For the Boston Review, I write on novels by Neel Mukherjee and V.S. Naipaul and one odd winter in New Delhi that left me unhoused in my own skin. I consider whether, “in the curved space-time of global history, migration can crack open wormholes to freedom from old rigidities and entitlements,” including the barriers of gender, class and caste.
The New York Times Book Review
MUSIC OF THE GHOSTS
By Vaddey Ratner
324 pp. Touchstone. $26.
Vaddey Ratner calls each of the three parts of her tenaciously melodic second novel a movement. And indeed this story of an orphaned Cambodian refugee’s return to her homeland does have a symphony’s elevating effect on emotion. Ratner stirs feeling — sorrow, sympathy, pleasure — through language so ethereal in the face of dislocation and loss that its beauty can only be described as stubborn.
Continue reading in the NYTBR.
With support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, I produced a package of stories on the long-lasting effects of U.S. Cold War intervention on politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the northeastern shoulder of South America.
I review Rafia Zakaria’s memoir in Ms. Magazine’s Winter 2015 issue: “The Upstairs Wife revises an old conceit—at least as old as Plato—in telling the story of a nation-state: justice (or lack thereof) in the philosopher’s ideal Republic is reflected in the souls of its individual citizens. A nearer example is Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children; its protagonist is born at the precise moment that India gains independence from Britain, and the man’s life mirrors his country’s life in magical ways, his body disintegrating as the body politic cracks. Zakaria almost mimics Rushdie’s device; she describes her father’s birth in Bombay a month before the creation of India and Pakistan. Fifteen years after the nations’ twin genesis, her kin sail from one to the other, and their fates help tell “an intimate history” of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Ultimately, however, it is not the citizen who mirrors state in this family memoir. It is marriage.”
A review essay for the July 7-14, 2014 issue of The Nation: The way women navigated the boundary between the home and the world was a question with great resonance and imaginative significance for India’s anti-colonial struggle during the first half of the twentieth century. (The title that Rabindranath Tagore gave his 1916 novel about a progressive landowner who nudges his reluctant wife out of purdah, only to be cuckolded, was The Home and the World—Ghare Baire in Bengali.) As India wrestles with what is frequently cast by parties across the political spectrum as a new foreign onslaught, through the influence of global capital and Western culture, the free movement of women between the private and public spheres continues to be central to the nation’s reckoning with itself. Does the growing visibility of women in public explain the increased sexual violence against them? Or, to the contrary, does their relative ongoing invisibility continue to make them vulnerable? Two and a half decades ago, just as India was opening itself up to free-market capitalism, Sen coined the phrase “missing women” to describe the acute gender imbalance rooted in bias against females that existed across much of Asia. But the term can be applied as much to the women missing from India’s streets as to those missing from its population.
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