Latest news with #TheAdversary
The Guardian
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Adversary by Michael Crummey review – dark humour and depravity at the edge of the Earth
Several years have passed since Michael Crummey's last novel The Innocents was published in the UK in 2020. A pandemic has since occurred and, appropriately perhaps, The Adversary begins on a dark note of contagion. 'There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,' runs the opening line, setting the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but – thanks to its energy, and its ripe and adventurous language – never loses a black sense of humour. Having now won the 30th annual Dublin Literary award, worth €100,000, The Adversary is proof that Crummey is beginning to garner the accolades he deserves beyond his native Canada. Crummey hails from Newfoundland; all six of his novels are set there. He understands the power of lashing sea, scouring wind, an eked-out existence far from what many consider to be civilisation. In The Innocents he told a kind of Adam-and-Eve story of two children left alone to raise themselves in a shack in the early years of the 19th century. Supplies are occasionally brought in a ship called the Hope; its black-clad captain is known as the Beadle. There is no need to read The Innocents to enjoy The Adversary, but it's a pleasure to spot the connection. The new novel is set in a town called Mockbeggar, and the Beadle is one of its itinerant grandees. This is the Canadian frontier, the harried edge of wilderness, though in comparison with the world of The Innocents the municipality's physical comforts seem positively Parisian. Despite the prevalence of funerals, the reader encounters a wedding in the novel's opening pages. It is between a trembling girl, Anna Morels, brought over from far-off Jersey, and Abe Strapp, one of the grandees of Mockbeggar, the two syllables of his name landing like blows. 'He was a fright for a child to look upon as a prospective husband, bacon-faced, with a small full mouth that gave him the air of a greedy infant.' He turns out to be worse than a greedy infant – Strapp is a brutal tyrant whose violent whims are the scourge of Mockbeggar. The marriage will not, in fact, take place: as in a gothic tale, an impediment is presented when another girl, Imogen Purchase, is revealed to have been impregnated by Strapp – or at least such testimony is given – and she becomes his forlorn bride. Neither girl's fate is enviable. If you ever entertained romantic ideas of what it might be like to live in a wild and isolated place in centuries past, Crummey's work will disabuse you of such idle fancy. The book's true mechanism, however, is the rivalry between Strapp and a woman we first meet as the Widow Caines. I am not the first critic to note that, like The Innocents, The Adversary plays on another story in Genesis, that of Cain and Abel; later in the book we find a kind of trinity, too, in the three young people who are the leavening element of goodness and go by the resonant names of Solemn, Bride and Lazarus. The novel's blurb compares it to Deadwood, David Milch's brilliant HBO series from the early 00s. It is an apt analogy, and not only because both present a portrait of a society forged under duress. Plot doesn't, strictly speaking, drive the tale. Rather, Crummey and Milch alike have built nuanced portraits of the allegiances that must be forged in adversity, and the enmities that arrive not only from longstanding hatreds but from scarce resources too. And, like Milch, Crummey luxuriates in vivid swearing and slang. The Widow Caines dresses in her late husband's clothes to run her business – she dismisses a skirt as a 'fucksail'. The madam of the whorehouse, known as the Abbess, refers to the use to which the servant's room in her domicile has been put: ''The blanket hornpipe,' she said. 'The goat's jig. Clicket. Making feet for children's stockings.'' In his acknowledgments the author bows to the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, now freely available online for all to peruse. You won't be sorry if you do. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Crummey is a wise and unsparing writer whose understanding of human foibles retains a scrap of empathy even for his blackest creations. The bloody denouement of The Adversary is well earned. The title, if we think along biblical lines, refers to the devil, but Crummey shows that the Adversary is in all of us, just waiting – alas – to be released. The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Serpent's Tail (£9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Adversary by Michael Crummey review – dark humour and depravity at the edge of the Earth
Several years have passed since Michael Crummey's last novel The Innocents was published in the UK in 2020. A pandemic has since occurred and, appropriately perhaps, The Adversary begins on a dark note of contagion. 'There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,' runs the opening line, setting the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but – thanks to its energy, and its ripe and adventurous language – never loses a black sense of humour. Having now won the 30th annual Dublin Literary award, worth €100,000, The Adversary is proof that Crummey is beginning to garner the accolades he deserves beyond his native Canada. Crummey hails from Newfoundland; all six of his novels are set there. He understands the power of lashing sea, scouring wind, an eked-out existence far from what many consider to be civilisation. In The Innocents he told a kind of Adam-and-Eve story of two children left alone to raise themselves in a shack in the early years of the 19th century. Supplies are occasionally brought in a ship called the Hope; its black-clad captain is known as the Beadle. There is no need to read The Innocents to enjoy The Adversary, but it's a pleasure to spot the connection. The new novel is set in a town called Mockbeggar, and the Beadle is one of its itinerant grandees. This is the Canadian frontier, the harried edge of wilderness, though in comparison with the world of The Innocents the municipality's physical comforts seem positively Parisian. Despite the prevalence of funerals, the reader encounters a wedding in the novel's opening pages. It is between a trembling girl, Anna Morels, brought over from far-off Jersey, and Abe Strapp, one of the grandees of Mockbeggar, the two syllables of his name landing like blows. 