Love in the time of AI

 Kazuo Ishiguro (2021), Klara and the Sun, Faber, London, pp.307

It is a brand-new year and I am beginning with one of my favorite writers of all time – the elegant and masterful Kazuo Ishiguro. The blurb of his most recent book Klara and the Sun spoke about robots and my inner voice screamed ‘please don’t go to the other side’. Ishiguro is one of the four authors (others being Alice Munro, Julian Barnes and Penelope Fitzgerald) that I never want to deviate from the path they tread. The day they go uncharacteristic will be the beginning of the end for me. In a world where most things are so irreversibly mutating, I have a terrible propensity for stability and consistency. These authors remain my anchor points for the world as I know it.

Dreading the worst, I bravely began this beautiful story set some time in the future in which children are genetically modified and have robots with artificial intelligence for companions. I mused, ‘clearly, the worst has already happened’! But then, something emerged slowly from the ruins of this dystopian setting, something akin to what you felt when you were reading The Remains of the Day. A master at work on something delicate and undestroyed – the primal innocence we are born with. This is Klara’s reckoning in the human world and she blooms not as AI, but as a child, asking questions, always being curious, and heartbreakingly human. Before long, we are rooting for her as she navigates the politics and platitudes of the society in which she is planted in.

The most beautiful part of the book is the relationship Klara has with the sun. It is one of the oldest tropes of nourishment and life and it symbolizes something undying and irreplaceable in us. It is our capacity to love someone and act on that love. Klara’s love for the child she accompanies is more poignant in the milieu that it is set against, that of a withering human world. And what happens to this person as she unfolds human-like in an inhuman world forms the rest of the story.

It takes mastery to weave the old with the new, retaining something unexpected from both. Ishiguro weaves a rich tapestry not with grandiose strokes, but with fragile imperceptible ones that paint pathos, innocence and first learning, that of children awakening to love and loss with unfailing dexterity. By extracting the human essence out of humanity, he shows the most enduring part of us that are yet savable and worthy of saving.

If this is not a great way to begin this year, I don’t know what is. Here’s wishing you a beautiful year ahead with books!

 

 

 

12 women, 200 years

 

Bernardine Evaristo (2019), Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin books, pp.453

The book came to me as a gift, literally,

a discerning friend’s nod for my love of the literary.

I am glad this book and this author found me

they way they did,

when I was least expecting.

That’s when you are the most vulnerable

and completely open,

an attitude best suited to read

something so expansive as this novel,

the story and history of twelve women

through two centuries across many continents,

told in a compelling contemporary way.

 

Bernardine Evaristo,

writer, poet, playwright, professor,

the first black woman to win the Booker Prize

an accolade she shared with another great writer,

is a gifted story teller.

As you read through the novel

this aural quality pervades,

the prose is poetic and musical,

evocative and vivid.

So, you picture the protagonists and the places

and hear them speak and think,

walk through the gullies of your mind,

sashaying and shushing,

as they erupt into thoughts and doubts.

 

It is a tour de force of human history

in the last two centuries,

colonialism, slavery, racism, casteism,

sexism, queerphobia,

all roads taken

to be the human race we are today,

 explored within the microcosm

of individual lives,

specific plots and timelines.

 

And yet they interrupt each other,

invade and interact with one another

to give the map of a gnarly tree, the pedigree,

from which, these unlikely compatriots

hang like irreverent fruits.

They are ancestors and descendants,

peers and sisters,

exploring and bickering their way

through history and their stories.

 

Girl, Woman, Other has

the themes and temperaments

that Evaristo’s works tend to have,

 an evaluative perspective of received wisdom

from as many angles as possible,

and a lyrical quality to radical thoughts.

 

As winter buries us with an impossible longing

for a year that is fast slipping by,

this is the perfect companion

to soothe and comfort you,

enlighten and frighten you,

but above all give you so many opportunities

to live out the lives of others

however imaginary.

