|
|
If conflict is what drives a novel, Gautam Malkani’s debut, Londonstani, has plenty of fuel. Throw in a narrator who tells the story with perception and humor in an argot comprised of English, Punjabi and urban slang and you’re in for an intriguing ride, even if the payoff might leave you skeptical.
Londonstani addresses a variety of internal, generational, racial, religious and societal conflict. The story is told entirely from the viewpoint of Jas, who is in his late teens. He lives in the Hounslow district of London, an area bordering Heathrow Airport with a significant immigrant population, many from India and South Asia. They call themselves “desis,” a term stemming from the Indian diaspora. But there aren’t just desis. Jas and his cohorts watch out for their blud (blood/kin), bredren (brother), bruv (brother) and bhanjis (sisters). They scorn the goras (whites), coconuts (someone with brown skin who acts like they’re white), pendhus (fools) and spods (boring inferiors).
Jas’ language is such an admixture that Malkani provides a glossary. While somewhat cumbersome at first, the reader eventually picks up on the flow of the jargon, profanity and patter. And it is in this flow, most often when Jas is in a stream of consciousness, that we find the flashes of humor and insight that expose and explore the conflicts.
At heart, Jas is a perceptive and intelligent nerd. Yet he has quelched those attributes in a successful effort to join a small gang of “rudeboys,” the desi version of gangstas who pride themselves on their style and fashion. From the standpoint of his favorite teacher and parents — and perhaps himself at times — Jas is throwing away his talents and opportunities to immerse himself in this urban youth culture.
His rudeboy group is led by Hardjit, a Sikh body builder who loves to fight. The other two members are Armit, a Hindu nationalist, and Ravi, who brags about his sexual exploits, seemingly more imagined than real. While subordinate to Hardjit they clearly rank higher than Jas. Yet as tough and independent as they wish to appear, all four still live at home. The classy BMW they ride around in is owned by Ravi’s mom. They are part of “the informal economy,” reprogramming stolen mobile phones to earn some money here and there.
The rudeboys themselves are an amalgamation of conflicting cultural notions. Their independence leads them to distance themselves from some of their parents’ traditions. This inevitably leads to what Jas calls “complicated family-related shit.” At the same time, they are proud of their heritage and their “desiness.” One of the sad historical legacies they tend to embrace is detest for their Muslim counterparts. Thus, when Hardjit fights it is to stomp a gora for allegedly referring to them as “Pakis” and in a pre-arranged battle with his counterpart in a Muslim rudeboy group.
The latter scene leads an old school teacher to attempt to rescue Hardjit’s group, or at least Jas. He hooks the four up with Sanjay, a former desi student who studied economics at Cambridge. Sanjay introduces the group to “Bling Bling economics,” takes Jas in particular under his wing and the boys are soon living large as they them move from being menial cogs in the stolen phone trade to relatively significant players.
Sanjay also helps Jas achieve one of his dreams, dating Samira, the fittest (best looking) Muslim girl around. Jas has to hide that relationship from his friends, who believe it wrong to date a Muslim. Samira’s brothers take a similar view of Muslim girls going out with non-Muslims. The reelationship eventually becomes fraught with trouble for Jas, his friends and their burgeoning mobile phone enterprise.
Malkani adeptly combines the threads of each of these elemental struggles into a generally workable whole. Readers will undoubtedly have differeing opinions on a surprising plot twist at the end. Some may think it bolsters the novel’s impact. Others will see it as not much more than a highly improbable contrivance. I lean toward the former but freely admit there’s merit in the latter. Yet even if the end might ring hollow, it does not utterly invalidate Jas’ unique voice and perspective on life and conflict in a thoroughly multicultural environment.
Complicated family-related shit: the chemists should give it its own fuckin aisle.
Gautam Malkani, Londonstani
While looking at various blog posts via my RSS newsreader, I stumbled across a compilation of book-related statistics and facts at ParaPublishing. Although some are a bit dated, here’s several that caught my eye:
- In 1947, there were 357 publishers, that increased to 12,000 in 1980, to nearly 53,000 in 1984 and an estimated 73,000 in 2003.
