Tag Archives: Thrity Umrigar

End of Year List 4: Books

Posted on 31 Dec 2023 | 2 comments

From the Emerging Artist, in her own words (links to the LibraryThing pages or, at her request, to my blog post when there is one):

Non fiction

Claire O’Rourke, Together We Can (Allen & Unwin 2022)
I read this after hearing Claire talk on a Sydney Writers’ Festival panel on how to have hope in relation to climate change. It’s a good read, mixing specific examples of everyday Australians tackling what’s happening with broader theory on how to bring about change. It does fulfil its title, giving a real sense that “together we can”.

Debra Dank, We Come With This Place (Echo Publishing 2022)
We watched this book win four awards and heard Deborah Dank’s speech at NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023. We immediately went out to buy it. The writing is beautiful, a slow evocation of country and its connection to the author, while filled with story. I think it’s the must read of the year.

Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, a personal history of Ireland since 1958 (Head of Zeus 2021)
Hearing Fintan on the ABC’s Conversations, I immediately placed an order and waited patiently for four months for it to arrive. I’m glad I did. It’s written in short chapters in chronological order, but often picking up themes from chapter to chapter. It’s funny while documenting the appalling state of Ireland from 1958 through personal history, statistics and other sources. The incredible poverty (no running water in homes or sewage, no education for 80% of the population past primary school) made worse by the stranglehold of the Church and corruption in keeping poverty in place and the changes brought about by the impact of globalised capitalism all come alive in riveting storytelling.

Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Scribe 2022)
A very readable history of post WWII Australian policies in relation to First Nations people where the impact of the policies on Aboriginal people in a specific area – Tennant Creek – are made clear. It tells how the policies of assimilation and later self determination came about and how far-reaching their effects have been. It would have been good for all those voting no to have been made to read this as a requirement for having a say.

Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (Penguin 2023)
So much has been written about this book already I don’t need to give a summary. I found it gripping. 

Fiction
I read 62 books this year, from quick comfort ‘junk’ reads to harder literary tomes. I take a photo of each book to prompt memory, and going through them all, it’s clear I have had an excellent selection to choose five favourites from. I’ve ended up deciding by level of enjoyment, not on some literary merit criteria.

Hilde Hinton, A Solitary Walk on the Moon (Hachette AUstralia 2022)
A totally enjoyable read while disquieting in its simplicity. This is a second novel by an Australian author who seems to slipped under the radar. I found it in my local library. 

Annie Ernaux, The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions 2018)
This was also an entrancing read, covering a similar time period to my own life. It conjures up the similarities and immense differences between growing up in middle class France and Australia.

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)
Another library chance find. I loved the three strong old women protagonists, the exploration of caste and how this is/isn’t changing in modern India.

Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (University of Queensland Press 2018)
This was gripping rather than straight out enjoyable, with a sense of what was to come on every page. I loved the imagined world of life at the point where the strangers are staying and growing in number, while keeping your own way of life intact.

Richard Russo, Somebody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2023)
Jonathan hasn’t yet been lured into the wonderful world that Richard Russo writes about, but I expect that to change soon. This is the latest in a series that includes Everybody’s Fool and Nobody’s Fool, all set in small town east coast USA. The books follow a number of interconnected characters over a few generations recording the process of change as late capitalism, racism and gender are played out in the town of Bath. He writes with affectionate humour about all of his characters. We see their frailties and appalling behaviour (between white and black, men and women, different generations) but in a number of cases we see how their connections with each other bring a shift in perspective. I love them. 

From me

I read 83 books (counting journals but not children’s books). I finished my slow read of Middlemarch and read St Augustine’s Confessions, a little each morning, but didn’t start another slow read in September because I was doing the Kelly Writers’ House course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPo), which was great fun and probably taught me a lot.

I read:

  • 21 books of poetry
  • 26 novels
  • 4 comics
  • books in translation from Chinese (2), Spanish (3), French (2), Danish (1 or 3, depending on how you count), Russian (1) and Latin (1), and bilingual books containing Greek (1) and Maori (1)
  • counting editors and comics artists, 44 books by women, 39 by men
  • 12 books by First Nations writers, and
  • 15 books by other writers who don’t belong to the White global minority.

