43. “Sacred Games” by Vikram Chandra

Year of first publication: 2006
Genre: novel, (not quite a) detective story, (not quite a) crime thriller
Country: India

In italiano: Giochi Sacri di Vikram Chandra, edito da Mondadori (2008), € 14

Plot: In the chaotic city of Bombay, detective Sartaj Singh is about to arrest the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, who’s mysteriously closed in a bunker, a white cube suddenly appeared in the still-developing area of Kailashpada. When he finally manages to open the door, he finds that Gaitonde has just blown his brains out with a gun and has also killed a woman called Jojo Mascarenas, a model co-ordinator who apparently has no connection with him. The inspector then starts to investigate into the deaths, while the story of how Ganesh Gaitonde came to power is told in flashbacks through alternating chapters. While we enter in the daily routine of a Bombay police inspector, we also discover the criminal underworld of the city. This capacious novel is a sort of huge mosaic of the city of Bombay, constructed through the life of the many people who enter the lives of Sartaj Singh and Ganesh Gaitonde.

Some thoughts: From the plot above you might have gathered that this is a detective story or maybe a crime thriller, but you’re wrong: this novel has the frame of a crime thriller, but it’s much more than that. At 900-odd pages, Sacred Games is reminiscent of a three-and-a-half-hours Bollywood movie, but unlike Bollywood movies it is meticulously researched and realistic. This novel explores how a city and a whole nation changed in recent years, without forgetting the human side of the story: friendship, love and family ties are all important themes of the novel. In a whirlwind of labyrinthine plots and subplots, the author gives life to characters that look so authentic that you keep thinking of them even after the end of the book. The “star” of the novel is of course the protagonist, a Sikh police inspector, honest in an unusual way in a city where every policeman is corrupted (Chandra defines his as “romantic” with regards to his job). He is not at all perfect (he’s getting old, he’s sometimes clumsy and not that cocky with women), but very charming all the same (his profile was once featured in a women’s magazine as one of the most best-looking bachelors in Bombay). Gaitonde’s life is also interesting and engaging, but the chapters concerning the inspector are the ones you’re constantly waiting for. Chandra builds a complicated story, packed with details and subplots. Digressions are recurrent: the in-set chapters, for instance, could give life to another interesting novel about inspector Singh’s mother and the loss of a sister during Partition or about K. D. Yadav, a former Indian intelligence officer who’s now suffering from brain cancer. These chapters don’t add up to the story, but they’re wonderfully written, proving that Chandra can cope with all sorts of different settings and not only with “cops and robbers”. I recently discovered why Indian fiction (and cinema) often feature digressions (which is something that is likely to result annoying for western readers): epic sagas like the Mahabharata are full of this kind of digressions, because they are, among other things, a collection of oral traditions and beliefs on varied subjects, from yoga to war craft. Keeping this in mind, you can understand why in Sacred Games everything is involved, from India-Pakistan relations to Bollywood starlets, without forgetting Partition and Hindu nationalists. The author uses the template of a detective story as a sort of excuse to touch on the same topics of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, another great book about Bombay.

One of the strengths of this novel are the convincing dialogues in Hindi-influenced English as it is spoken in the streets of Bombay, with many vernacular words and swearwords (on this full-blooded lesson on Hindi curses, Kevin Rushby of The Guardian wrote: “next time some maderchod Mumbai tapori tries to cheat me, he'd better watch out. My tongue is gonna be sharper than one of Ma Singh's lime pickles”)!

Another feature that is important in the novel, as it is for the city of Mumbai, is Bollywood. The characters of the novel often sing verses from Bollywood movies and discuss about their favourite film stars. Moreover, Ganesh Gaitonde loves to watch Bollywood gangster movies, while his archi-rival Suleiman Isa keeps on watching The Godfather over and over again. At a certain point in the novel, Gaitonde even produces his own action movie, suggesting that there are sometimes connections between Bollywood and the criminal underworld of Mumbai. The irony is that a film critic writes that the makers of Gaitonde’s movie have never dealt with real-life gangsters (and the film critic gets beaten up by Gaitonde’s boys). This sounds a bit like a funny warning for the reader: are we allowed to think that the portrayal of Indian dons in the book is not realistic enough? Incidentally, some think it’s too much Bond-style, with all those women following Gaitonde everywhere, first of all his protégée, Zoya Mirza, destined to become Miss India and a film star. Contrary to that, I think that Chandra has done a great job of research on the life of Bombay gangsters, resulting in a multi-faceted character like Ganesh Gaitonde: a megalomaniac who’s sometimes ridiculous and ingenuous (think of the exercises to enlarge his penis or of his relationship with the Hindu guru), but who’s also looking for true love (albeit from the wrong woman, the “completely redone” Miss India he helped to create and whose plastic surgery he used to pay).

