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The Hindu
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
The Hindu On Books newsletter: Kiran Desai on Booker longlist, Kuvempu in English, ‘The Lion of Naushera' and more
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The Booker Prize longlist for 2025 is out and past winner Kiran Desai is back on it 19 years later for her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin). The judges, led by Roddy Doyle, called the novel about a pair of young Indians in America 'vast and immersive', which enfolds a 'magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story.' Booker's dozen The Booker's dozen or 13 longlisted novels, include two debutants, Albanian-American writer and playwright Ledia Xhoga (Misinterpretation/Daunt Books) and Ukrainian-Canadian writer Maria Reva (Endling/Virago), and five British authors. Other writers on the longlist are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Fern Press), Tash Aw for The South (4th Estate), Natasha Brown for Universality (Faber), Claire Adam for Love Forms (Faber), Jonathan Buckley for One Boat (Fitzcarraldo Editions), Susan Choi for Flashlight (Jonathan Cape), Ben Markovits for The Rest of Our Lives (Faber), Andrew Miller for The Land in Winter (Sceptre), David Szalay for Flesh (Jonathan Cape) and Benjamin Wood for Seascraper (Viking). The shortlist will be announced on September 23, and the winner on November 10. In reviews, we read an excerpt from The Lion of Naushera, Kuvempu's magnum opus in English, Joan Didion's posthumous book and more. Books of the week Legendary Kannada writer Kuvempu's 1967 novel, Malegalalli Madumagalu, an exemplary work of social realism, has been recently translated into English (Bride in the Hills/Penguin Modern Classics) by Vanamala Viswanatha. In 2020, K.M. Srinivasa Gowda and G.K. Srikanta Murthy also translated it into English (Bride in the Rainy Mountains). Set in the late 19th-century Western Ghats, a region of dense forests teeming with animals, birds, and diverse communities, Bride in the Hills, writes N.S. Gundur in his review, explores the lives of ordinary folks 'far away from the grand mainstream of the historical flow of civilisation'. However, colonial modernity later enters this lifeworld with a bicycle, Christian missionaries and schools. 'Of all the portraits in the novel, it is the subaltern characters — Gutthi, Aita, Pinchalu, Akkani and Pijina — who win our hearts in tune with the novel's epigraph: 'No one is unimportant/Nothing is insignificant',' says Gundur. Brigadier Mohammed Usman was touching 36 when he led a contingent to wrest two strategic locations in Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan in 1948. Given a choice to move to Pakistan after Partition, he chose India. Brigadier Usman died in combat, and was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously for his valour. Read an extract from a new book, The Lion of Naushera (Bloomsbury) by Ziya Us Salam and Anand Mishra. After Joan Didion passed away in 2021, summaries of sessions with a psychiatrist were found in her desk addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. Didion's Notes to John (HarperCollins), published posthumously, raises several questions, not least should such notes have been published? and b) what is the quality of the book itself? In a piece, Suresh Menon goes into questions of ethics and aesthetics, and says that 'there are no easy answers; you react to [a] book on feel and emotion.' Spotlight As part of The Hindu's Out of Print series with writers, Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Imayam was in conversation with Justice (retired) Prabha Sridevan, former judge of the Madras High Court, at The Hindu office in Chennai recently. Sridevan has translated three of his books into English. The task of a writer is to create, while the translator, in turn, breathes new life into it through another language, Imayam said. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2021. His debut novel, Koveru Kazhudhaigal (Beasts of Burden), was published in 1994. When Imayam, the nom de plume of V. Annamalai, bagged the Sahitya Akademi award, historian and writer A.R. Venkatachalapathy wrote that the writer from the south Arcot region of Tamil Nadu had kept to his commitment of writing on what he believes in. Browser
The Hindu
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
A Kuvempu magnum opus for the English reader