Biggest serendipity: Four books spoke powerfully to each other and to me in the wake of the referendum on the Voice: Debra Dank’s We Come with This Place, Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story and David Marr’s Killing for Country (no blog post yet). Unlike Voice and Treaty, the third proposal from the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart – Truth – doesn’t have to wait for government action. These books, and so many others with them, are moving that project forward brilliantly and unsettlingly.

The most fun was probably two novels about poetry, which also spoke to each other: Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra and The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.

Most interesting new discovery of someone who has been writing for decades: 2022 Nobel Prize laureate Annie Ernaux. I read Les années and Mémoire de fille, both of which mine her life story in ways that make most memoirs seem dull. Though I read them in translation, it seems right to name them in French.

Most imaginatively huge was Alexis Wright’s novel Praiseworthy, which incidentally is set in some of the same localities as Killing for Country.

Most memorable poetry: Sarah Holland-Batt’s Jaguar, with Ken Bolton’s Starting at Basheer’s (no blog post yet) a close second, the first for its precise, compassionate treatment of the poet’s father’s final illness, the latter because it filled me with joy about the everyday.

Happy New Year to all. May 2024 see the rejection of authoritarianism in elections and an end to mass killings everywhere. And may fossil fuels at last be left in the ground. Failing that, may we all keep our hearts open and our minds engaged.

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Thrity Umrigar’s Space Between Us

Posted on 31 Oct 2023 | 7 comments

Thrity Umrigar, The Space Between Us (©2005, Harper Perennial 2007)

Bhima is a domestic servant in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she calls it. She has been with the same Parsi family for decades. She can’t sit on the family’s furniture, and physical contact is avoided, but she and the woman of the house – Sera, whom Bhima cannot think of without the respectful suffix ‘-bai’ – have formed close bonds. Bhima is the only person in whom Sera has been able to confide about her husband’s violence, and Sera has paid for the education of Bhima’s granddaughter, Maya.

When the novel opens, Bhima is living with teenage Maya in a hut in the slums. We gradually learn that Maya’s parents died of AIDS when she was seven years old, that Bhima’s husband left her decades ago in tragic circumstances, that Sera’s husband has recently died. In the present, Sera’s daughter is pregnant and her relationship with her charming husband is a bright spot in everyone’s lives. To Bhima’s shame and fury, Maya is also pregnant, and the action in the novel’s present revolves around the father’s identity.

It’s Thrity Umrigar’s tribute to ‘the real Bhima’, who was a servant in her wealthy Parsi childhood home in Mumbai. But having established the bonds of affection and mutuality between the two families, the book turns, and becomes a brilliant study of the way relationships can be close and strong but in the end tragically vulnerable to social norms and structures.

I read this book after The Secrets Between Us, a sequel published 13 years later. This isn’t something I’d recommend. On the one hand it was interesting to see passing mention of Parvati, a major character in the second book, to have the stories of Bhima’s husband and daughter dramatically realised, and to come to a fuller understanding of the ending of the second novel. But the major thunderclap reveal of the identity of the man who got Maya pregnant comes as no surprise, and it was odd to know better than all the characters when there was very little foreshadowing.

A strong point in both books is the way they enact the fine detail of changing culture. Sera, like Thrity Umrigar, is Parsi, and the book’s version of traditional Parsi culture probably didn’t win it any friends among older Parsis. In one of the book’s many flashbacks, soon after Sera marries, she and her new husband move in with his parents, and what follows is a classic mother-in-law nightmare. Banu Dubash, the mother-in-law, insists on traditional Parsi practices, specifically those built around the idea that a woman is impure when he has her periods. Reluctantly, Sera accepts that she must eat meals in her room until her periods are over. Although she is Parsi herself, she has no idea of the extent of her assumed impurity, and walks through the room where Banu is praying, provoking a deafening shriek and a torrent of abuse. Freddy, Sera’s kindly father-in-law, comes running in from the dining room. This is on page 76:

