Few writers have offended their readers as regularly as V.S. Naipaul has. From his first travel book, which disparaged the West Indies as a “dot on the map” where “nothing was created,” to his most recent, in which he dismissed Pakistan as a “criminal enterprise,” the Trinidad-born author of Indian ancestry has shown a staggering capacity for insensitivity and prejudice. Africa is filled with “bow-and-arrow people.” India is “an area of darkness.” “V.S. Nightfall,” Derek Walcott has called him; like a man who turns his back to the sun, Naipaul sees the world through his own shadow.
Traces of this imperiousness and biliousness are already evident in “Between Father and Son,” a collection of Naipaul family letters covering the period from September 1949, shortly before the 17-year-old’s departure on a government scholarship for Oxford, to the publication of his first novel, “The Mystic Masseur,” eight years later. Naipaul finds the “bright young sparks at Oxford quite insipid,” their “conversation and company tedious.” Of a new acquaintance, he writes to his sister Kamla that “I hope he isn’t homosexual. Nearly every other man one meets in this country is homosexual.” Still a teenager, Naipaul displays a remarkable cocksureness. He is, he informs his sister, “the best man on the news staff” of a student paper, and “as usual, the hardest-working.” In his second year, he produces a novel. “I am in no doubt about its being accepted,” he writes home.
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The book is rejected, and Naipaul sinks into a long depression — a “nervous breakdown” as he later, in typically dramatic fashion, characterizes it. “A man isn’t a block of wood,” he writes morosely to his parents. “Some people, alas, feel more and think more than others, and they suffer.” This suffering Naipaul — “a jar of muddy water,” he calls himself — is not the inscrutable man of legend; he is a lonely, fragile and culturally awkward boy, unsure of his place in the world. Readers familiar with his work will turn to this book expecting the familiar cold detachment and the usual larger-than-life account of the writer’s quest for artistic purity. But “Between Father and Son” is something quite different: a portrait of the artist as a human being.
We see a naive young man struggling for social acceptability as he worries about finding his “circle of friends.” We see his fumbling, endearing advances toward women. (A Finn names her pet turtle after him; rather than sputter, Naipaul tamely throws up his hands and asks, “What could I do?”) And we see his affection for his family. Salman Rushdie, reviewing Naipaul’s masterly novel “The Enigma of Arrival” in 1987, famously observed that nowhere in that book could he find the word “love.” Yet the Naipaul here who counsels his siblings on marriage and education is warm, affectionate and caring. Toward his beloved father, Seepersad (the inspiration for his 1961 Dickensian masterpiece, “A House for Mr. Biswas”), he is all emotion, admiration and encouragement for the older man’s writerly ambitions. When, near the end of his time at Oxford, Seepersad dies, Naipaul is heartbroken. “HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW,” he cables home. “EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM. BE BRAVE MY LOVES.”
It is a sad and poignant moment — and the book is filled with such moments. Perhaps the deepest impression these letters impart is of the hardship of Naipaul’s life at Oxford. The cultural isolation, the desperate poverty, the strain of work and loneliness: Any young man might have come away with a gloomy disposition. “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it,” says Salim, the narrator of “A Bend in the River.” To survive in the world, one sometimes needs to be a block of wood. “Between Father and Son” suggests that this is the lesson Naipaul learned at Oxford; it is a lesson he may have taken too much to heart.
“Crimes of War” exists in a curious place between despair and hope. There is something unnerving about this book, which seeks to clarify the laws that might prevent barbarity at the end of a decade scarred by the horrifying barbarity in Chechnya, Rwanda, Iraq, Liberia and, especially, the former Yugoslavia — places that have burned themselves as emblems of hopelessness onto our collective consciousness. Roy Gutman and David Rieff hope that, in some small way, their book will help “sweep away” violations of humanitarian law; they have set themselves a daunting task.