The book came out only four years ago, in 2006, but that was before Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars. Since then, stories about life in the slums, rascals, religious intolerance and corruption in the subcontinent have saturated the market (or haven’t they?). It’s like a never-ending circle: once you’re fed up of reading about spirituality and non-violence in the subcontinent, you need to look for something about the dark side of India and then back again to dharma and meditation. Even if you’re fed up of these topics, though, you might want to make an exception for this engrossing, larger than life, page-turner of a novel.

About the author: Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi in 1961. His mother and one of his sisters work in the film industry as screenwriters. His first novel was Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), which was inspired by the autobiography of James Skinner, the nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian soldier famous for raising two cavalry regiments in the British Indian Army. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. His collection of short stories Love and Longing in Bombay (1997) is the first featuring inspector Sartaj Singh. In 2000 he co-wrote the Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir with Suketu Mehta, the author of Maximum City. His most-recent novel to date is Sacred Games, which came out in 2006 and it was highly anticipated, to the point that publishers in the UK and in the US fought to have it.

J.D. Salinger (1919 - 2010)

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.” [from The Catcher in the Rye]

I will never stop thanking my humanities teacher back at high school. He made us read The Catcher in the Rye (renamed Il Giovane Holden in Italian) and it was one of the books that prompted me to read more literature. He invented for us a well-planned “trail” through a few things he probably adored himself: Fabrizio De Andrè who sang many songs adapted from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River’s Anthology, Fernanda Pivano who translated it and who made Italy aware of writers like J.D. Salinger and his novel The Catcher in the Rye. Fernanda Pivano’s teacher at high school was Cesare Pavese, so he made us read some of his poems about adolescence and then one by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet about the same topic. And so on in a never-ending thread of connections between poets and song-writers, freedom fighters and “rebel authors”.


Ho trovato questa vecchia fotocopia sul Giovane Holden, probabilmente scritto dal mio professore di lettere per invogliarci ed entusiasmarci nella lettura del libro, forse anche per formarci, perché crescessimo con delle idee e uno spirito critico pari a quello del protagonista del libro di Salinger.

“Indicazioni per un viaggio in compagnia del giovane Holden

Un adolescente cerca la propria identità ed autonomia rifiutando i codici di comportamento e il conformismo borghese: i suoi condizionamenti, regole, limiti, convenzioni… condannando e smitizzando tutto e tutti senza appello, togliendo il velo all’ipocrisia e il perbenismo, evidenziando il comico e il grottesco della vita, soprattutto di quella “seria” ed “ufficiale”, irridendo a mode, valori , miti… combattendo il sentimentalismo…

Holden, ecco un motivo in più per leggerlo a 16 anni, esprime continuamente il proprio punto di vista sul mondo, sugli adulti, sulle istituzioni (la famiglia, il college, la scuola, i giornali, l’esercito, l’industria, la religione…), su i coetanei e su sé stesso con distacco e sincerità, a volte anche cruda (“dissi che l’amavo tanto, ma naturalmente non era vero”), irriverente, brutale, (“non mi interessava niente quando uno moriva”), con ironia ed anche autonomia, (è un invito ad imitarlo), con umorismo e sarcasmo.