- According to the Publishers Marketing Association, 78% of the book titles published came from small/self-publishers but Publishers Weekly reports that in 2002 five large New York publishers accounted for 45% of sales, with US sales of $4.1 billion.
- A literary agency reports that the first print run for a mid-list book by a larger publisher is 10-15,000 books and the publisher must sell 10,000 copies to break even.
- The last statistic is interesting when compared to the Authors Guild reporting that a successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies and a successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
- A study group reported that 59% of customers who enter a bookstore plan to purchase a specific book and 40% make impulse purchases.
- The same study showed that 24.6% of book sales were by large chain stores, 17.7% via book clubs, 15.2% by smaller chains and independents and 5.4% over the internet. (The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2003, though, that online bookstores sold 10% of books in 2002.)
- Membership in the American Booksellers Association, an organization for independently-owned bookstores, dropped 30% from 2000 to 2002.
- Libraries lose 20% of their books each year.
- According to Publishers Weekly, women buy 68% of all books. They are more likely to shop in discount stores and supermarkets than men, who are most likely to shop in chain stores.
- A survey by the Jenkins Group provided some of the most shocking statistics:
- One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
- 42% of college graduates never read another book.
- 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
- 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
- 57% of new books are not read to completion. (Similarly, the American Booksellers Association reports that most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased).
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
G.C. Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
I have three or four book reviews I should/need to write and either lack the motivation to finish (or even start) or am simply in procrastination mode. Thus, it seems an appropriate time for a collection of miscellany:
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell
In reprinting Beyond Armageddon, a 1985 anthology of stories focusing on nuclear holocaust, Bison Books validates an enigma. Undoubtedly, things were different 20 years ago. But equally true is the diametric adage that the more things change the more they remain the same.
Although the 21 stories compiled by Hugo Award-winning author Walter M. Miller Jr. and master anthologist Martin H. Greenberg cover decades of writing, they also reflect the world at the time Beyond Armageddon was originally released. Ronald Reagan was sworn in for a second term and Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership in the Soviet Union. Only two years had passed since Reagan, discussing proposals for a nuclear weapons freeze, called the U.S.S.R. “an evil empire.” The world was on its way to record number of nuclear weapons and the doomsday clock was almost the closest it has ever been to a nuclear midnight.
Today, the number of nuclear weapons has diminished and the Cold War has ended. But in the same time we have seen the disintegration of controls over the Soviet stockpile, the efforts of North Korea and Iran to obtain such weapons, Pakistan joining its neighbor and foe India in the nuclear club and the increased threat of terrorism. As a result, while the hands of the nuclear clock have retreated, they today are they closest to midnight in more than a decade. Sadly, Beyond Armageddon is not an interesting historical artifact. It remains far too relevant today.
The release of this edition is part of a continuing effort by Bison, a paperback imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, to reprint classic books in a variety of genres. Thus, with the exception of Greenberg’s new postscript to Miller’s original introduction, the reprint seeks to remain true to the original, even matching the pagination. Among science fiction aficionados, Miller’s introductions to the anthology and each story are themselves notable.
Miller won the 1961 Hugo Award for best novel for A Canticle for Leibowitz. First published in 1959, Canticle is a classic post-apocalyptic novel, one in which a Catholic abbey struggles to preserve bits and pieces of pre-war knowledge it does not understand. Not only was that Miller’s only novel (although a sequel Miller started was completed by another writer and published posthumously), it was his last original fiction. Thus, his introductions here may be the last in an SF work by Miller, who committed suicide in 1996. Yet perhaps reflective of Miller’s personal struggles, the basic introduction tends to be a rambling politically-oriented discourse. He, in fact, even suggests nuclear proliferation may ultimately be the key to nuclear disarmament. His introductions to individual stories serve more as transition pieces, providing limited details about the timeframe in which the stories appeared, something the reader might find useful in analyzing the works.
Still, he and Greenberg undoubtedly compiled an eclectic collection. Few of the stories talk about the act or war giving rise to the destruction of society. Instead, the focus is on “life after” and human efforts to cope with it. As Miller says in the introduction, the topic here is what he calls the “Megawar,” which need not necessarily be nuclear cataclysms.