The book was conceived, according to Kenneth Anderson, its legal editor, “to combine technical accuracy and readability.” This it does, by interspersing first-hand reporting from crime scenes with accounts of the legal issues surrounding such topics as “Safety Zones,” “Civilian Immunity,” “Prisoner of War Camps” and “Genocide.” Both types of accounts are presented in an alphabetized and cross-referenced encyclopedia format.
For all the information packed into the legal discussions, however, this is not a legal manual. There is little in “Crimes of War” to tie together the various statutes and treaties that make up the firmament of international law. The only overview — and it is an excellent one — is by journalist Lawrence Weschler, who compares the attempt to build an international legal framework with the little-by-little reclamation of flooded land in 16th century Holland. His essay is less a summary of the current legal situation than a history of the evolution of laws of war; more specifically, it is a history of the impotence of such laws. “The porous ramparts sag and leak,” he writes, “and seem subject to random collapse.”
But as Weschler also points out, the publication of “Crimes of War” coincides with a moment of sudden and unexpected optimism in international human-rights law. With Pinochet facing possible extradition, Milosevic under indictment and real hope at last for the establishment of a permanent war-crimes tribunal (the ones on Yugoslavia and Rwanda are both ad hoc), war-crimes law has acquired an unprecedented authority. It is no surprise that this new strength emerges against the backdrop of what is arguably the most vicious decade since the end of World War II; indeed, the last time the prognosis for human-rights law seemed as positive was during the postwar Nuremberg trials. There is nothing like an informed and outraged public to make governments throw their weight behind humanitarian law; and there is nothing like extreme barbarity to inform and outrage an otherwise indifferent public.
This is something the editors seem to understand, and it is the key to the book’s success. “Crimes of War” draws strength from the immediacy of its journalistic accounts. David Rohde on the massacre in Srebrenica, Charles Lane on a hospital blown up in El Salvador, John Burns on teenage suicide squads in Sri Lanka — these gripping descriptions, supplemented by often shocking photographs, give the book a gruesome voyeuristic fascination. (The pictures of the conflict in Liberia, which Mark Huband describes as “a horror story pure and simple,” are particularly graphic.) Though “Crimes of War” bills itself as a book about war and the law, in a sense the law takes a back seat: This is, ultimately, an encyclopedia of evil. But because the kind of despair it creates can hit hard enough to inspire an informed public to demand more from its leaders, it is a hopeful book as well.
Much like the upper-class Colombo world it portrays, “Cinnamon Gardens” is a polished and elegant work. Five years ago Shyam Selvadurai, a Sri Lankan-born writer who has spent the better part of the past two decades in Canada, published his well-received first novel, “Funny Boy,” a touching story about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. Now he takes up the theme of high-society morality and hypocrisy in a second book that reads like a turn-of-the-century Sri Lankan novel of manners.
The trouble is that — again, like the world it portrays — “Cinnamon Gardens” is a little too polished. It lacks the idiosyncrasies and the unpredictability that would give it life. In aspiring to write a grand social epic, Selvadurai has put all the cultural and historical scaffolding a little too neatly in place. Historical incidents obviously gleaned from archival research feel artificially woven in; quotations from the Triukkural, an ancient work of Tamil philosophy, are copiously (and indiscriminately) cited, not only by several characters but also by the author, at the head of each chapter.
There is more than a little exoticization in the use of such elements, and like all exoticization, this case tends to emphasize the general at the expense of the particular. Selvadurai is so eager to tell the big social story that he neglects the human elements. Thus he grafts his characters’ lives and relationships onto the age’s great concerns; the results read like stereotypes. The Mudaliyar Navaratnam, the patriarch of the family at the center of the book, fights against universal suffrage and stifles his son Balendran’s passion; he represents the old generation. Annalukshmi, the headstrong young teacher who rides a bicycle and refuses to marry, is the voice of women’s emancipation. Mr. Jayaweera, the teacher from a rural village who fights for the rights of laborers, points up the economic exploitation of the colonial era. His conversations with the urbane and well-educated Annalukshmi — he intrigues her with his talk of spirit possessions and snakebites in the country’s interior — sound like parodies of interclass interaction.