David Jerome Salinger cerca di esprimere l’animo ribelle ed anticonformista del sedicenne Golden ricorrendo ad una vera e propria rivoluzione formale. La sua scrittura ricostruisce infatti l’orizzonte linguistico adolescenziale fatto di frasi gergali (“Il gergo ha una funzione coesiva con gli amici, ai coetanei ed oppositiva con gli adulti” E. Capriolo), di formule ripetute e di tic verbali (“che so io”, “e compagnia bella”, “eccetera, eccetera”), di figure retoriche (iperboli, ironia, sarcasmo, similitudini, antitesi…), di espressioni tipiche del parlato…Quello di golden è un monologo continuo e non lineare (= a ruota libera), espresso in prima persona e rivolto ad un pubblico che sembra essergli a fianco e a cui strizza l’occhio, chiedendo partecipazione e complicità. Per quanto riguarda il ritmo della narrazione è veloce ed avvincente, sia per il susseguirsi di una miriade di persone, fatti, incontri, esperienze… sia per l’assenza quasi totale di descrizioni (“nel Giovane Golden mancano gli indugi narrativi” E. Capriolo).”

42. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen

Year of first publication: 1813
Genre: novel, novel of manners, romantic comedy, realist novel
Country: United Kingdom

In italiano: “Orgoglio e Pregiudizio” di Jane Austen, edito (per esempio) da Garzanti (2009), € 7,50

Plot: Mrs Bennet has five daughters and they are all in need of a husband. Mr Bingley, a wealthy young gentleman, rents an estate near the Bennets, thus presenting the perfect occasion to find a good match for the girls. While Mr Bingley is immediately attracted to Jane, the most beautiful of the Bennets, his good friend Mr Darcy is haughty and cold, particularly towards Elizabeth, the most intelligent and outspoken of the girls. Elizabeth makes the acquaintance of Mr Wickham, an officer in the militia stationed nearby, who has been mistreated by Darcy in the past. She then starts to hate Darcy for what she has been told about him. In the meantime, Jane and Bingley grow closer, despite the opposition of his sisters who consider her socially inferior. Things become more complicated when Mr Bingley inexplicably leaves the estate breaking the hopes of a marriage with Jane and Darcy falls in love with Elizabeth who continues to scorn him.

Some thoughts: After having studied the book at school and having seen two adaptations, but never having ventured after page 50 of the book itself, I finally decided to pluck up the courage and read this novel from the beginning to the end. I was never attracted to Jane Austen’s novels, but maybe it was just a bias against romantic comedies.
I appreciated Austen’s ability to detail the inner life of people, especially young women. The psychology of the characters is astonishing: I loved Elizabeth Bennett and I was fascinated with Mr Darcy. He’s one of those characters, like Rashkolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who despite being unpleasant and unsociable for most of the novel, has an undeniable charm. There is also comic intent in some of the characters, for instance the unbelievably ridiculous Mr Collins or the equally hilarious Mrs Bennett with all her frivolity and obsession for the marriage of her daughters. They’re not round characters, but they add a “comic relief” to an otherwise very serious novel. Some people suggested that Pride and Prejudice is also a feminist novel ante litteram, because Elizabeth Bennett has a strong spirit of independence. Honestly, I think it’s a stretch. What is unusual and remarkable for a novel of that time is Elizabeth’s attitude towards conventions. With this novel, a new kind of hero (and heroine) is born: one that has some faults (pride and prejudice, indeed) as well as many virtues.

In spite of all this, I’m still not a proper “Janeite”, simply because I’m not a big fan of novels of manners, where characters have to respect a social code that, for instance, encourages them to marry for money when they would like to follow their passions and have love marriages, instead. It all feels very distant from my life. In the society I live in, women no longer need to marry to have economic stability and the main aspiration of a man “in possession of a good fortune” is no longer marriage. Nonetheless I understand why in other cultures, where women have considerably less freedom and marriage is still an important value, writers still think of Jane Austen as an important inspiration (remember that I mentioned that Rushdie thanks Austen in the preface of Midnight’s Children?).

Also, western women in no want of a career might feel very attracted to the aspirations of Jane and Elizabeth. I’m not saying that I despised the novel, because I’m very conscious of its literary and historical value. Moreover, I enjoyed it overall. It’s just that, as the English would say, it’s not my cup of tea.

By the way, a book has come out recently: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, a sort of rewriting of the book in horror-style. Anybody wants to comment on that?

