bookpagedev

In Milan Kundera’s new novel, Ignorance, two Czech ŽmigrŽs have been talked into returning to the country of their birth after having been away for 20 years. They will soon discover how much things have changed in their absence and learn that who they have become doesn’t matter much to their former countrymen.

The ŽmigrŽs, Irena and Josef, are both middle-aged and have lost spouses. They meet by chance in a Paris airport and promise to reunite in Prague. Irena, now involved with a man who is closer to her domineering mother than to her, remembers Josef from long ago as a potential lover, though he has long forgotten her.

How we choose to flee the past and forget it, before finally confronting its physical and emotional realities, is at the heart of Kundera’s book. The Czech ŽmigrŽ’s 10th novel returns him to his homeland. Having departed Czechoslovakia more than 25 years ago to live in France, the writer perhaps best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being adopted the French language to write his last three novels and two nonfiction works.

Kundera describes how Irena left Czechoslovakia many years ago with her husband to distance herself from a mother who flattened her. But when her husband dies and her children are grown, Irena comes back to her native land. Josef also left behind his family and possessions to emigrate, and only returns following the death of his wife. In some of this book’s best pages, Kundera explores the attachment between Josef and his deceased wife, and shows how he maintains a life with her.

Kundera poetically captures the disorientation and loss that ŽmigrŽs feel when returning to a city or country after such a long time away. His two ŽmigrŽs shockingly realize that to be accepted by old friends and family, they must amputate the last 20 years of their lives. Richard Carter has lived on three continents but presently calls North Texas home.

The history of literature confirms Plutarch, who wrote, You will find few of the wisest and most intelligent men buried in their own countries. A great many of the best writers have lived abroad. My bookshelves are a veritable shrine to homelessness: Hemingway, Nietzsche, Milosz, Naipaul, Vidal, Buck, Conrad, Wharton . . . and now Gao Xingjian, the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a long-time resident of Paris. China, he says, gives him a headache.

Precious little of Gao’s oeuvre is available in English: a few plays and the monumental novel Soul Mountain, which documented the disastrous repercussions of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His new and long-awaited novel One Man’s Bible relates in fictional form his own participation in the Revolution and his ultimate rejection of its goals.

The novel begins in Hong Kong. The year is 1996. Or is it 1984? Gao fears that his hotel room is being videotaped by his nemeses in Beijing. And as his lover forces him to recall life under Mao, the reader visits a real version of Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare.

Suspected counterrevolutionaries are denounced in a fashion reminiscent of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, publicly flogged and humiliated, transported to reform-through-labor camps, monitored by seeming friends, thrown from windows to fabricate suicide. History is constantly revised for political expedience. To save his skin, Gao must conceal and even destroy his writings, and he must pretend to fawn over Marx and Lenin. Searched and questioned before departing China, Gao realizes that home is now elsewhere. Only reluctantly is Gao a political writer. Politics is merely an obstacle to living well. This includes the creation of art: before winning the Nobel, Gao supported himself largely as a painter. It also includes sexual indulgence. For Gao, as for Orwell, sex is the ultimate defiance of an increasingly regimented world. Indeed, the novel’s most compelling scenes involve two strangers sharing a night of love, trust, and abandon amid a climate of hate, suspicion and control.

One Man’s Bible is a profound and liberating testament to the human spirit, whatever as Gao might say with an ironic smile that may be. And while he admits that happiness may be unattainable, the pursuit of happiness is well, you know, inalienable.

Within Bombay’s Towers of Silence, the Parsis expose their dead to hungry vultures a practice as environmentally friendly as it is macabre. Ethnic Persians who had migrated to India, the Parsis have traditionally led Bombay’s commercial class. And though they have become an endangered species due to stagnating birth rates and miscegenation, their Zoroastrianism has largely removed them from the constant squabbling of Bombay’s Hindus and Muslims, which a decade ago erupted into carnage and fire.

Behind the riots was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu supremacist band of thugs, whose agenda includes abolishing Valentine’s Day, razing mosques and, according to writer Rohinton Mistry, subjecting innocent letters and postcards to incineration if the address reads Bombay instead of Mumbai. Such is the cultural and political backdrop of Mistry’s commanding new novel, Family Matters, his follow-up to the acclaimed A Fine Balance. A Bombay native, Mistry capably evokes a city that would explode were it not for the Indians’ heroic tolerance and patience. I am a born-and-bred Bombayvala, writes Mistry. That automatically inoculates me against attacks of outrage. Nariman is an old Parsi widower cared for by his children Jal and Coomy. But Coomy soon connives to move Nariman into the house of Roxana, his daughter by another marriage. Roxana’s husband Yezad resents the new addition, and he takes to illegal gambling to subsidize Nariman’s care. Mistry deftly shows how necessity compels Indians to embrace corruption, India’s scourge. Even Yezad’s son starts taking bribes in his capacity as a Homework Monitor.

Nariman becomes demented and incontinent; Yezad’s boss, Mr. Kapur, abandons his dream of becoming a muckraking politician; Jal and Coomy enlist the help of a semi-competent handyman to refurbish their flat this in a Murphy’s Law country where anything that can go wrong usually does.

Any novel set in Bombay must be as vast as the city. Mistry’s knowledge of its customs, locales and languages is encyclopedic, his cast of characters panoramic, and his portrayal of Indian attitudes spot on. Indians perceive the use of toilet paper as unhygienic; they often converse in trite proverbs, and their attitude toward the West is decidedly conflicted. So is their attitude toward India, a great country and a hopeless one.

Indians writing in English are producing some of today’s most inspiring and original fiction. And with Family Matters, Mistry’s name may soon take its place alongside those of a Rushdie or a Roy. Kenneth Champeon is a writer living in Thailand. He lived and worked in Bombay for six months.