That’s what all good writers do.

 

Irish Love

 

Sally Rooney (2018), Normal People, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 266

This is the book you should take with you in summer to remember what it feels like to read a great love story. It is small town Ireland and two young people are in love as they move from high school through college and are just about to begin life. It is that time of life when it is perhaps the most awkward to write about love without sounding flippant or pedantic. It is difficult to speak of love that is so young and unsure, yet when done right it is the kind of quiet love that makes you yearn for good literature.

Sally Rooney does it right. Not just in the convincing way she portrays the protagonists, but also scooping up the sounds and smells of the small town, the flavor of its people, the tone and tenor of high school in the backwater stillness of the place, its intimacies and resentments. The book brings to life those who have adapted themselves for life in a quiet town that the world does not come to. It requires skill and an astute mindset to stay full of life and happy in any place, but more so in a quaint little space dancing to its own tune. The town is abuzz with news - rumours, love affairs, desertion, quiet suicide, seething anger and the whole melodrama that makes life. And amidst this are two people, vulnerable in their lack of self - consciousness, who manage to escape that world without meaning to, and stay connected with each other.

I admit it is difficult to write about it than read and enjoy it. Grab a copy and have a lovely summer! There is an adaptation streaming on Prime, but you are not going to, are you?

In Search of Love

Madhuri Vijay (2019), The Far Field, Fourth Estate, New Delhi, pp. 432

Madhuri Vijay is a debutante with a compelling story. Her novel ‘The Far Field’ won the JCB prize for literature in 2019. I got hold of the book with the beautiful cover art and wonderful story telling about identity and memory in contemporary India. This story of the mother-daughter developed first as short fiction in 2010 and was subsequently developed as a novel. Vijay’s voice is tender and distinct, and is an asset throughout the narrative.

‘The Far Field’ is the story of a young woman in India who drifts away in life until a powerful memory from childhood triggered by her mother’s death, leads her on a mission to understand her past. Her journey takes her to militant Kashmir in search of a familiar face only to get entangled in an irredeemable quest. The narrator-protagonist is unreliable and vulnerable, evoking alarm and sympathy in equal measure. The anti-hero telling a story of anti-climax is essentially the essence of the tale, although there are layers and depths to explore.

Echoes and Mirages

One device that Vijay uses masterfully is the ‘echo’. There is a constant reverberation between childhood and adulthood, Bangalore and Kashmir, mother and daughter, that gives us the feeling of shifting time, space and gaze. This is a great narrative device to show comparison, contrast and the manner in which arcs end and cycles come to pass. In many ways, the daughter avenges her mother’s death but the brooding, meandering valley and the story warns us of what is to come.

At another level, this is a story about the impossibility of redeeming the past and the relying on memory. What is gone is gone forever and to wade into incomplete stories is to rip apart its integrity. Memories can be mirages that lead nowhere but to further illusions. Perusing such illusions cannot but end in doom.

This is good fiction coming out of India asking the larger questions of political identities through the personal quest of love and loss. The description of bustling towns and the quiet valleys of Kashmir are evocative. The human and natural characters from the valley are portrayed with flair and compassion. The portrait of Kashmir through the silent mountain, the gurgling ravines, the vigilant cows and goats, the incessant weaving and the busy everydayness of life is on point. The light and shade, the people and the forces parallel each other in a dreadful deadlock.

As we celebrate women’s history month, a fresh voice asking us difficult but important questions is here with us.

A ghost-love story

George Saunders (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo, Bloomsbury

‘These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy broth, but we then named them and loved them, and, in this way brought them forth. And now must lose them.’

        roger bevins in Lincoln in the Bardo

This is the Man Booker winning experimental debut novel from George Saunders. The story opens in the United States of mid nineteenth century, with President Lincoln’s son Willie fighting for his life, while the country is gripped in civil war. Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery in a marble crypt. His mother descends into grief and madness. The President is bent on returning to his son as he visits the crypt and talks to him lovingly. This agonizing love, guilt and longing reaches his son across the veil of death.