About the author: Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist, still among the most widely read in the country. She was born in rural Hampshire into a family belonging to the lower fringes of English gentry and was educated at home by his father and older brothers. She never married and lived all her uneventful life within the bounds of her immediate family. Her lifelong companion was her sister Cassandra, also unmarried. She began to experiment with writing and between 1795 and 1796 she began to write what would be published in 1811 with the title Sense and Sensibility. The novel was quite successful. In 1813 she published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of a novel previously written with the title First Impressions, and Mansfield Park appeared one year after that. All of her novels were published anonymously but they were very fashionable among opinion-makers, also giving Austen some financial independence. Her last novel, Emma, was published in 1815, only two years before her death in 1817. She has been very influential for many writers who came after her, for example E.M. Forster.

Italia e Corno d’Africa: “Madre Piccola” di Cristina Ali Farah

Ubax Cristina Ali Farah è nata a Verona nel 1973 da padre somalo e madre italiana. Le piace dire che è suo padre l'africano, mentre sua madre è italiana, ribaltando la consuetudine che vuole siano le spesso bellissime donne africane a sposare gli uomini bianchi, e non viceversa. Cristina è vissuta a Mogadiscio dal 1976 al 1991, quando è stata costretta a fuggire a causa della guerra civile scoppiata nel paese. Ora vive a Roma, dove organizza eventi letterari e si occupa di educazione interculturale, con percorsi rivolti a studenti, insegnanti e donne migranti. E’ anche co-fondatrice della rivista di letteratura della migrazione El-Ghibli. Poetessa ed autrice di diversi racconti, nel 2007 è uscito il suo primo romanzo, Madre Piccola.

Barni e Domenica Axad sono due cugine, cresciute insieme a Mogadisco e legate da un filo sottile ma resistentissimo. Vengono separate contro il loro volere quando Domenica parte, insieme alla madre, alla volta di un paese a lei sconosciuto, ma che in realtà è quello della madre: l’Italia. Quando le due cugine finalmente si rincontrano a Roma dopo molti anni, la Somalia è ormai “persa” perché in preda alla guerra civile, ma ancora viva nei loro ricordi di bambine. Barni decide di essere la habaryar, la madre piccola, del figlio che Domenica porta in grembo. “Madre piccola” è infatti il modo in cui i somali si riferiscono alla zia materna.

Attraverso questo libro Cristina Ali Farah ci parla della Somalia dove la colonizzazione italiana ha lasciato tracce evidenti e anche ferite non meno profonde, ha stretto forti legami tra Mogadiscio e Roma, legami che però ora che la Somalia è in preda alla guerra civile l’Italia sembra aver dimenticato. In Italia non si ricorda mai questa brutta parte della nostra storia nazionale, quando ci siamo macchiati di crimini di cui spesso accusiamo le altre nazioni – Inghilterra, Francia o Spagna. Questa parte della nostra storia non si studia a scuola e i giornalisti non ne parlano spesso. Cristina Ali Farah parla dei somali della diaspora, sparsi nelle città di mezzo mondo, ma anche dei “meticci” italo-somali, poco accetti in entrambe le culture. Quegli stessi discorsi che sembrano banali se riferiti ad uno scrittore algerino di lingua francese o ad uno scrittore guyanese di lingua inglese, non sono banali per la poco conosciuta “letteratura postcoloniale italiana”, definizione alquanto dubbia quanto quella di “letteratura italofona”. Cristina, cresciuta a Mogadiscio, ha studiato in una scuola italiana su libri italiani, è di madrelingua italiana e quando le si domanda se si sente italiana (domanda che le è stata posta da un anziano signore alla presentazione del libro a cui sono andata lo scorso anno), rimane un po’ sorpresa. E come potrebbe non sentirsi italiana? Eppure si sente anche somala ed è una cosa che si percepisce molto nel libro, impreziosito da espressioni e parole somale. Non sono due cose che non possono convivere, l’essere italiani e l’essere somali, giacchè l’autrice, così come la Domenica Axad del libro, lo fa nei suoi due nomi di battesimo, Ubax, un nome somalo, e Cristina, un nome italiano.

