Some Recent Reading Recommendations

Elena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (Penguin, 2005): A novel of extraordinary power, written in a voice that is at once lucid and half-crazed with rage; the words explode off the page. This is a performance of astonishing virtuosity.

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Simon and Schuster, 2014): is a work of such monumental significance that it is impossible to do justice to it in a few lines. Suffice it to say that Klein demolishes every argument for ‘market based solutions’, exposes the carbon complicities of ‘Big Green’ organizations, demonstrates why geo-engineering will not work, and after all that even succeeds in finding a silver lining in the clouds. There is more optimism here than the situation warrants, but a dose of hopefulness is perhaps a necessary ingredient in a work that is intended as a call to the barricades.

Elizabeth Kolbert: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt & Co., 2014): This is the story of the sixth great mass extinction in our planet’s history, the one that is under way right now. A skilled reporter, Kolbert’s account is rigorously detailed and exceptionally vivid. The book is an uncompromising picture of something that can only be described as a spectacle of true-life horror.

Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway: The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the future (Columbia University Press, 2014): The writers are historians of science who have specialized on climate change related issues. This book is something of a departure for them; they describe it as an exercise in science fiction, because they are looking back at the world of today from an imagined future (‘the penumbral age’). Based on solid research, it paints a chilling picture of a world that is racing towards self-annihilation.

As a child I loved the stories of the Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandopadhyay (1899-1970), whose most enduring creation perhaps is the detective Byomkesh Bakshi. Thanks to film and television Byomkesh Bakshi has had a remarkable after-life, extending to this year’s Bollywood thriller Detective Byomkesh Bakshy, by Dibakar Bannerjee. But Sharadindu wrote a great variety of stories – romances, detective stories, historical fiction, ghost stories and so on – and these too deserve wider attention. The tales I liked best were about a character called Sadashiv, a Maratha boy-soldier in Chhatrapati Shivaji’s army (although Sharadindu wrote in Bangla, he lived most of his life in Pune). Fortunately there are now some good English translations of Sharadindu’s work, for example the story collections Band of soldiers and The Menagerie and Other Byomkesh Mysteries (both published by Penguin Random House) and the novel By the Tungabhadra (Harper Collins).

Christian Parenti’s Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, 2011) is an excellent non-fiction work about a very important and little-discussed subject: the political consequences of climate change. The changing weather patterns of our time are exacerbating and even causing many conflicts; and there can be little doubt that the situation will only get worse. Parenti pays particular attention to South Asia, which is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions in this regard. This book is an exceptionally clear-headed look at what the future holds.

Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s: Before We Visit the Goddess  (forthcoming, Spring 2016 from Simon and Schuster): Tender, bittersweet, beautifully wrought tales about love and longing, exile and loneliness. I was reminded of the songs of separation sung by Bhojpuri women: Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni discovers new nuances in the ‘biraha’ that creeps into the lives of migrants.