peter young’s listopia

55) Sabai Muang, The Call of the Midnight Hour, 1993
Sabai Muang is one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific Thai author Sukanya Cholasueks, and The Call of the Midnight Hour is one of five novels she wrote on each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism. The Third Precept here is that of abstaining from sexual misconduct and is the story of Phatta, who abducts another man's wife and suffers the consequences but also obtains a rather unusual redemption. Set in India at the time of the birth of Buddhism, Muang's story has supernatural elements which muddy the waters of what is otherwise a very clear storyline, and towards the end it splits into two threads that separate what is going on with Phatta's soul in the spiritual world and what is happening with his body in the real world, but these are mixed in such a way that I was often unable to tell what was happening where, and with whom. If the other four short novels are also published in English I'll probably read them as well as this was mostly well written, even if I felt at times that it was either too straightforward in places or a little too abstract.

40) Carsten Jensen, Earth in the Mouth, 1991  ( RE-READ )
This is an interesting experiment in self-reflection: the Danish author Jensen revisits an unpublished fictional Indian travelogue he wrote twenty years earlier, and questions himself – and indeed his younger self – on why it remained unfinished. The travelogue itself is of the kind many thousands of backpackers-as-aspiring-writers would have turned out, with the self cast as a third person and where the protagonist's culture shock is explored to the nth degree. In fact Jensen's alter, Thomas, excels at this as he staggers from one crisis of the ego to another, utterly overwhelmed by the alienness of India. The bracketing prologue and epilogue frame it well, and understandably Jensen never really gets to the bottom of things as his journey isn't yet finished. A mature book and one that, since the first time I read it, now reminds me of the writing of both Bruce Chatwin and Milan Kundera.

40) Salman Rushdie, East, West, 1994
Nine stories, three of Indians in India, three that exhibit aspects of Rushdie's own peculiar way with Western fictional forms, and three of Indians living in England. Those middle three are notable for their imaginative diversity but they don't sit well with the rest: we have a bizarre (and somewhat unreadable) abstraction on Hamlet, a scenario where fictional characters are infiltrating the real world at an auction of Dorothy's slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and a courtship with Queen Isabella in the fevered mind of Christopher Columbus (a story which, somehow, has Bruce Chatwin written all over it). The remaining six more straightforward stories show how Rushdie makes the act of spinning very engaging tales of ordinary Indians and their families look easy, including the very original 'Chekov and Zulu', something which could qualify as a piece of very Indian and very erudite Star Trek fan fiction.

42) Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust, 1975
The 1975 Booker Prize winner, also made into a Merchant Ivory film. A closely examined interaction of cultures and eras, in which a 1970s British woman goes to India in search of the truth about her 1920s step-grandmother, the naïve wife of a dull British diplomat, who forms a brief romance with a minor Indian prince. A small scandal and not especially dramatic, though what impresses are the well-drawn characters, the portrayal of the condescending paternalism of the British as India's colonial masters, and an atmospheric rendering of the all-pervading, oppressive Indian climate.

Greetings from Kolkata... that's Calcutta for us lazy hangers-on to imperialist language. Yes, they even spell it Kolkata on a British Airways boarding pass. And I still fall habitually into calling Mumbai 'Bombay' and Chennai 'Madras', as I expect do most Brits.

Have just slept for five hours throughout the day, after a night which will not exactly go down as a career highlight followed by an hour-long bus ride, during which I was too tired to even look out of the window at a city I've never seen before. As I seem to be thinking more often these days with time lost, that's an hour I will never get back. Was finally woken up this afternoon by a loud street procession immediately outside with lots of drumming and singing in a Bollywood stylee.

The sun will soon be setting directly in front of my hotel room's window, which might save me going on a 'sunset hunt', my usual frantic method of trying to capture a decent photo when I haven't had the chance to scout the area first for a decent location. It's also very cloudy here, so a decent shot might be out of the question. This means I can go hunting for some dal for brisingamen instead, which will be time well spent.

Meanwhile, ( here's the incredibly boring 'room with a view', including a man in a yellow shirt who will never know his picture can now be seen all over the world )