Di questo primo libro di Cristina mi ha colpito molto il modo di scrivere, la sintassi proprio, rotta, discontinua, discorsiva, bellissima. Non so come spiegarvelo, ma l’ho interpretato un po’ come un modo per dimostrare a quel signore che le ha posto quella domanda che sì, lei è proprio di madrelingua italiana, che usa l’italiano con tutte le sue sfaccettature e le sue complessità. Non posso far altro che riportarvi un piccolo assaggio del libro:

" Soomaali baan ahay*, come la mia metà che è intera. Sono il filo sottile, così sottile che si infila e si tende, prolungandosi. Così sottile che non si spezza. E il groviglio di fili si allarga e mostra, chiari e ben stretti, i nodi, pur distanti l'uno dall'altro, che non si sciolgono.

Sono una traccia in quel groviglio e il mio principio appartiene a quello multiplo.

Il mio principio è Barni mentre mangiamo insieme dal piatto comune. Siamo sedute per terra l'una accanto all'altra e i maschi ridono per come tengo le gambe. Sulla stuoia le ginocchia si toccano, una gamba di qua e una gamba di là. Non ti si spezzano dalbooley*? Vedessi quando corre quanto fa ridere, i polpacci che vanno a destra e a sinistra.

Barni, persino i maschi hanno paura di lei. Si alza e li prende per il collo, graffia, dovresti vedere come graffia. Nessuno si azzardi a scherzare. Il piatto quasi pieno si rovescia ed eccola, la mia Barni con la sua voglia a cuore proprio in mezzo alla fronte, che corre a protestare, mai un giorno che si possa mangiare senza dover fare a botte con questi prepotenti. Ve lo faccio vedere io chi è più forte. Io ci ho provato una volta, volevo essere come lei, ma di Barni ce n'è una sola.
Il mio principio è noi due che ci infiliamo in cucina, vediamo la papaia tutta aperta con i suoi semini tondi tondi ed ecco, un po’ a te e un po’ a me, poi corriamo in cortile e facciamo una buca profonda nella sabbia rossa, domani torniamo e magari, chissà, è spuntato qualcosa. Barni che mi dice coraggio, quel giorno che hanno messo la trappola per il gatto, quello che rubava sempre la carne dal cesto della spesa, e ora che l’hanno beccato le danno tante di quelle bastonate che non riesco neanche a guardare. L’hanno buttato per strada, ma quello è tornato, ora non ruba più la carne, ha un occhio raggrinzito. Forse è tornato per ricordare che il nostro profeta Maometto amava i gatti, dicono che una volta un gatto gli si è addormentato sul braccio e il profeta, per non svegliarlo, ha deciso di tagliarsi la manica.
Il mio principio è Barni quando tocca a me raccontare le storie, mi chiede quelle dei libri che leggo e traduce le parole che non so, come quella volta che volevo dire la storia della sirenetta e io raccontavo, una donna metà pesce e metà donna, come si dice, gabareymaanyo dice Barni, ecco come di dice. Vorrei anch’io essere una gabareymaanyo, ma non so nuotare, al mare volevo raggiungerla nell’acqua, ma c’era una buca, meno male che Barni è più alta di me, è venuta subito a tirarmi fuori, mamma mia che paura, ho ancora il sapore dell’acqua salata.

Il mio principio sembra spezzarsi quel giorno, mentre Barni mi sta pettinando i capelli per la partenza, così tua nonna vedrà come sei diventata bella!, spalma l’olio e separa le ciocche e io dico, Barni non vedo niente, mi sembra come una nuvola nera davanti agli occhi. Poi mi manca il respiro e sento solo l’acqua fredda che mi scende dalla fronte al petto, ha perso conoscenza, dicono. Domenica, domenica! e mentre mi chiamano io ricomincio a vedere gli occhi di Barni che mi fissano così vicini. Allora io le dico, abbaayo* io non voglio più chiamarmi con questo nome che fa ridere tutti e lei dice, non ti preoccupare d’ora in avanti ti chiamerai Axad, come il principio.”

