On Mumbai and the decay of India’s literary culture
Altaf Tyrewala, stylistic chameleon and satirist extraordinaire, charts the tragedies of unread books and bowdlerised language in his first collection of short fiction, writes Aditya Mani Jha.
6th Sep 2014 – Excerpts:
The truth of these lines hits you like a sucker punch, and it is moments like these that make Engglishhh©, Altaf Tyrewala’s latest book, the painful pleasure that it is. The first story of the collection is called New and Second-hand, and it is written in the first person, from the point of view of the owner of an independent bookshop facing impending closure. (Tyrewala dedicates the book to the memory of the New and Secondhand Bookshop at Dhobi Talao in Mumbai — a store that shut down in 2011 after more than a century of operations.)
Tyrewala’s standard narrative voice is in full bloom here: male, weary, essentially rational, somewhat savagely pragmatic and fond of gallows humour. One might say that the author is playing to his strengths here, but then this really is a brutal, wholesome, red-blooded story that takes no prisoners, and rips apart the hypocrisies of several different kinds of readers and writers. Take for instance, a section where the bookseller gets involved with a commercially successful writer, which affects his professional life as well.
“My own shop’s anti-best-seller stance was reversed the day I fell in love with a best-selling novelist. Our romance soured after four months of hectic and rather stressful coupling. If being with a hack like her could be so strenuous, I shudder to imagine the nightmare of keeping up with a serious author.”
Since his acclaimed debut novel No God in Sight, Tyrewala has written the magisterial book-length poem The Ministry of Hurt Sentiments and now Engglishhh. His stories explode with the effervescence of a Zeppelin riff.
Tyrewala returns to the decay of literary culture in two more stories, in the titularEngglishhh©, as well as the last story in this collection, the hilarious One-Hit Wonder Literature Festival: Welcome Kit. If anything, Engglishhh© — a story describing the hypothetical numerology-induced overhaul of the English language — seems even more prescient now, since the emergence of a certain Dinanath Batra.
More at the Source: Sunday Guardian.
Book at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Engglishhh-Fictional-Dispatches-Hyperreal-Nation/dp/9350297531
Earlier at Ismailimail:
Ismailimail 