Huma Yusuf

This article first appeared in The Herald, March 2006.

Such a premise – the love of an aged man for a sexually ingénue – carries much literary baggage, a fact Marquez acknowledges when quoting from Yasunari Kawabata’s short story “House of the Sleeping Beauties” in the preface of the novella. Lolita, Death in Venice and Marquez’ own Of Love and Other Demons as well as several short stories have expertly explored the overwrought themes stemming from the pedophiliac urges: guilt, desire morality, inadequacy, violence, seduction, escapism, delusion and fear. In earlier works, Marquez distinguished himself from Nabokov and Mann by contrasting his characters’ perversion with the lush lyricism of his prose when describing sensuality and sexuality.

 Geriatric Grumblings

This article first appeared in The Herald, May 2005.

Although a first-person non-fiction account, Mehta’s book reads like an epic novel. His exuberant, irrepressible and often rambling prose captures the city’s character even more so than the content of his chapters. And despite the self-aggrandizing tone employed by most Indians when they write about their motherland, one can’t help but buy into Mehta’s Mumbai. His city is more colorful, dangerous, funny and feral than anyone could imagine. And as Mehta writes about all aspects of life in the great metropolis, whether it be Bal Thackeray or Bollywood, he’s sure to touch on the two topics that matter most: sex and death.

 Urban Legend

This article first appeared in The Herald, October 2005.

To maintain an image of Levitt as the last of the freethinkers, Freakonomics boasts that “this book indeed had no ‘unifying theme’”. Instead, it consists of a series of unrelated questions, purportedly relevant to everyday life, that Levitt answers by using an economist’s penchant for analyzing numbers. The questions he asks range from the ridiculous to the sublime: how does the Klu Klux Klan resemble a group of real estate agents? Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers? What makes a perfect parent? The answers to the queries which Levitt proffers only after a long-winded statistical exercise, are often mundane reinstatements of fundamental truths. In many ways, Freakonomics does no more than remind us that the modern world is driven only by suitable incentives, that conventional wisdom is often flawed, that dramatic effects frequently have subtle causes, that experts in any field manipulate their “informational advantage” to serve their own agenda and, most importantly, that measuring something often undermines the mythology that surrounds it.

 The Math of Life

The article first appeared in The Herald, December, 2004.Rather than labor with the rudiments of this plot, Hall uses her storyline as a vehicle for anachronistaclly sensuous and exuberant writing. She dwells on the symbol of the tattoo, teasing out its ironies. In Riley and Cyril’s thoughts, the tattoo emerges as the perfect art form, the conflation of pain and erotica, beauty and destruction, narrative and life, the eternity of art and the temporality of the body. Hall notes that “there were instances when [Cyril’s] needle unwittingly delved down into a soul and struck upon meaning… he caught [his customers’] stories in a bucket and mixed it with ink and used the serum to paint translations of the very stories the tellers were hemorrhaging on to them.”Written on the Body

This article first appeared in The Herald, October 2004.No wonder then, Rahman’s writing is a referential spree. Like the Thomas Pynchon of the new millennium – less paranoia, more humor – or a bookish Quentin Tarantino, Rahman tosses out allusions in a frenzied ode to American suburbia. From Robert Graves to rock group REM, Shakespeare to Sid Vicious and Billy Wilder to Tennesse Williams, Rahman’s familiarity with Americana, Midwestern trailer-trash, strip mall vernacular and low-budget porn makes his stories spectacular.Script, Not Scripture

This article first appeared in The Herald, August 2004.The anti-thesis of the tell-all type, Merchant writes with a polite restraint that recalls the stiff upper lip of the colicky colonials from his period films. One would imagine that the narration of a rags-to-riches story would focus more on the riches and far less on the rags. But Merchant counter-intuitively paints his childhood as the most exciting time of his life. The Bombay, Bollywood and bazaars of his school days are more lovingly rendered than the Manhattan, masala and movies of his later years.Where’s the Ivory

This article first appeared in The Herald, July 2004.The novel is the second installment in a trilogy about Marianna Givens, a spunky English heroine who, unlike her fellow colonizers, respects the ‘natives’ of the Raj, is prone to wildly impulsive behavior and cannot for the life of her, keep her hair tidy beneath her bonnet. In Ali’s first novel A Singular Hostage, Mariana became the guardian of three-year-old Saboor, after marrying his father Saboor in a whirl of unusual events. Now, ostracized by the gossipy British community, Mariana agrees to travel from Calcutta to Lahore to return Saboor to his family and ask Hassan for a divorce so that she can revert to her old life. But wait a minute: just one whiff of Lahore’s rose-sprinkled air and the feel of jamawar on bare English skin in the dappled light of the zenna and Mariana’s not to keen on being British after all. As she chooses between the familiarity of her English world and the spirituality of Hassan’s family, Ali reduces Mariana’s decision to the done-to-death choice between the spice of the East and the insipidity of the West.Romancing the Desi

This article first appeared in The Herald, May 2004.Both Seierstad and Ellis are unable to escape the patronizing tone typical of British colonial documents such as travelogues and demographic ‘reports’ on the Afghans disguising themselves as academic anthropological studies. T.L. Pennel, a British doctor who lived among the “wild tribes” of the Afghan frontier for 16 years until 1891 described the Afghans as a people with “a lavish hospitality yet an irresistible propensity for thieving.” Seierstad also observes that “the bookseller was a liberal. In his heart he remained the authoritarian patriarch.” The writers imply an affinity with their subjects and under the guise of empathizing with the Afghans, condemn them.This is Another Country

This article first appeared in The Herald, April 2004.The novel is set in Silk, a desolate coastal town in an unnamed Southern state which is defined by the prosaic morality of the middle-class.: righteous citizens like the Gibbons keep their distance from fast girls like Junior and Heed who “dance crotch out” and hail from ghetto neighborhoods like the Settlement and Up Beach respectively. The characters in the novel are brought together through their affiliation with Bill Cosey, the smooth-talking, cocktail-chugging archetype of a Depression-era black entrepreneur. In the novel’s present tense, Cosey’s widow, Heed and granddaughter Christine are house mates who thrive on making each other miserable.Tainted Love

Way back in 1958, a young Indian immigrant to New York bought tickets to see Paul Newman on Broadway. After the curtain call, he canoodled his way backstage and brazenly offered the screen legend a role in a film that still did not have a budget, script, production crew or cast. Understandably, Newman declined the offer. Some 28 years and 30 films later, the same man, now producer of the smash hit Mr and Mrs Bridge starring Newman, invited the actor for dinner to discuss his performance and reminisce about their first encounter.