'He was a fright for a child to look upon as a prospective husband, bacon-faced, with a small full mouth that gave him the air of a greedy infant.' He turns out to be worse than a greedy infant – Strapp is a brutal tyrant whose violent whims are the scourge of Mockbeggar. The marriage will not, in fact, take place: as in a gothic tale, an impediment is presented when another girl, Imogen Purchase, is revealed to have been impregnated by Strapp – or at least such testimony is given – and she becomes his forlorn bride. Neither girl's fate is enviable. If you ever entertained romantic ideas of what it might be like to live in a wild and isolated place in centuries past, Crummey's work will disabuse you of such idle fancy. The book's true mechanism, however, is the rivalry between Strapp and a woman we first meet as the Widow Caines. I am not the first critic to note that, like The Innocents, The Adversary plays on another story in Genesis, that of Cain and Abel; later in the book we find a kind of trinity, too, in the three young people who are the leavening element of goodness and go by the resonant names of Solemn, Bride and Lazarus. The novel's blurb compares it to Deadwood, David Milch's brilliant HBO series from the early 00s. It is an apt analogy, and not only because both present a portrait of a society forged under duress. Plot doesn't, strictly speaking, drive the tale. Rather, Crummey and Milch alike have built nuanced portraits of the allegiances that must be forged in adversity, and the enmities that arrive not only from longstanding hatreds but from scarce resources too. And, like Milch, Crummey luxuriates in vivid swearing and slang. The Widow Caines dresses in her late husband's clothes to run her business – she dismisses a skirt as a 'fucksail'. The madam of the whorehouse, known as the Abbess, refers to the use to which the servant's room in her domicile has been put: ''The blanket hornpipe,' she said. 'The goat's jig. Clicket. Making feet for children's stockings.'' In his acknowledgments the author bows to the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, now freely available online for all to peruse. You won't be sorry if you do. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Crummey is a wise and unsparing writer whose understanding of human foibles retains a scrap of empathy even for his blackest creations. The bloody denouement of The Adversary is well earned. The title, if we think along biblical lines, refers to the devil, but Crummey shows that the Adversary is in all of us, just waiting – alas – to be released. The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Serpent's Tail (£9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Wire
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
Kolkata's Vietnam Connection: A Forgotten Chapter of Familiarity
Kolkata: For any city, the past is an echo of the times it has lived through. Fifty years ago, in 1975, May Day in Kolkata had transformed itself into a spontaneous and triumphant celebration of the defeat of US imperialism and Vietnam's victory, celebrated as the reunification of the two sundered parts of the country, was declared official. From a show of working class solidarity and strength, which is how Kolkata has always celebrated May Day, it became both, the city's salutation to the 'sheer human courage and resilience' of the people of Vietnam as in iconic director Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary), 1970, and an occasion for yet another remarkable show of solidarity. On April 30, 1975, the day North Vietnam Army's troops and tanks rolled into Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – Kolkata, the only city that could, hit the streets as news spread of the US defeat. Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Rabin Deb recalled he was also on the streets, participating in a rally of celebration. On May Day, apart from the Left trade union leadership, the CPI(M)'s leadership were at Sahid Minar, the favourite rally ground of the city; it was large, well-connected to public transport and accessible from both the railway stations – Howrah and Sealdah. It was not as challenging and vast as the sprawling Brigade Parade Grounds. The crowds spilled out of the Sahind Minar grounds and among them were students, like now-retired professor Pranab Basu; distinguished scholar of films, theatre and the performing arts like Samik Bandopadhyay, and Professor Tridib Chakraborti, an expert on Vietnam-India relations. There were thousands of others, those who were inspired by the slogan ' Tomar Naam, Amaar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam, ' (Your name and my name is Vietnam, Vietnam). Or, they had read the poetry of Beerendra Chattopadhyaya, a fiery radical poet and Mangal Charan Chattopadhyaya and one of the foremost poets of the 20th century in India, Subhas Mukhopadyaya, also known as 'padatik kobi' (footsoldier of poetry). Or, they were people who probably watched the iconic theatre personality Shombhu Mitra's version of Badal Sircar's The Rest of History. Master of his craft, Mitra substituted Vietnam as an example of The Rest of History, because the name, place and the people and their heroic struggle were proximate, immediate, familiar and significant for Bengali alternative theatre goers. In the original version by Sircar – a pioneer of street theatre in India, an experimentalist and a