The Bardo- which in Tibetan language means ‘that place between life and death’- is populated with a bevy of rich characters, all in a state of oblivion. People of all sorts have carved out a space for themselves in this netherworld, the high and the low, god fearing and nihilists, with their friendships and subterfuge. Into this world, little Willie descends, expecting his father to come and visit him again. The entry of the little boy creates a new sensation among the inhabitants of the lively Bardo and they unite to help Willie ‘pass over’. For this plot to succeed, they must have an unlikely ally- the President himself. How Willie is transported on through the unlikely alliance of his father and the Bardo, forms the rest of the story.

The central theme that runs through the story is that of love and loss, the deep human ache to retrace lost tracks and reclaim our pasts. Saunders shows us a way of moving on after a devastating loss, not by forgetting, but by letting go, accepting, freeing ourselves from the burden of care for the loved one. He attacks the very idea of loving by living, by showing, by acting- our love for those who are dead should be a different kind of love. It cannot find meaning in the repetitive acts of expression through words and deeds, for this creates a tomb of the past, a never-ending mourning. A graceful way of loving the dead is to not act or talk but to think, to ache and hold. It is not a love that hinges on sharing, sympathy and reciprocity. It is a silent one-sided love, not prone to the tempest of action, time or space. That is how love for someone who is absent looks like.

The deep contrast to Lincoln’s throbbing aching love is the cohort in the Bardo, ebullient, devoid of all memory and sense of being. They are literally a ghost of their previous Saunders uses the oldest trick in the book to make the imaginary world real- by turning metaphors into their heads. They are accustomed to a charade, a clinging on to the most mundane that defined them when they were alive. Willie’s arrival infuses a human-like feeling in them for the first time- passion, purpose and fellow feeling.  Eventually helping Willie to freedom helps the Bardo to free itself.

This unusually poignant novel works because of its audacity- the narrative style, the imagination at one level, and the philosophy that is conveyed through polyphony that testifies to love, loss and what it takes to heal and be free.

The Master of Spare Elegance

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, pp. 258

With the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature coming to Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, the turf of literary feud (since the award was given to Bob Dylan last year) has calmed down. Ishiguro, a literary polymath, has written seven novels in addition to screenplays, short fiction and lyrics. It is a great time to revisit one of his much-loved novels and the winner of the Man Booker Prize 1989, ‘The Remains of the Day’.

This novel is about the short journey that Stevens, the butler of the now decrepit Darlington Hall, takes across west countryside of England. Stevens has tirelessly worked for the distinguished family of Darlington Hall during the inter-war years, and the second world war. His old master is dead and in his place an American comes along, retaining Stevens as part of the ‘package of an old English house’. Stevens struggles to fit in the ‘new world’ of careless banter and informality. He feels a little lost, bereft of older ideals and notions of honour.

It is when Stevens is struggling with change, that an unexpected holiday comes. An opportunity to leave Darlington Hall for a few days gives him a chance to reflect on his life and work. He stumbles upon the truth about his lost love and his old master’s fall from esteem in the eyes of the world. It is a poignant journey of epiphany, but the realization of truth is by slow and painful degrees with the glacial chipping away at the fog of illusion that holds the protagonist intact.

Reflections on the Past

Stevens look at the past begins as a fairly straightforward narrative, with his neat, organized and sparse mind that never regrets. He believes that staunch loyalty to work and ‘dignity’ of conduct above mere competence, are what makes a butler truly ‘great’. He is looking back at himself at a time when the world has little use for his virtues and his place in the order of things stand precipitous. Happy and non-oblivious to the mechanization of the larger world of affairs that he stands by waiting every day, and the smaller microcosm of his own life, he evaluates and validates his life.