Celebrated Kannada writer K.V. Puttappa (1904-94), known by his pen name Kuvempu, continues to remain a great literary figure akin to Rabindranath Tagore in the Kannada cultural imagination. His monumental novel Malegalalli Madumagalu (1967) re-enters the world via the hands of veteran translator Vanamala Viswanatha as Bride in the Hills. It was preceded by an earlier attempt as Bride in the Rainy Mountains (2020) by K.M. Srinivasa Gowda and G.K. Srikanta Murthy. In the Afterword to this new translation, prominent Kannada writer Devanoora Mahadeva hails it as the novel of the century. Mahadeva's observation not only testifies this work's influence on his sensibilities as a writer but also its achievement as a literary classic. Like a steady masterpiece, this work with frequent reprints goes on earning more readership. It has been successful as a play on stage and has been made into a TV series, besides readers revisiting it as pilgrimage. Before completing the novel in 1967, Kuvempu's prolific output across genres — including another great novel Kanuru Heggadati (1936), later translated into English by B.C. Ramachandra Sharma and Padma Sharma as The House of Kanooru (2000), and the epic Shri Ramayana Darshanam (1949) — must have sharpened his literary ambitions. Struggles of young people Set in the late 19th-century Western Ghats, a region of dense forests teeming with animals, birds, and diverse communities, Bride in the Hills explores the lives of ordinary folks 'far away from the grand mainstream of the historical flow of civilisation'. However, colonial modernity later enters this lifeworld with a bicycle, Christian missionaries and schools. Gutthi, an untouchable bonded servant, sets forth to bring his lady-love, Thimmi, who was supposed to marry the man her zamindar ordered. Refusing to be mere pawns in the hands of social power structures, Gutthi and Thimmi elope. The story, much like a stream on the Sahyadri, is joined by different lives brimming with desires and despairs. While the orthodox mindset refuses to see Gutthi and Thimmi as human beings, let alone consider their love, the Vokkaliga young man, Mukundayya, too must swim against a different set of social currents to wed Chinnamma, whose marriage is arranged with an ailing Heggade, much against her will. Of course, there are no qualms about a zamindar getting on with a concubine, as happens in the case of Devayya and Kaveri, but the courtship of young people is a struggle. In the spirit of the original This novel without a hero is an exemplary work of social realism. The narrator not only provides a solid description of objects, people and their customs with an anthropologist's eye for detail but also comments on social practices. The novel's ability to immerse readers in its cultural world, more than its exploration of a society's moral fabric, makes it a unique work of art. The extraordinary literary talent of Kuvempu turns documentary realism into rasanubhava, an aesthetic experience. The tempo of the narrative transfers the Joycean movement of most characters, especially Gutthi's rhythmic errands with his dog Huliya, to readers. Of all the portraits in the novel, it is the subaltern characters — Gutthi, Aita, Pinchalu, Akkani and Pijina — who win our hearts in tune with the novel's epigraph: 'No one is unimportant/ Nothing is insignificant'. The title of the novel, which opens a perspective for eco-feminist readings, connotes the complex play of passion and desire in a man-woman relationship, explored against the backdrop of jungle life more than the social function of a bride. Read in a particular way, even a widow occupies the subject position of a bride, thus making it 'brides in the hills'. While a large part of Kuvempu's works awaits translation, early English renderings of his two novels — The House of Kanooru and Bride in the Rainy Mountains — do not seem to have made him reach a wider audience. One has to wait and see how Vanamala Viswanatha's deservingly excellent translation fares in the literary sphere. Most of all, Viswanatha needs to be congratulated on this colossal work, shaped by her creative choices in transferring the Kannada ethos to English readers. Indeed, it is difficult to do complete justice to a work that breathes the spirit of regional nuances. Though classics invite multiple translations, Viswanatha's confidence in choosing an already translated work should not be underestimated. The reviewer teaches English literature at Tumkur University. His translation of D.R. Nagaraj's Allamaprabhu and the Shaiva Imagination will soon be published.
