest, through therapy, and so on. Once you leave you mini community in Newark, and become a liberal individual, an American (and in the Jewish case, for the first time, “white”) you become utterly alone, homeless. No alternate collective life awaits you on the other side of assimilation, no place that you can call home. Out of the ghetto and into the abyss. It’s this central problematic of even the successful trajectory of American immigrants that is Roth’s great subject. And even though this is ostensibly a book about Calcutta, I think I also write on the same subject, mining the same things. “The writing life is mainly about sitting alone in a room, butt in your seat, day after day, week after week, month after month” The failure to emerge out of the abyss is a political failure. The other thing about Roth is that he understood the relationship between politics and the individual, that politics was not about belief or your inner life – that’s faith. Politics is about how you organise your public life, your public self in the world with others, what kind of world you try to make. You may fail, you may be completely flummoxed, but this project is what still drove Jews in Roth’s childhood to fight at dinner tables, what drives the daughter of the great assimilated hero, Swede Levov, to 1960s radicalism. Roth understood the relationship between the individual and the political from childhood experience in a way that the next generation of American writers, raised in suburbs, often do not. From Aristotle’s time onwards, the polis – the city – and politics are connected. The failure to produce a new city, a new society in the utopia of suburban assimilation is a failure not only of urban planning or social organisation but of the political imagination."

"Diaz, like Roth, grew up very close to where I lived in New Jersey, and he represents to me the next generation of New Jersey writers who have dealt with these themes. They form a literary tradition to which I lay claim. The places he describes in his fiction are places where I grew up. In the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , there’s a scene where Oscar Wao tries to kill himself by jumping off a rail bridge across the Raritan river. That bridge is just down the street from my house. To this day, I can’t take a train across it without thinking of that incident. As far as I’m concerned, it happened. Oscar Wao is very real to me. When I read Wao, I think, there but for the grace of God go I. My book on Calcutta opens in Ellis Island and then takes us on long drives at night down the same roads that Oscar travelled, journeys full of despair, that lead back to the places where we began. The main predicament, as I see it, for Oscar Wao, for us, is that we cannot start over in America, as new men, without history. For Roth, the past is the Jewish world of Newark, but for Diaz, as for me, the past is another country. That past haunts Wao, it literally drags him back into history, into the brutal dictatorial past of Trujillo and the Dominican Republic, and it ultimately destroys him. There is a poem by Cavafy that I quote in the book, “As you have destroyed your life here/ In this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.” Like Wao, I kept getting drawn back into Calcutta over and over, despite myself. But I’m still here, and writing. Maybe that saved me."

"I Served the King of England is a Czech picaresque novel which narrates the whole 20th century history of Czechoslovakia – Nazism, Stalinism – from the perspective of a semi-literate waiter whose only goal seems to be to try to get laid. It’s hilarious and I learned a lot from the book about how to write the 20th century history of Bengal and Calcutta without making it read like a history book. I really struggled with that at one stage of the writing process and I read a lot of books to figure out a workaround, but no one helped me as much as Hrabal. This novel, and another one by Hrabal, were made into films by Jiri Menzel, and were part of the Czech New Wave. Hrabal was also a big influence on Milan Kundera. He was in turn heavily influenced by Jaroslav Hasek who wrote The Good Soldier Svejk , which is a hilarious novel about a coward trying to evade conscription during World War I. Hasek and Hrabal both write like they’re telling stories at a bar, and in that I think they’re part of an Eastern European tradition that’s connected to oral storytelling. There’s a link with Leskov’s work too, I suspect, where the novel seems like a transcript of a storyteller’s narration. I think Syed Mujtaba Ali was familiar with this genre of literature, having read such works translated in German or French, and he imported this form into Bengali and melded it with our own storytelling and “adda” or raconteur traditions. I’ve tried to copy and adopt that mode of writing in my book, though I don’t know to what extent I’ve succeeded."