legend – he had used Congo as the example. The substitution was striking because Vietnam had become an unmissable part of the public discourse. In the Bengali imagination, the war in Vietnam was the most important event of the 'past decade' – more important than Apollo 16 docking on the moon. The reason, as Dhritiman Chatterjee says in Pratidwand i, is that five years before Vietnam's liberation, it was so 'unpredictable.' Against US imperialism In the late 1960s, especially after 1968, Bengalis talked all the time about Vietnam and its 'heroic struggle' to defeat US Imperialism armed with inadequate fire power against B-52s flying carpet bombing missions, of helicopters with American soldiers armed with machine guns strafing the rice paddies, of the resilience and courage of the physically puny, rice-eating people who were fiercely waging war against a 'superpower'. In the Bengali imagination, there was a trace of identifying with the North Vietnam Army forces fighting, apparently, insuperable odds. A city and a polity that had coined ' Tomar Naam, Amar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam ' as a war cry against 'US imperialism and neo capitalism,' where a street in 1969 was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani, only because the US Deputy Consulate Office was located on it, where a bust of Uncle Ho had been installed so that all manner of communists and emotionally connected individuals could garland the sculpture, made itself a distant outpost of a liberation movement in East Asia. Inside the National Library, India's largest library by volume and for public record, there is a small corner, dedicated to Vietnam. It opened in 2016, as the first country-specific section within the National Library. And then there is Ho Chi Minh. Like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh's face is familiar; it is printed on T-shirts and is always included in the line up of legendary communist leaders. He remains an icon even today, though the details of what he did beyond fighting French and US imperialism have been forgotten. Not all the cadres of the dwindling CPI(M) and the CPI recall that 'Uncle Ho' visited Kolkata more than once; he made a halt in 1946 on his way to Paris to attend the preliminary round of negotiations for the peace accord, which incidentally collapsed. There is a plaque at the Great Eastern Hotel, described by Mark Twain as the 'Jewel of the East,' installed after the grand building was taken over and renovated by the Lalit Group. In 1958, Ho Chi Minh visited again, probably on a stop over on his way to Paris. That visit is significant; it explains why Ho Chi Minh is so much a part of the city's history and its imagination. In 1958, Ho Chi Minh went to the office of Swadhinata, the evening daily of then undivided Communist Party of India, to meet Dhiraranjan Sen, who was injured in a rally organised in support of Vietnam's struggle in January 1947. The British police had fired on rallyists and two people were killed. They were the first martyrs of the movement in India that supported Ho Chi Minh's fight to liberate Vietnam from French colonial rule. When Madam Nguyen Thi Binh visited Kolkata in 2007, the public welcomed her with a massive rally. This was not her first visit. She had come earlier, probably for the first time in 1973. However, this time the turnout was huge; the enormous Netaji Indoor Stadium with a seating capacity of 12,000, was packed. People also gathered outside the stadium just to be in the presence of the lady who stood up to Henry Kissinger and was part of Vietnam's negotiating team for the peace accord. She was inspiring. In 1989, Kolkata hosted General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who defeated the French army and ended its colonial rule by winning the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. He paid his respects at the Ho Chi Minh statue, met the leaders of then ruling CPI(M)-led Left Front, including chief minister Jyoti Basu, attended a public reception and dominated the headlines the next day in the Bengali print media. Since 1947, when the first rallyists of the Vietnam liberation died in police action, Kolkata's relationship to Vietnam has been visceral. Samik Bandopadhyay is now 85 years old; his encyclopedic memory is awe inspiring. Even so, the vividness of his recall of the day Vietnam was liberated is remarkable. He says, 'We celebrated on the streets, joined the rally and celebrated at home, too.' Vietnam was a place not out there somewhere in the vast world; it was a place to which the Bandopadhyay family felt connected with, much like many other Bengalis. However, there was a key difference: Samik Bandopadhyay's eldest brother, Subrata Banerjee, was posted in Vietnam when he joined the British Army, post 1942, on directives issued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the world war had become a peoples' war. Serving in Vietnam, Banerjee made friends; these friends then made tracks to visit him in Kolkata. The distance was bridged by the emotional attachment between spirited Bengalis inspired by the courage and resilience of the Vietnamese people. Other notable visitors Kolkata has hosted many visitors. Back then, after Independence and before globalisation and the digital revolution, the city was a magnet for a particular kind of world leader. Writing for the New York Times in 1955, the day General Secretary of CPSU Nikita Krushchev, who was Stalin's successor, and Premier Nikolai Bulganin flew in, A.M, Rosenthal, who later became the newspapers managing editor, painted a picture of the city: 'Late into the night, the streets of India's largest city were jammed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the Russians. This was by far the largest crowd to greet the Soviet leaders. Oldtime residents of Calcutta said they had never seen anything like it, not for Mohandas Gandhi or Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, nor for Indian Independence day.' The reason why world leaders came to the city, then called Calcutta, was its 'reputation of being India's most leftist and turbulent city.' The turbulence was packed away when the city played host; the people took over and transformed a formal visit into, as Rosenthal wrote, 'the welcoming crush of one of the largest crowds in Indian history'. 