Utsob Roy

I really don't know what to say. Annoying yet funny.

Until you finish it, you'll never notice how well-crafted this novel is. That is how good art or literature should be. It will hide the craftsmanship. The narrative was concise, flowing, and captivating.

Another thing not strictly about this book is, I envy authors who (though being a man) can portray women such a way that it compels you to think that they know women from the depth of their psychology. I know they don't know everything about women. However, they can create a character which may not be like ‘This is how women are' but will be like ‘this is also how a woman can be'. Dazai can do this very well.

It has been suggested, for instance, that the Mahābhārata, the great early Sanskrit epic, owes a debt to the Iliad and to the Odyssey, with the theme of the abduction of Lady Sita by Rāvaa a direct echo of the elopement of Helen with Paris of Troy.

It is supposed to be Rāmāyana, not Mahābhārata. Mistakes like this, and that also in the first few pages made me skeptical about the quality of this book.

Beyond that, I found this book enlightening. Writing a history based on how businesses have been made (and related things like coercion and war) is a very refreshing read.

This is an autobiographical work; therefore, what the author was thinking is much more important than the literary quality. But again, all a writer could do is write themselves. So this is also about the style.

What I found about him reading this one is that Hemingway is a man deeply embedded in reality. A person who likes people, cats, dogs, and children, and wants to write a really good story. That is all that matters to him. I never found him philosophising beyond the level that the first interaction allows him to. Text is not dense, but superbly tactile. And somehow, he can make the emotions tactile too.

Hemingway's brand of realism has, unfortunately, become a mundane genre in the hands of his successors. Their shallow sense of reality did great disservice to the genre. That is why they never could've produced a line like this:

The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them,

Or, three lines so dense that they cover a whole gamut of class-conflict, longing, baseness, hostility, and charming sarcasm:

“I just came in to have a drink. What’s wrong with that?” “At home they’d serve you and then break the glass.” “Where’s home? It sounds like a charming place.”

Another thing that many realist writers cannot do is widen the reality. Here's an example:

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In their narrow sense of reality, they completely ignore the most interesting aspect of reality— temporality. They act as if they are buffers on a tape and caught by the temporality of the story itself, and possess neither the capacity for retrospection, nor the prescience. Their story, in turn, feels like frames in a film I am holding in my hand instead of a movie I see.

Only recently, I think, Manto is getting traction once again. A writer disowned by his country because of cultural bigotry (This act is an irony itself since Manto himself left his country and then regretted it.) and was unable to grow in his new ground, died as a middle-aged man.

The stories are indeed well-chosen, as the translator claimed to show the spectrum of Manto’s ability. I can also vouch for the translation quality because I’ve already read some excellent translations of Manto in Bengali. Since all the languages in the Indian subcontinent are kin, they share similarities. You can easily get a vibe of the original writing.

To see in Manto’s eyes is like seeing with sensors rather than wisdom. You don’t need any special depth to understand Manto, I think. His writings are all about the things that are alive. You’ll rarely find any description about the environment in his writings, but whenever you get some, they will hit some of your nerves. You may find yourself beside a long wall with the stink and stains of urine, or in a room so small that you may suffocate. These stains and stinks, these feelings of suffocation, are lively. Attention to minute details, which is a strength of many writers, is almost absent in his works. Rather, he will talk about people's minds and thoughts in length, what they are thinking, acting, and living… The stories are stories of living things, and you’ll start living and breathing in these stories.

Time to time, we talk about this and that, the responsibilities of writers and artists in general. Well, to be truthful, an artist’s only responsibility is to speak his mind truthfully. To do that, an artist may, and historically always has been, an iconoclast in their style, subject, and expression. Obscene, Manto was, and also sceptical about the then-contemporary ideas of revolution and freedom. An icon, be it Gandhi or Virginity, he has challenged. By doing this, he expressed truths that transcend beyond society's ethics, yet are very close to our human self.