His contentment and pride are shattered by revelations that take place throughout his holidays. Often poignantly told to him directly by others who love him, he becomes aware of what he has lost. With a few pages to spare in the novel, we witness Stevens understanding his life for not just what it was, but also for what it could have been. He sees the trade-off, the point where there was a choice and how he missed it completely. And what he decides from there, is the rest of the story.

The theme of an unassuming protagonist and his journey towards truth is recurrent in Ishiguro’s works. In his other novel, ‘The Artist of the Floating World’, truth is stubbornly refused by the artist even as it stares at him. The acceptance of truth and the awareness of loss that comes with it, are done only when it is inevitable. Ishiguro takes his readers through these small inner worlds of people with great austerity and sympathy. The epiphany is not of the Joycean artist as a young man so that it reveals a world of possibilities ahead. It is the lives of individuals nearing the end of their lives, and the thick fog of possibilities that could have been is heart breaking. How Ishiguro’s protagonists negotiate these bargains forms the enduring philosophy of his works.

The American Imperative

Colson Whitehead (2016), The Underground Railroad, London: Fleet, pp. 306

‘In America, the quirk was that people were things.’

                                                  

If you are a thing, your value depended on your possibilities. After being appraised and reappraised in the scales of other men’s visions, you knew your value and your place in the order of things. To escape the confines of this hierarchy was to escape the principles of your existence. The Underground Railroad, winner of Pulitzer Prize Fiction 2017, is a daring novel that maps the journey of escape of a slave girl as she traverses the physical terrain and foundational myths of America.

Three generations of slave women- Ajarry, Mabel and Cora- are at the heart of the story. While grandmother Ajarry was sold from Africa and died in plantation after being sold and resold many times over, her only surviving daughter Mabel attempts to escape the plantation and is not seen thereafter. Cora, Mabel’s daughter, is living as a stray, outcast among other slaves. She is part of the Hob that has seven outcast women who have insulated themselves from the insinuations of the world around them because of their reluctance to mix with others. As she is fighting for her ‘three square yards of dirt’ within the plantation where she grows her own garden, she meets Caesar, a former freeman from Virginia, who offers her passage to freedom through the ‘underground railroad’. Cora is compelled to take this offer and she sets off on a dangerous journey to go to the free states up north.

Upending metaphors

In this vicarious pathway to freedom and dignity, Cora encounters different states, each a possibility of an alternative America. In each of these steps, she encounters a terror more unprecedented than the previous. Cora understands that you do not need chains to imprison a person- the purpose of chains was accomplished in so many different ways. The seemingly harmless hospital in South Carolina is a hub of eugenics that subjugates black people through controlled sterilisation and her refuge (a nook in the attic of a white man’s house) in North Carolina is no more than a secret prison. Cora understands that ‘the world could make living prison of your safe haven.’ As she passes through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, a miraculous combination of faith and friendship, takes her to her freedom.

What makes the novel stunning is the way metaphors and myths are turned on their heads, to live out their literal existence. Colson Whitehead sketches the details of the underground railroad by making the metaphor live its meaning, bolts and all. The railroad literally spreads like invisible vein of slave transport, an empire with its own logic, under the foundation of America. From this underbelly, it chisels away at the foundational myths of the American Declaration of Independence- the promise of equality, freedom and dignity to all its citizens. Cora hears of the Declaration recited by a slave and thinks of it as a ghost from the darkness. Later her language tutor Georgina tells her, ‘The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.’ When Cora ventures out, truth comes to her as a sudden engine from darkness dislocating all her beliefs, breaking her. When she works as an actor in a history museum in South Carolina, playing out a slave for the white audience, she thinks of truth as ‘a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach’. Simple theatre becomes a refuge of faith that comforts her. It is this same mistrust in truth as revealed by history that makes her reject the Bible and poetry.  Cora understands truth, freedom and equality when the lived experience of her life confronts the inherited faith of her society.