'More than 2,000,000 Bengalis turned out to greet Soviet Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin and Communist party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev and turned a day of welcome into a security officer's nightmare,' he wrote. Calcutta-Kolkata's police experienced in managing huge shoving, pushing, excited and determined crowds had to rescue Krushchev and Bulganin from the car in which they were travelling and put them into a secure police van. The crowds remained an index of the size of mobilisations by political parties for decades to come. Nelson Mandela also visited the city. So did Yasser Arafat. The public receptions were exceptional. West Bengal and the city always converged at the reception venues, regardless of the effort it may have been to travel from other districts into Kolkata, on packed trains – even the 27 special trains that ran for the Krushchev-Bulganin visit. When the first democratic election, following the end of monarchy, in Nepal was won by the Left coalition headed by Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Prachanda, a contingent of its leaders had arrived in Kolkata to receive a hero's welcome at Esplanade East on August 15, 2008. The victory was celebrated in Kathmandu and Kolkata, almost as though Esplanade East was a rally space in Nepal, except for the fact that the crowds who clogged the thoroughfare were Bengalis and resident Nepalese. Kolkata knew how to make itself a vibrant extension of whatever was happening in the world. It broke the tall window panes of the American Centre in 1968, as thousands of students and anti-American pro-Vietnam rallyists took to the streets, protesting the visit of Robert Mcnamara, then US Secretary of Defence, and a key figure in the decision to use Agent Orange, increase bombing and escalate the intensity of the war in Vietnam. It knew it had to make itself seen and heard when relief ships carrying wheat from Punjab – some donated and some purchased – were flagged off from Haldia port to Cuba after tougher US sanctions were imposed in 1992. Like the characters in Badal Sircar's play, the horizon of Kolkata, like that of its immensely aware, educated and conscientious middle class, seems to have closed in on itself. The tendency to behave like frogs in the well was always there. Vivekanda used the word Kupamanduka to describe the Indian condition, whereas conscience keeper and the voice of the Bengali spirit, Rabindranath Tagore lamented that Bengal as the mother had nurtured Bengalis, not humanity.
Time of India
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Hyphen-hype
A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE The weaponisation of a commonly used mark of punctuation, and how best to counter it The minister of Punctuation, Propaganda, and Fake News was addressing his aides and assorted flunkies. There is good news and there is bad news, said the minister. First, the good news. The good news is that our Operation Hyphen worked even better than we anticipated. The terror attack we masterminded triggered an inevitable response from The Adversary who promptly launched multiple strikes against the terrorist training camps we've established. So far so good, said the minister, while his aides and assorted flunkies nodded in obsequious agreement. With the escalation of hostilities which we so cunningly had provoked, international attention, not to mention alarm, got focused on the face-off between us and the adversary, as we had planned, said the minister. This was the good news, he continued. Our Operation Hyphen was crowned with success because in the eyes of the international community we and the adversary got re-hyphenated. Or, to be more precise, clarified the minister, we and the adversary got re-re-hyphenated, after having been repeatedly de-de-hyphenated. The hyphen, explained the minister, which is not to be confused with the N dash or the M dash, or the minus sign which it resembles, is one heck of a juju of a punctuation mark. Its name derives from the Greek 'Huphen', which in late Latin became 'hyphen' and means 'together'. The first recorded use of the hyphen to join two words, and by implication, give them equal value or status was by Dionysus Thrax, the great Greek grammarian (170-90BC), pronounced the minister. Thanks to the hyphen we got equated with The Adversary, even though we are a bankrupt military dictatorship and The Adversary is the world's most populous democracy and the fifth-largest economy to boot, he gloated. That's good news, he said. Unfortunately, he continued, the bad news is that The Adversary has made it abundantly clear to all concerned that to counter our hyphen, if necessary it is ready to come up with an even bigger juju of a punctuation mark: the Full Stop… Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Irish Independent
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Madeleine Keane on books: Stars descend for festival season and Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year announced
We're in full festival swing. After 10 (mostly) sun-drenched days, a superb International Literature Festival Dublin concluded last weekend. A personal highlight was interviewing Michael Crummey. The charming Canadian won the Dublin Literary Award (worth €100,000) for his dark, compelling masterpiece The Adversary. Kudos too to Dublin City Libraries who sponsor this life-changing prize. Register for free to read this story Register and create a profile to get access to our free stories. You'll also unlock more free stories each week.