* Soomaali baan ahay: “Somalo io sono”, poesia composta nel 1977 da Cabdulqaadir Xirsi Siyaad “Yamyam”
Dalbooley: persona dalle gambe valghe

Abbaayo: sorella (anche in senso affettivo)

La prossima volta, Gabriella Ghermandi e il suo libro Regina di Fiori e di Perle

41. “The Marriage Bureau for Rich People” by Farahad Zama

Year of first publication: 2008
Genre: novel
Country: India

In italiano: “Agenzia Matrimoniale per Ricchi” di Farahad Zama, edito da Sonzogno Editore (2009), € 18,00

Plot: Having recently retired, Mr Ali decides to open a marriage bureau in his home city of Vizag. With the help of his wife and Aruna, his beautiful assistant, the business is going on very well: a lot of people are willing to find the right match through the services of Mr Ali. When Aruna falls in love with Ramanujam, a young, handsome and rich doctor whose female relatives are determined to find the perfect wife for, things become more complicated. Despite the fact that Aruna is from a respectable Brahmin family, she is in fact poor and cannot afford the marriage Ramanujam’s family is expecting.

Some thoughts: This is a nice, easy-to-read and lighthearted book about marriage customs in India. It reminds me a lot of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a series of books about investigations led by Mme Precious Ramotswe in Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana. They have much more in common than the fact that they are both about an agency. This excellent article from The Financial Times illustrates very well what the similarities are. According to Adrian Turpin, McCall Smith’s “imitators” have “cartoonishly bright ethnic covers”, they share “an aesthetic of simplicity” with linear stories and short sentences and they are set in the developing world but are aimed at the western market, causing them to have long descriptions of local customs that seem to be taken from guide books*. Even though The Marriage Bureau for Rich People is not a detective story (but neither McCall Smith’s series could be ascribed to that genre without hesitations), the cover certainly has bright colours and it’s ethnic in its pointed arch, arabesques and woman in sari. Moreover, there is no doubt that the language is simple and straightforward, plus the plot doesn’t involve nasty surprises or too much unpleasantness in the depiction of a developing country. It is clear that the book is aimed at the western reader, to the point that at the end of the book the author inserts a sort of appendix of a few passages (camouflaged as Mrs Ali’s English compositions) describing the city of Vizag, Indian cuisine, Hindi and Urdu words for family members and the caste system. All elements that help the western reader, who knows little about India, to better understand the novel. Personally, I prefer to be thrown into the complexity of another culture and gather the information I need from the context or the plot, imagining or researching the rest by myself, but other people might find the compositions helpful.

With this said, The Marriage Bureau for Rich People is not a bad book: it’s enjoyable, like a Bollywood movie. The book is not devout of insights into Indian culture, in particular regarding marriage customs. It is also a book about love marriages and arranged marriages, their pros and cons, especially. Mrs Ali says that in marriage you should be content with what you have, because the perfect wife might never come. To learn what the criteria to choose a good wife are in India is a bit shocking for a westerner: height, fair skin, education, cooking skills, caste and sub-caste, financial situation of the family, religion and of course the dowry. In no case the tastes of the two newlyweds, their interests or the physical attraction between them are considered. You might consider Indian culture to be materialistic with regards to this practises, but after all it used to be exactly like this just a few centuries ago here in Europe. Think of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for instance: Mrs Bennett has the same urgency to find a good husband for her daughters that every parent in Zama’s book has. And think of the opening sentence of that book: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. As a matter of fact, Farahad Zama puts a citation from Pride and Prejudice as an epitaph for his book, but this doesn’t mean, as some readers suggested in their reviews, that Zama is trying to write a masala-style Pride and Prejudice (this has already been done at the cinema, didn’t you know?)*2.

In the book, extreme poverty or nasty things are featured, but they come and go very quickly, they always have a happy ending and are treated a bit superficially, because it’s not the aim of the book to make you think about the problems of India. Mr Ali and Mrs Ali, who are Muslims in a predominantly Hindu town, are concerned with their son, who’s a political activist for the rights of poor people and has no intention of getting married and find a good, well-paid job like his parents want. From what I’ve learned through my recent “Indian reads”, in Indian culture it is very important to please your parents and it feels like the author himself does think so. However, Mrs Ali learns to accept his son for what he is, which means that she learns to be content, just like she advises that you'd do with marriage.