Questioning history

The American landscape is portrayed with as much brilliance as the mindscape of its people that run a ruthless machinery of order and hierarchy. The slave master and the slave catcher, the slave mother and the station agent, the grave robber and the abolitionist, are all the products of the same system. The philosophy of the slave catcher Ridgeway sums up the unstoppable racial logic, that the story portrays and disembodies, trenchantly. He believes that the true American Spirit was one ‘that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate, if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription- the American Imperative’. Ridgeway worked for this ‘American Imperative’ to ensure that property remained property. It was a notion of order, hierarchy of social arrangement and chain of value.

In the end, this is a story of one woman’s indomitable will to escape her destiny and find her way to freedom. Quite directly, it is her adventure through space and time in America where at each step a unique terror awaits. But this is also a meditation on history, our understanding of our pasts. In this light, the politics that works when black history is placed in the pages of white narratives attacks the foundational myths of the America. This story also brings out how technology moulds history, the tale of inventions and human endeavour to find a way out of difficulties, the kind of technology that is fantastic and adds meaning to life. Whitehead is claiming back something substantive here, but it is not something we are expecting. The novel is in the same vein of other defining works that took the idea of identity and turned it on its head- Julian Barnes’ England, England on the English question, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout on slavery and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question on being Jewish. An important perspective for our times!

Exploring the Conscience of Art

The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape

I was waiting for Barnes’ new novel for a while now after the Man Booker winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. This new novel explores the conscience of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich through an intimate third person narrator who meets him at three crucial moments of his life- as a man awaiting the repercussions of a dictator in the beginning, an ambassador of the same regime to world in the second and the torn lonely artist making his private tribulations into music praying that death liberates his art from life in the final moment. What interested me was the way we wind up with Shostakovich as he is thinking to himself what it means to be him, an artist, a Russian, a man hounded by power in public and art in private. We see with him how it all began on the wrong note for him with his name a mere echo of his father and how he shuffled through his life into the inevitable tragedy of betrayal that life set up.

We are faced with two impossible choices- to be honest, brave and dead or to be deceptive, fearful and alive. That is the kind of duality with no middle ground when power of that kind as we found in Stalinist Russia pervades life. There is no meaning to freedom and all roads lead to deception. Shostakovich’s encounters with Soviet tutors are some of the best parts of the book. They are sent to be patient with the genius, deliberately working through his stubborn mind ridden with guilt of living with such uncompromising vicissitudes. How the first tutor of the Stalinist world teaches him to begin with obeisance through remembering what it means to be part of history by teaching it to oneself. And how the last tutor encourages him to forget the past when he has barely begun to forgive. Caught between memory and forgetting, courage and cowardice, life and death, Shostakovich drowns the noise of time with music.

The larger questions we are posed with are who does art belong to? And how do you speak truth to power? Art belongs to everybody and nobody at the same time. As Shostakovich reminisces the posterity is free to do what it wants with his art, his music. It is both theirs to judge and not theirs to understand. That is because the truth in art stands all time while the truth in life is dealt with in small measures till it resembles no truth at all. With these interesting questions to explore, I found the novel intimate and interesting.

The Luminaries

 

   

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, Granta, 2013

“There is no truth except truth in relation and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clock work orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still.”  

                                              

Eleanor Catton, all of 29 years won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her second book, The Luminaries. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, Catton had literally travelled pole to pole, wondering at the sky turned upside down and all the restless inhabitants of the firmament, who with their limitless influence on the human life beneath, would partner her in grand and breathtaking story telling. The book begins with the arrival of a stranger in the gold fields of New Zealand in the 19^th century. He abruptly enters a stormy world of greed, passion and ambition and soon becomes an impromptu witness and inevitable insider. The intimate world of a digger’s town, rankled by a series of mysteries too incredible even for the schemers and conspirators, is slowly brought to light. It seems as though every man in town has an insignificant piece of the puzzle and a great claim to the outcome of fates. The sea farers, opium traders, masters and slaves are thrown into a devilish world of death, disappearance and treasure. In a land where every fellow is a stranger to the next man and foreign to the soil, the muddied and stained states of affairs conjure up unlikely alliances. 