‘Oh, Freddy, thank God you are here,’ Banu said dramatically. ‘help me, darling, help me.’
Freddy looked distraught. ‘Banu, what is it, will you speak? Is it your heart?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Just that this whole house will have to be purified now. Sera walked across the room while I was praying and she is having her monthly cycle, you see. Still, without any consideration, she interfered with my prayers.’
Sera blushed. Before she could speak, Freddy raised his voice. ‘You and your superstitious vhems and dhakharas. Crazy woman, you are. Harassing this poor child, scaring her for no good reason.’ He grew even more angry. ‘And worst of all, you’ve ruined my enjoyment of my music. A new Mozart record I’d just bought, and now your hysterical faras has made me miss the best part.’ He flung a sympathetic look at Sera and then stomped out of the room.
Banu narrowed her eyes and flashed Sera a look that made her heart stop. ‘See what you’ve done, getting my Freddy all upset?’ she said, careful to lower her voice so that it didn’t carry into the next room. ‘Is that why you entered my house, to create friction between my husband and me?’
Sera felt dizzy, as if she had drunk four beers one after the other. She took a step toward Banu and reached out to touch her hand. ‘Banu mamma, I don’t know what happened–’
‘She touched me,’ Banu screamed. ‘Deliberately, on purpose, she touched me with her impure hands. ‘Oh, God, what kind of daakan has entered my house, to make me miserable in my old age?’
This time, Gulab, the Dubashes’ servant, came into the living room. She took one look at the situation and pushed Sera toward her bedroom. ‘Baby, you go in your room for a while,’ she said authoritatively. ‘Go on, I will calm Mummy down.’

I love the way the non-English words are given without italics or explanation. I couldn’t find ‘vhem’, ‘dhakara’ or ‘faras’ with a quick web search, and I’m happy to have them be untranslatable – or rather to be left to make my own rough translations: ‘panics’, ‘idiocies’ and ‘ruckus’, perhaps? And I love the way that each of the four people in this scene are in a different relationship to traditional religious practice. The pragmatic Gulab is probably, like Bhima, Hindu. Freddy is European in his musical tastes. Sera is part of the modern world and completely unprepared for Banu’s fanatical attachment to – in her understanding – antiquated practices. But mostly what I love is the vividly realised drama of the moment, the brilliant use of dialogue.

I came across these books thanks to the Emerging Artist’s practice of plucking books with non-Anglo author names from the shelves of our local library. It’s a life-enriching practice

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Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These

Posted on 27 Oct 2023 | 6 comments

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Faber & Faber 2021)

I first became aware of Claire Keegan through The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), an Irish-language film based on her short story ‘Foster’. I saw the film at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival, and was blown away by its portrayal of a small girl’s escape from a terrible situation. The final moment, which I won’t describe because of spoilerphobia except to say that a single, ambiguous word is spoken, is one of the most powerfully moving I’ve seen. The acting (especially Catherine Clinch as the girl), the cinematography (Kate McCullough), the direction (Colm Bairéad) and the script (by Colm Bairéad, closely following Claire Keegan’s prose) are all brilliant. I still haven’t read ‘Foster’ but I was delighted to be given Small Things Like These on Father’s Day.

It’s a tiny book – just 117 pages. It’s set in a small Irish village. Its action takes place over a few days in late December in the time not so long ago when the Catholic Church dominated the lives of most Irish people. Bill Furlong, the coal and timber merchant, is being run off his feet in the pre-Christmas rush. The son of an unmarried woman, he and his mother were able to thrive in spite of the stigma thanks to the patronage of a wealthy Protestant woman – a situation that has uncanny echoes in the Thrity Umrigar books The Space Between Us (which I’m currently reading) and The Secrets Between Us (my blog post here). He is devoted to his wife and five daughters.

A shadow is cast over this benign scene by two pages that precede the beginning of the text proper. First there is the dedication: ‘to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries’. Then, on a page to itself, there is an excerpt from The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 1916, which declares that the republic resolves, among other things, to cherish ‘all of the children of the nation equally’. Having a rough knowledge of the Magdalen laundries (Wikipedia entry here if you need to look it up), I was prepared for a little book of horrors.

Claire Keegan is a finer writer than that. There is horror, but not the jump-scare, demon-rising-from-the-grave kind, or even the Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life kind. Just outside the village there’s a ‘training school’ for girls of low character and an associated laundry, which ‘had a good reputation’. When Bill delivers a load of coal there on Christmas Eve, he comes upon a young woman who is obviously being abused, and he isn’t reassured by the nuns’ attempts to, well, gaslight him. It’s a small village, and the whispers say that no one can challenge the Church. Aware that his own mother could have found herself in the young woman’s situation, Bill faces a dilemma.

