Beautiful & Slight

BOOK REVIEW

Title: Difficult Pleasures

Author: Anjum Hasan

Publisher: Penguin Viking 2012

Price: Rs. 399/-

Beautiful and Slight

The “Difficult Pleasures” of the title lops into view on page 111 of this handsomely produced book in a story entitled “Immanuel Kant in Shillong”. Hasan has the protagonist say: “It’s such a difficult pleasure-talking,” right in the middle of the page, when confronted with an emotion laden confession/apology on the part of a long ago transgressor. 

This short story also grapples with the Kantian idea of the “Categorical imperative- act only on that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it should be a universal law”. The charming thing is that Kant is decidedly not for the intellectually challenged. But not getting it can, and in this instance does, have some poignant consequences. Consequences that also ironically visit the best student of Immanuel Kant in the class.

All Anjum Hasan’s stories in this volume are interiorscapes in the main, and one enjoys being let into other people’s heads with such skill. But, and this is the rub- nothing very much happens. The evocation of moods and emotions is good but the plotting is weak.

When this young writer marries her considerable talent for honest description and controlled language with strong plot lines, she will have no difficulty winning the prizes she has already been shortlisted for, and I dare say, bigger ones too. The question, as is often the case with poet-writers who naturally incline to visualising, is whether they can muster enough detachment from the beautiful image to tell a riveting story.  

Anjum Hasan is undoubtedly an elegant writer and considerably acknowledged for being so. Her previous book of poetry Street on the Hill located in her erstwhile hometown of Shillong, was heralded as a fresh new and original voice from the North East, where her parents, originally from Uttar Pradesh, were professors.

Hasan now lives in Bangalore. Her debut novel, Lunatic in my Head, yes, with a character enamoured of Seventies mystic rockers Pink Floyd,  was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. This was followed by Neti Neti, also shortlisted by the Hindu Best Fiction Award.

I personally like the story named “Saturday Night,” in which a frustrated house maid steals the baby in her charge as something her blasé employers absolutely cannot take in their stride, but only to foist it surreptitiously on another couple randomly encountered.

A couple, where the man wants to start a family after a year of marriage but his careerist wife does not. The two stories of the maid in her efficient but taken-for-granted existence, looking after the home and son of her employers, and that of the yuppie couple, run in parallel. That is, until they dramatically intersect. The couple gives the signalling maid a lift during their headlong dash to the Bangalore airport. And she leaves the baby behind in the car when she gets off at an intersection.

Hasan demonstrates masterful insight into the ambivalence of the careerist wife, one with a ticking body clock. It is she who is subconsciously motivated to have her husband stop the car to give the fleeing maid and baby a lift. This, even though she is late on the way to a conference abroad. This story is an illustration of what Anjum Hasan can do when she combines plot and the dexterity of her writing style.

It is fashionable nowadays to write palimpsests with muted tonalities. But there should be something more to remember a book like this beyond the pleasure of well crafted prose. Except, of course, the encomiums of the already initiated, those literary types with refined sensibilities that populate the edit departments of publishing houses.

And yet post-modernism, into which genre this set of short stories might be classified, does not wish to do a Maupassant or O. Henry. That kind of writing is now considered old hat, despite their highly memorable stories that delighted and continue to delight millions. Neither would the posher elements of the current literary establishment welcome what it considers “obvious” writing.

After all, it is indeed a function of good literary prose to explore frontiers, and not be afraid to experiment with both style and content. Anjum Hasan’s Difficult Pleasures does contribute to all of this. But the parallel point that might be considered is best illustrated by the erstwhile “art cinema” of decades past now become far more accessible. It is today a genre of mainstream, particularly in the urban multiplexes. The bold new hybrids retain their ability to break new ground while proving commercially successful at the same time.

The dwindling reading public in the digital age, is largely middle-brow in temperament. It generally wants its healthy diet of intellectual stimulation with a few condiments for the salivatory glands. Or am I using the Kantian “Categorical Imperative” here to fly my own kite at Anjum Hasan’s expense?

(800 words)

20^th May 2012

Gautam Mukherjee

Published on Sunday 27th May 2012 in The Sunday Pioneer AGENDA Section BOOKS Page as "Beautiful & Slight" and online at www.dailypioneer.com