One of the stories was actually published eight years before the first atomic bomb test. Stephen Vincent Benet‘s “By the Waters of Babylon” originally appeared in 1937 but fits perfectly in the anthology. Said to be a reaction to the bombing of Guernica, it is an exploration of life years after “the Great Burning and the Destruction” that occurred when there was “fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned.” That is just one example of how Greenberg and Miller plumb the genre and in their effort to explore a variety of explicit and implicit themes.
Some stories, such as Ward Moore’s “Lot” and Carol Emshwiller’s “Day at the Beach,” look at family. The former is patterned on the Old Testament story of Lot’s wife while the latter is a family trying to have what previously would have been a normal day at the beach. The best exploration of efforts to find post-cataclysm normality, though, may be Robert Sheckley’s “The Store of the Worlds,” which is based on priniciples of quantum physics, not atomic physics. Another aspect of family — the genetic effect of nuclear war — is explored in several stories, including Edward Bryant’s “Jody After the War” and Poul Anderson’s “Tomorrow’s Children.”
Music also occasionally appears as a core element. Norman Spinrad’s Nebula Award-nominated “The Big Flash” makes rock music a prelude to nuclear devastation while in Michael Swanwick’s “The Feast of Saint Janis,” also Nebula-nominated, Janis Joplin’s music becomes a centerpiece of post-holocaust society. Finally, music is an effort at communication in Edgar Pangborn’s “The Master of Babylon.”
Some stories fans would consider classics also are included, such as Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (in which an automated house has outlived its human occupants) and Arthur C. Clarke’s “If I Forget Thee O Earth” (pondering the total destruction of the human population of Earth). Yet only one of the collection’s stories has received one of SF’s most notable awards. Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog,” a story selected to explore a theme predicated on ancient myths of the underworld, won the Nebula for best novellete in 1970.
But Beyond Armageddon wasn’t intended to assemble award winners and classics. Instead, as Miller says in the introduction, “This is a book about people.” Yet it is unfortunate that works about people facing the end of civilization and history via man’s own hand have lasting relevancy.
But when human extinction (as a result of a decision) is assigned a probability, however small, and a finite negative value, however large, and added to a list of other such products to obtain the expectation for a given political or military decision, the statistician and his employer should be detected, apprehended, and led away in straitjackets to the nearest lobotomy ward.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., Introduction to Beyond Armageddon
As you’ve likely heard, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled 5-3 (Chief Justice Roberts not participating) that the military tribunals Bush planned to use to try Guantanamo Bay detainees violate federal law and the Geneva conventions. The decision in the case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was more than 175 pages with the concurring and dissenting opinions. Not surprisingly, Justices Thomas and Scalia (joined by new Justice Alito) would have found the tribunals legal.
Lyle Denniston, who has reported on the Supreme Court for more than four decades, may have spotted the biggest news in the decision. In a post at SCOTUSblog, Denniston notes the potential significance of the Court’s determination that the Geneva conventions were violated. In light of other provisions in those conventions, Denniston says,
This almost certainly means that the CIA’s interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administration has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).
While the majority and minority opinions are extensive and examine myriad legal issues, I think Justice Stevens, who wrote the main opinion, summarized it best in that opinion’s penultimate paragraph:
We have assumed, as we must, that the allegations made in the Government’?s charge against Hamdan are true. We have assumed, moreover, the truth of the message implicit in that charge – ?viz., that Hamdan is a dangerous individual whose beliefs, if acted upon, would cause great harm and even death to innocent civilians, and who would act upon those beliefs if given the opportunity. It bears emphasizing that Hamdan does not challenge, and we do not today address, the Government’?s power to detain him for the duration of active hostilities in order to prevent such harm. But in undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction
(Emphasis added).
Given the administration’s repeated claims that it is trying to spread democracy and the fact democracy must be founded upon the rule of law, our government must be held to the same standard.
The Court’?s conclusion ultimately rests upon a single ground: Congress has not issued the Executive a “blank check.”
Justice Stephen Bryer, concurring opinion, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld
|
Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
|