So the book hinges on a small chance encounter, a small crisis of conscience for an ordinary man, who many would say is leading a small life. The title can be read as the beginning of a sentence: Small things like these … pose big moral challenges / … can change the way you see the world / … can disrupt oppressive institutions / …

This blog generally looks at page 76. I might have preferred to talk about the page when Bill sits down to a cup of tea with the Mother Superior, or one of the pages where the abused girl talks to him. But page 76, it turns out, illustrates beautifully the way Claire Keegan tells her story.

It occurs at about the three-quarter point. We have been told very little of what’s happening in Bill’s mind. He doesn’t talk about what he has seen. Perhaps he can’t – he’s a working class Irishman of his era. But his wife, Eileen, can tell he’s ‘out of sorts’. The family go to Mass on Christmas morning. Bill stays back near the door when Eileen and their daughters walk down the aisle and slide into a pew, ‘as they’d been taught’. We’re not told if Bill usually stays by the door, or if this is a sign of new alienation. What follows could easily be a simple description of Irish villagers arriving for Mass in a past era (not all that dissimilar to Mass in the North Queensland town where I was a child in the 1950s):

Some women with headscarves were saying the rosary under their breath, their thumbs worrying through the beads. Members of big farming families and business people passed by in wool and tweed, wafts of soap and perfume, striding up to the front and letting down the hinges of the kneelers. Older men slipped in, taking their caps off and making the sign of the cross, deftly, with a finger. A young, freshly married man walked red-faced to sit with his new wife in the middle of the chapel. Gossipers stayed down on the edge of the aisle to get a good gawk, watching for a new jacket or haircut, a limp, anything out of the ordinary. When Doherty the vet passed by with his arm in a sling, there was some elbowing and whispers then more when the postmistress who’d had the triplets passed by wearing a green, velvet hat. Small children were given keys to play with, to amuse themselves, and soothers. A baby was taken out, sobbing in heaves, struggling to get loose from his mother’s hold.

This may feel like an exercise in nostalgia. But it’s not like, for example, the moment in Robert Dessaix’s Arabesques where he ‘realises’ that the lives of simple Portuguese women at Mass ‘had been redeemed, not by understanding, not by seeing Truth face to Face, but by being gathered up into the Church’ (my blog post here). Neither Bill Furlong not Claire Keegan, observing this gathering, projects visions of redemption onto it. This is an insider’s view. We are told people’s names. We can guess why the freshly-married man is red-faced, we recognise that different people make the sign of the cross differently (I love ‘deftly, with a finger’), there are class differences, children and babies need to be dealt with. It’s a picture of a community coming together that anyone of a certain age with an Irish-influenced Catholic childhood will recognise.

But it’s a critical insider’s view. Bill has a fresh distance because of his moral dilemma, Claire and the reader have perspective created by the seismic shifts in Irish culture since the time of the novel. This is a picture of a surveillance state, benign enough you’d think, but any small divergence from the normal – a sling, a new hat – is noted. It’s characteristic of Keegan’s writing that none of the divergences noted by the gossipers has any moral weight attached to it – we’re left to imagine for ourselves how that would go. We haven’t been told in so many words (this isn’t a Hollywood movie, after all) that Bill is mulling over what to do or not do, but as he looks over this scene, we feel with him the coercive pressure to conform, to accept the authority of the Church, not to rock the boat. The baby, ‘sobbing in heaves’, has to be removed – his mother’s hold is unescapable. Small things like these accumulate so that we understand the pressure Bill faces.

The whole book is a marvel.

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Thrity Umrigar’s Secrets Between Us and the Book Club

Posted on 24 Oct 2023 | 8 comments

For years, I’ve been part of a Book Club where no one can spend more than 30 seconds talking about any book. We would eat, return books borrowed at previous meetings, each offer three books which we describe and score out of 10, then – in an order determined by a card draw – borrow up to three books each.

