It is said that even the best of writers trip over their second novels. And it was a second novel that was, by far, the publication highlight of 2018: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.
Readers had waited two decades for it. When it came, despite flashes of brilliancy and admirable political courage, it suffered from being not just a second novel but also a novel that had been too long in the waiting. Everything that Roy had not put into fiction for two decades seemed to have gone into it!
In general, the big names were not the names to remember in 2018—though, of course, given the nature of publishing and the literary world, they are the ones who will actually be remembered. If Roy’s long-awaited novel disappointed because it tried to do too much at once, The Only Story by Julian Barnes left me feeling that, surely, a writer of his experience, accomplishments and talent could have tried to take on just a bit more! Far more effective and ambitious was Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home, which revolves around a couple entering a brutal motor race in the Australian outback and is a nuanced exploration of identities, including racial ones.
But, perhaps, I should not talk about the big global names, because I generally stayed off them—a policy I intend to continue in 2019. There is no point wasting hard-earned money on books that a thousand smart people are working hard to sell all over the world! Much more interesting are the lesser names, and works in translation.
Neel Mukherjee is not a small name, and neither is Kamila Shamsie, but they do not have prizes like the Booker behind them—yet—despite being shortlisted. Both came up with very good novels. Shamsie’s Home Fire, published in 2017 in some markets, was a highly readable take on Islamism and terror from a British-Pakistani angle. Mukherjee improved his already good track record with a novel (A State of Freedom)—or rather a volume of cleverly interlinked novellas—which was more ambitious and unconventional than his Booker-nominated, The Lives of Others, though just as accomplished. It will probably also garner fewer prizes as a consequence.
Then there were half-a-dozen books that I planned to read, because they sounded interesting and were by authors I know, but I have not managed to procure them yet, even as the year runs out. These include Manu Joseph’s Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous, and Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives we Never Lived. One could also name excellent fiction from small houses—such as Linda Heuring’s story collection, A Woman Walked into a Bar—but these are not available to readers in India. Or, for that matter, readers almost everywhere—given the established networks of big (commercial) publishers, big agents, big editors, big prizes, big bookshop-chains and big festivals, which leave small houses out in the cold.
Given a choice, I would say that there was more interesting non-fiction than fiction in 2018—and there is no point talking about poetry, which has been turned into a weird monster by the marriage of unprofitability with prestige. There are good poetry books out there—2018 had two or three, too—but why read poetry when you can simply listen to Bob Dylan? Or some other excellent singer who might, in forty years, win the Nobel Prize in Literature as well?
But the non-fiction was definitely worth delving into. Shashi Tharoor came out with Why I am a Hindu: necessary, urbane, scholarly and readable, even though it did not look too closely at the problem of caste and its role in Hinduism. I also enjoyed reading Neyaz Farooquee’s autobiographical debut, whose title explains its concerns: An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism: Growing up Muslim in India.
One major publishing house that has taken an exciting turn in recent years is Oxford University Press, which has started publishing well-researched books for a general readership along with its usual academic tomes and translations. A major work of scholarship in Urdu, translated into English and published by OUP this year, was Gopi Chand Narang’s Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind. Ghalib, I have always felt, deserves far more scholarship than he has received, and this book fills a gap. It is vital for critical studies from other Indian languages to enter the “global” discourse through English translations.
This year, thanks to OUP’s growing list of translations, I read two seminal fantasy fiction texts from the Bengali Renaissance, Abindranath Tagore’s The Make-Believe Prince and Gaganendranath Tagore’s Toddy-Cat the Bold (translated by Sanya Sircar) and a surreal satire from 1923, translated from the Bengali by Arnab Bhattacharya, that I strongly recommend: Troilokyonath’s Mukhopadhyay’s Domoruchorit: Stunning Tales from Bengali Adda. Another significant OUP translation, from the Kannada by S.R. Ramakrishna, was U.R. Anathamurthy’s Suragi, an autobiographical novel about growing up in a village in Karnataka.
Of course, mine is by no means an exhaustive list: I know there were many good books in 2018 that never came to my notice. One should not generalise about the ocean out there on the basis of some skinny-dipping at one of its beaches. And, yet, it appears to me that some of the most interesting books to come out in 2018 were non-fiction ones and books translated into English. In any case, my personal favourite this year was Byung-Chul Han’s The Expulsion of the Other, which was both non-fiction (philosophy) and translated from the German, and which began with these dire words: “The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over.” The short book went on to show how an excessive focus on “the positivity of the Self” is something to be deeply frightened of, as is the disappearance of attention to and space for the Other.
Tabish Khair is an Indian author based in Denmark; his new novel, ‘Night of Happiness’, was published by Pan Macmillan in 2018