A young heir to great wealth goes missing on a night an infamous prostitute tries to commit suicide. A hermit in the woods ends up dead with immeasurable wealth stowed away in his cottage. A harmless trunk disappears, a strange woman appears with occult powers to exorcise secrets from planets and stars. A rich tapestry unfolds to reveal a brilliant and exquisite story that gradually impacts the reader with a style that is substantial, grounded and strong. 

Catton remains true to the moods of strange times in a virgin land that is slowly being ravished by all kinds of men. The subtle pull of tension between the white man and the aborigine, master and slave, man and woman- all of whom covet wealth and safe passage to a serene future- is brought out exceptionally well. The capricious ambience of a gold mine that lures and traps men, smothers and nourishes their ambition, leads to unimaginable conflicts in the lives of the characters. In a land where one wills his destiny through the sheer acuity of one’s perception as if one is playing at whist, death and danger lurk like shadows. The only thing that is fixed and unassailable is what the mythical stars weave with their cold hands over slouch hats and flayed corpses- inchoate tales of elusive destinies. A brilliant book from a promising author!

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna, Bloomsbury, 2010

‘The Memory of Love’ is a novel written by Scottish born writer Aminatta Forna, the author of the powerful memoir ‘The Devil that Danced on the Water’ and two acclaimed novels ‘Ancestor Stones’ and ‘The Hired Man’. ‘The Memory of Love’ is a story of love and loss that binds seemingly scattered lives across a nation limping back to life. The landscape of the story is a small country in Africa, Sierra Leone, which has been ravaged by war and ravished by a hostile rebel group until a well meaning despot of a neighbouring country takes over and brings in peace. The coming of peace in this land is sudden and surreptitious. The people of the land, the recruits of the military junta, the soldiers who fought on and the soldiers who changed sides- all of them come together-the loyalists and betrayers, the rulers and former rulers, the persecutor and the victim all on the same side of a newly formed peaceful future. This is a new time and place, where they have to make peace with the past and their coerced present, marry murderers and love the enemies as their neighbours. People who cope, fill their life vehemently with the present alone, burying a livid past and live on as silent islands. That is why there is a different quality to the silence here- silence that does not find a need to be clothed with words, but is let loose and naked to roam among people like the wind and the sun. People who cannot cope are cleaved beings, caught between two worlds and stranded there, forever haunted by nightmares not of their making.

In this unforgiving landscape, four lives are irretrievably entangled. In the land of silence and muted sounds, an old man called Elias Cole talks from his death bed. He needs a listener, a witness to his testimonials and a man willing to be complicit in the making of ghost of memories. A British psychologist Adrian Lockhart arrives in search of a new purpose of life and finds much more than he hoped for. A committed doctor Kai Mansaray aspires to leave the shores of insomnia and gaudy nightmares and never does. A fiery woman Nenebah fights with equanimity for a place in her country and life. Four lives, whose beginnings are hard to trace, but are blessed with neat regimented endings. Four lives that are bound by love, loss and the memory of love.

Aminatta returns to her theme of war and its aftermath in her second novel and deftly weaves the threads of four haunted lives into an enduring tapestry of human survival. This story is of epic proportions both in the time span and thematic scale it hopes to portray. The questions of identity, loyalty and betrayal lead to the larger concerns of justice that is necessary for peace to be founded in this war torn land. In the end, what is left is whatever is unchanging- the red and mould of the earth, the salt of the sea and the blue and growling grey of the skies. Here, hope comes occasionally as a sunbird sitting on the windowsill or the birth of a child. Love comes as impromptu rendezvous between strangers. Words come unexpectedly, in low grunts piercing the silence. This is a stark, compelling story of four human beings, whose stale fear and colourless laughter stays on long after the last pages are turned.