In a nutshell, this is a pleasant book to read where you can sniff some curry (among the food cooked by Mrs Ali) or have a trip to the store to buy a sari with Aruna and her sister Vani.

About the author: Farahad Zama was born in Vizag, on the eastern coast of India, but has been living in London since 1990. The Marriage Bureau for Rich People is his first novel.

*The rest of the similarities are aimed at detective stories that came out in the wake of McCall Smith’s series (Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant or Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, for instance).

*2 Speaking of works that could be prefect if turned Indian-style, I keep thinking of a comedy by Goldoni called Sior Todero Brontolon (“son el pare del pare, e son paron dei fioi, e son paron de la nezza, e de la dota, e de la casa, e de tutto quelo che voggio mi” – “I’m the father of the father, I’m the master of my children, and the master of my grand-daughter, and of the dowry, and of the house, and of everything I want”).

40. “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Year of first publication: 2009
Genre: collection of short stories

Country: Nigeria (but some stories are set in the USA and one in South Africa)

What it’s all about: This is a collection of twelve short stories, set in Nigeria and in the USA. The protagonists are all Nigerians, but their backgrounds and lives s are very different, ranging from experiences of war and riots in the author’s home country to the immigrant experience in America. Adichie’s stories often feature young women and their everyday epiphanies, tackling themes such as the brutality of war, colonialism, family relationships, the immigrant experience and the miscomprehensions between husband and wife.

Some thoughts: Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I’m not particularly fond of short stories. There is not much time to develop the characters in a story, consequently only good writers are able to say something really clever in just a few pages. Adichie is one of them: the stories are cleverly constructed, involving and offer a wide range of complex characters. Without any doubts, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most talented young African writers around. However, my favourite works by Adichie remain her two novels, Half of a Yellow Sun especially.
In “A Private Experience” an Igbo girl is sheltering from a riot among her people and Hausa people in a shop. She befriends a Hausa woman, demonstrating the inconsistency of ethnic conflicts at the personal level. The one described in the story is an episode of religious and ethnic friction that seems to be quite common in Nigeria but also scary and dangerous. In “Ghosts” the setting is the beloved university campus of Nsukka where Adichie grew up. The main character is a retired university professor of mathematics enquiring about his pension that never comes in, just like “el coronel” Buendía in García Márquez’s El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel). Floating in the darkness there is not only the ghosts of people he believed to be dead, but also the ghost of the Biafra war, which features prominently in her novel Half of a Yellow Sun. There are also stories concerning the experiences of Nigerian immigrants in America, such as “The Shivering”, about a young Nigerian woman in an American college and her gay friend Chinedu who is also very religious. As my blogger friend Nana wrote in his blog, homosexuality is sort of a taboo subject in Africa, but Adichie touches on it in two stories (the other one being “Jumping Monkey Hill” about a creative writing workshop in South Africa, but I would also suggest a strain of it in “On Monday of Last Week”). By doing this, she shows her “open-mindedness” and her sensibility on the matter. Other important themes are the relationship of Nigerian wives with their husbands, especially relating to distance and immigration (“The Arrangers of Marriage”), and family relationships (“Tomorrow is Too Far”, “The American Embassy”). The last story, “The Headstrong Historian”, can be considered a follow-up of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because it relates the colonisation of a village in three generations’ time. The traditions of the village and their animistic religion are swept awat by Christianity and the white man in a bitter way. This story demonstrates that Adichie can deal with traditional Nigerian lifestyles just as well, but it’s also a sort of reminder that Adichie takes on from Chinua Achebe in order to continue a tradition of excellent story-telling. Some people argued that it was pretentious for Adichie to write such a story, but I don’t think so. Adichie shows her admiration for Achebe without boasting about a comparison between her and the most prestigious of Nigerian writers.

About the author: see this post

Read my reviews of other works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie here and here.

39. “Il Gattopardo” di Tomasi di Lampedusa

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1957
Genere: romanzo storico
Paese: Italia

In English: The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa

La recensione di questo classico della letteratura italiana è apparsa sulla rivista on-line Paper Street (disponibile a questo link).

Tratto dal film che ne ha fatto Luchino Visconti, "La Sicilia non vuole cambiare":