"Roberto Arlt was an Argentinian novelist and journalist, a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, but one who came from a broken home, was barely educated and began working at a young age. He was the son of poor German immigrants, and he learned to read literature through bad translations of Russian and German writers. There’s a kind of madcap genius at work in Arlt that’s only possible in a person who is an autodidact. His language is a mix of slang and literary Spanish combined with immigrant patois, and his characters and their schemes are utterly unpredictable. The Mad Toy is about a kid doing odd jobs, hustling to make his way in a cutthroat world, and being cutthroat himself. It’s largely autobiographical and has a throbbing energy, a bit like Truffaut’s film 400 Blows , which is also autobiographical – both are narratives of the artist in his hardscrabble, and petty-criminal, youth. There’s another novel by Arlt called The Seven Madmen , which is devoted more to the crazy utopian political schemes by megalomaniacs and criminals. Arlt was a bit of a crank himself. He devoted much of his short life to trying to invent pantyhose that wouldn’t fall down — stuff like that which he thought would make him filthy rich — instead of writing. Arlt also wrote long articles in newspapers about everyday life in Buenos Aires — these pieces were called aguafuertes and have been compiled into volumes, though they have not been translated into English. Many of them have the same energy, dark humor, and experimentation with language that’s there in the novels. The aguafuertes are similar to Joseph Roth’s feuilletons in What I Saw. They had a lot of influence on me when I was writing about Calcutta. All writers are autodidacts in a way. You have to learn the craft on your own ­– that even McPhee was very clear about – by doing and doing, over time for thousands of hours and many many years. I feel like that’s even more true when you’re writing about places or subjects that are over-inscribed, where a great deal has been written about them already, but very little of it feels true. To write about a place that has been written about repeatedly by outsiders who knew very little about the languages or cultures or historical particularity of the place, and who masked their ignorance with their ready disdain, I think you can’t rely on what others have written. You have to start anew, use your intuition, your common sense, and all your senses. A city like Calcutta is not just big buildings and monuments but street corners and neighbourhood clubs and pujo pandals, sounds and bodies and moments. You can listen to a street like you would listen to a symphony. You can read a whole political history of a city from its wall graffiti, or tell a story of its industrial past from the names of closed factories that only remain in bus conductors’ calls. In such situations, we all have to become autodidacts, and Arlt is a good guide on how to proceed. I feel like nobody described the world of the street better than Arlt. Those who write about cities often fall back on Walter Benjamin’s writings and his notion of the flaneur. I greatly admire Benjamin, especially as a literary critic and a theorist, but Benjamin on cities to me always reads like a distant observer, watching life happen through a thick sheet of glass. In contrast, Arlt writes from the heart of the action. I used a quote from one of Arlt’s aguafuertes as the epigraph of The Epic City : He llegado a la conclusión de que aquél que no encuentra todo el universo encerrado en las calles de su ciudad, no encontrará una calle original en ninguna de las ciudades del mundo. Y no las encontrará, porque el ciego en Buenos Aires es ciego en Madrid o Calcuta… I have come to the conclusion that he who does not encounter the whole universe in the streets of his city will not encounter an original street in any of the cities of the whole world. He won’t encounter them because those who are blind in Buenos Aires are blind in Madrid, or in Calcutta… Some people can: the Mycroft Holmeses of the world, tubby and content, who sit in Pall Mall and know the entire goings on of the world outside. I really envy them. The rest of us, like his little brother Sherlock, have to hit the streets. I think what Arlt meant was what Socrates meant when someone remarked about a friend of theirs who had just returned from a long trip and seemed no less cantankerous than when he had left. Socrates said, look who he had as his travel companion. There’s a bit of that in the character of Ila, in Ghosh’s Shadow Lines , who travels the whole world and sees only airport lounges. Arlt himself traveled in Spain and North Africa and wrote more aguafuertes based on his experience. I think Arlt’s point is if you’re blind in your own metropolis, a change of scene is not going to help. But on the other hand if you know how to look, the whole world is there at your doorstep."