These characters and many more populate a sprawling narrative. They find love and friendship, and they struggle through conflicts with family members, social mores and their own repressed desires. Selvadurai holds his complicated story line together adeptly, but he is less successful at fleshing it out, at giving it emotional and psychological depth. When Balendran meets his long-lost lover, Richard, after 20 years (they had been forced apart when Balendran’s father discovered the true nature of their relationship), the reunion is, all too characteristically, linguistically stilted and psychologically shallow. Balendran is “speechless” and “stung by [Richard's] words”; later, he feels “a terrible emptiness.” “The sure apprehension of another mind / Is the mark of a God,” runs another verse from the Triukkural (one that Selvadurai doesn’t cite). It’s the mark of a good novelist, too.
Curiously, as the veneer of respectability and propriety begins to wrinkle near the end of the book, Selvadurai’s starched tone acquires a little life. Sentiments become less lachrymose, memories more vivid, and the conclusion, in contrast to the rest of the plot, is a surprise. There are traces in the final pages of the sensitivity and insight that distinguished “Funny Boy.” The effect is uplifting, but also a little disappointing. Selvadurai obviously has tremendous potential; we’ll have to wait at least until his next book to see it fulfilled.
Who is Vikram Seth? Even with a career that has spanned two decades and spawned nine books, Seth remains something of a mystery. No two books of his have been alike. He is a poet, a novelist, a travel writer and even the author of a libretto. Unlike most writers of Indian origin, whose works are obsessed with the subcontinent, Seth seems at home anywhere in the world. “The Golden Gate,” the novel in verse that first brought him renown, was a witty and inventive story of Californian yuppiedom; “A Suitable Boy,” one of the longest novels ever written in English, is a sprawling, multigenerational tale of family, tradition and politics in post-independence India.
Now, five years after that epic effort, Seth has returned with something completely different again. Set in the exalted world of the European classical music circuit, “An Equal Music” is a sensitive, meticulous novel that has something of the delicacy of a haiku. Gone is the grand sweep of “A Suitable Boy” — Seth’s new book is an intimate and internalized story of love and music.
Michael Holme, the high-strung narrator, is a violinist in a London string quartet. He is in love with a ghost: It has been years since he has seen Julia McNicholl, a pianist with whom he fell in love while studying in Vienna. Then one day he sees her again, on a bus in London. She is married now, but their passion (for each other, and for each other’s music) soon rekindles. Part of Seth’s achievement lies in his weaving these dual passions into a complex and multifaceted relationship. There are many emotional twists and turns (which I won’t ruin by giving away), and at its best the book is a gripping and profound meditation on love, music and the irrevocability of time (“the swift ellipses of the earth,” in Seth’s masterful formulation). Narrated in the present tense, in an insistent first person, this meditation is intensely personal; unlike anything Seth has previously written, the novel is distinguished by remarkable psychological portraiture.
The portraits, though, are not uniformly convincing. In the early pages and toward the end, the narrative sometimes falters on the very qualities that elsewhere distinguish it. The poetic language can seem oddly archaic (“What hath closed Helen’s eyes?” Michael soliloquizes in one instance), and the intensity can descend into generic — even maudlin — expressions of romantic anguish. “My life had shelved towards desolation,” Michael whines near the end of the book; “If I didn’t love you, things would be quite a bit simpler,” Julia says earlier.
But these are just the perils of writing about art and love. “Making music and making love — it’s a bit too easy an equation,” Julia says at one point. It is certainly true that Seth has undertaken no mean task in trying to distill something original from a subject that is almost by definition generic and sentimental. “I’d be bored unless I wrote a book that in some sense was a challenge,” he recently told an interviewer. It is to his great credit that despite the occasional lapses, he answers the challenge with a convincing and often beautiful story of passion.
