Novel of Bangladesh war
By Ali Sethi |
January 13, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
SOMEWHERE in the middle of "Scenes From Early Life," Philip Hensher's circuitous new novel of wartime Bangladesh, a lawyer and his wife are arguing over the chilies and tomatoes and mangos that have been left out to dry on their balcony.
"My balcony is full of rubbish and detritus," the lawyer complains.
"If there is no pickling and preserving," says the wife to her daughters, "what does he think we are all going to eat the next time we can't leave the house? We have no idea how long it will go on for, next time."
She is referring to the soldiers who have begun to stalk the streets outside her house. We are in Dacca circa 1970. It is the capital of East Pakistan, then one of that country's two wings, long inflamed by political grievance and now on the verge of a violent secession. The West Pakistani military is about to start Operation Searchlight - a euphemism for the massacre of Bengali nationalists. There are roadblocks in the city; soon there will be tanks and air raids. And in one leafy neighborhood, this lawyer and his wife are squabbling over where to put their chilies.
Hensher doesn't mean to trivialize such arguments; rather, he gives them pride of place in his narrative. "This is not a history of the struggle for Bangladesh's independence," the author writes in the acknowledgments, "but the rendering of a family's passionately held memories. It does not pretend to be an account of the millions who died in the war and the famines."
So, the lawyer and his wife are the maternal grandparents of Saadi, a character modeled on the author's own Bangladeshi husband. It is Saadi looking back on his childhood in Dacca, recalling the antics of his "immense extended family" and narrating the book to a quietly receptive Westerner.
For most of the novel, it is Saadi's subjectivity gives Hensher his method - the staging of interconnected memories, some closely bound up with public events - to tell a now-personal, now-political story.
The method works best when it reveals the war obliquely, as one of many strands in a personal history. We share Saadi's surprise when his aunt forbids him from visiting a neighbor boy who comes from one of "those" families who "had taken money from the Pakistanis and betrayed their own kind."
There are moments when Hensher's collated war stories reverberate metaphysically, as in the chapter about the period between March and December 1971.
But it is frustrating that Hensher is reduced to handing out the history of Bangladesh in wiki-statements of dumbed-down writing. And not all of the "passionately held memories" are worth recounting, some are embarrassingly trite. Further, some writing is over-reverential. The result is a sugary consistency that gives this well-meaning novel a sentimental feel, and produces in the reader a compensating skepticism.
"My balcony is full of rubbish and detritus," the lawyer complains.
"If there is no pickling and preserving," says the wife to her daughters, "what does he think we are all going to eat the next time we can't leave the house? We have no idea how long it will go on for, next time."
She is referring to the soldiers who have begun to stalk the streets outside her house. We are in Dacca circa 1970. It is the capital of East Pakistan, then one of that country's two wings, long inflamed by political grievance and now on the verge of a violent secession. The West Pakistani military is about to start Operation Searchlight - a euphemism for the massacre of Bengali nationalists. There are roadblocks in the city; soon there will be tanks and air raids. And in one leafy neighborhood, this lawyer and his wife are squabbling over where to put their chilies.
Hensher doesn't mean to trivialize such arguments; rather, he gives them pride of place in his narrative. "This is not a history of the struggle for Bangladesh's independence," the author writes in the acknowledgments, "but the rendering of a family's passionately held memories. It does not pretend to be an account of the millions who died in the war and the famines."
So, the lawyer and his wife are the maternal grandparents of Saadi, a character modeled on the author's own Bangladeshi husband. It is Saadi looking back on his childhood in Dacca, recalling the antics of his "immense extended family" and narrating the book to a quietly receptive Westerner.
For most of the novel, it is Saadi's subjectivity gives Hensher his method - the staging of interconnected memories, some closely bound up with public events - to tell a now-personal, now-political story.
The method works best when it reveals the war obliquely, as one of many strands in a personal history. We share Saadi's surprise when his aunt forbids him from visiting a neighbor boy who comes from one of "those" families who "had taken money from the Pakistanis and betrayed their own kind."
There are moments when Hensher's collated war stories reverberate metaphysically, as in the chapter about the period between March and December 1971.
But it is frustrating that Hensher is reduced to handing out the history of Bangladesh in wiki-statements of dumbed-down writing. And not all of the "passionately held memories" are worth recounting, some are embarrassingly trite. Further, some writing is over-reverential. The result is a sugary consistency that gives this well-meaning novel a sentimental feel, and produces in the reader a compensating skepticism.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