Over time, as most of the Club’s six members made the move to electronic books, the original idea of lending books we had enjoyed got muddied. We struggled on, meeting less frequently, two thirds of us buying books specifically so as to offer them at the Book Club.

At last we bit the bullet and agreed to try all reading the same book and discussing it. Our first title is:

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us (HarperCollins 2018)

Thrity Umrigar emigrated from India to the USA when she was 21 years old. Since then, among other things, she has written a number of novels in English. The Secrets Between Us revisits characters from her second novel, The Space Between Us, which was published 12 years earlier, in 2006. I’m writing this without having read more than a couple of pages of the earlier novel (I managed to get hold of a copy, but it arrived too late for the meeting). Though the second novel makes frequent reference to events from the first, I didn’t feel I was missing anything.

Before the meeting: Other demands on my time mean that this has to be brief.

It’s a terrific novel set mainly in the slums of Mumbai, featuring a brilliant gallery of women characters. It begins with Bhima, who is living with her granddaughter in a hovel in the slums. For many years she was employed in a Parsi household, virtually a member of the family, but expelled when she, correctly and necessarily, accused one of the family members of wrongdoing. She has been abandoned by her husband, and her daughter and son-in-law have died of AIDS. She makes a precarious living and enables her granddaughter to attend college by finding domestic work with a number of wealthy women.

In the course of the novel, Bhima’s life is transformed by two unlikely friendships. One is with Parvati, a woman who is even poorer than she is, who was sold into prostitution as a girl but now, as an old woman, is hideously disfigured by a growth under her chin and survives by buying and selling half a dozen shrivelled heads of cauliflower each day and sleeping on a mat outside a nephew’s apartment door, for which she pays rent. The other is with Chitra, a young Australian woman, the lover of one of Bhima’s employers, who was born in India but cheerfully disregards the rigid requirements class, caste and heteronormativity.

At the risk of reducing the book to a single paragraph, the significance of the title is spelled out in an exchange between Bhima and Pavarti. Bhima was initially shocked when she realised that Chitra and her lover aren’t just good friends, but as she comes to know them and appreciate Chitra’s generosity of spirit, she is then shocked when neighbours call them ‘a very bad name’. Here’s a quote from the conversation that happens after Bhima learns about Parvati’s background as a sexual slave, and meets her former employer who tells her how she suffers from lying about Bhima’s revelations. The lump that’s mentioned is the unsightly growth under Parvati’s chin:

‘Why do we aIl walk around like this, hiding from one another?’
Parvati’s thumb circles the lump in a fast motion as she ponders the question. ‘It isn’t the words we speak that make us who we are. Or even the deeds we do. It is the secrets buried in our hearts.’ She looks sharply at Bhima. ‘People think that the ocean is made up of waves and things that float on top. But they forget – the ocean is also what lies at the bottom, all the broken things stuck in the sand. That, too, is the ocean.’

(page 243)

The book’s story could be seen as a process of bringing those broken things to the light, and at least sometimes making them whole again.

After the meeting: We were a bit tentative about the Book Club’s new MO. We ate a pleasant dinner first, with barely a mention of the book until we moved to comfortable chairs. Conversation started out a little stiffly. Someone actually read out the questions for book groups at the back of her e-book, but we realised we absolutely didn’t want to go down that route.

The main question that got tossed around was how seriously to take the pair of books. The second book (which is the one I’ve read) has some extremely improbable benign elements, including – spoiler alert – a happy ending which may be the set-up for a third book, or not. The relative ease with which characters transcend the rigid barriers of class and custom, one person felt strongly, moves the book into the genre of fantasy, or perhaps mark it as prettified for the US mass market.

Not everyone agreed. Sure, things happen that are extremely unlikely, but they are within the realms of possibility, and the good fortune of the main characters allows the situation from which they (or at least some of them) escape to be seen more clearly by contrast. There’s no pretence, for example, that Lesbians are universally embraced by Hindu society, or that there is any kind of safety net for the poor.

Whether it’s an airport novel or a serious work of art, we all enjoyed it. All except me had read and enjoyed both books. I’m now well under way with the first one, and it’s a curious experience reading some of the harsh judgements expressed in its opening scenes, knowing that they’re based on wrong assumptions.

We agreed to carry on as a Book Discussion Club.

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