Posts by Moumita Ghosh

On the Tempers of Time: Reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Lockmaster

September 12, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Moumita Ghosh

The Lockmaster is a chronicle of an imminent future where emotional disorientations encounter environmental turmoil.

The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr, translated from the German by Simon Pare, Seagull Books, 2024

The Lockmaster, the latest novel from Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, begins with an act of killing in a small European town. The narrator’s father—the titular lockmaster—presides over a series of sluice systems for guiding river traffic around the Great Falls, a cascade over a hundred and twenty feet high on the White River. On a festive day, ironically a day to celebrate the feast of Saint Nepomuk, the patron saint of those in danger of drowning, the lockmaster floods a navigation channel carrying riverboats. Accidental or otherwise, this episode claims five lives. A year later, almost as if in atonement, the lockmaster stages his disappearance into the same foaming roars of the Great Falls.

Tortured by the possibility that his father could be a murderer, the narrator goes on to experience a series of harrowing events as his hydraulic engineering projects carry him from the banks of the Xingu River in South America to the Mekong in Asia. By the time the narrator travels back to Europe and to the coasts of the North Sea, he himself has transformed into a murderer. Throughout, Ransmayr details the narrator’s childhood with gentle premonitions of his transformation, with prose that feels like a moving panorama of the idyllic outdoors, soaked in an aesthetic genre that seems almost “cottagecore”; yet, existing collaterally with the seemingly quaint charm of strawberry-picking and kayak rides, amidst riparian forests and river spirits, there are far more disturbing scenarios. READ MORE…

On a Deafening and Prolonged End of the World: Reading Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor

July 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Moumita Ghosh

The Emperor might come across as a novel of . . . personal torment, but it is concurrently an elegy of a failing nation.

The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2024

Set in contemporary Haiti, Makenzy Orcel’s The Emperor arrives to the Anglosphere at a time when the Caribbean nation is in the news for ongoing political, economic, and humanitarian crises. In Nathan H. Dize’s translation, the words of Makenzy’s protagonist almost seem to presage the current moment as he articulates: “In short, this country is a sea of shit. A tomb. . .  we live in a black hole. We’d all leave if we could, every single one of us.”

The protagonist does not have a name—or more specifically, he cannot seem to remember it. Presumably abandoned by his helpless family in a hurricane-ravaged countryside, he is only given an alphanumerical code as an identity, and grows up in a lakou ruled by a self-fashioned, pseudo-spiritual leader—the titular Emperor, who occupies the most beautiful house in all of the lakou. The protagonist sketches: “The other houses planted around the Emperor’s are not homes but narrow sheep pens, ajoupas, huts, used to corral an entire flock of absent souls, followers who are forced-fed truths and falsehoods by the mystical master. . .” Amongst them, the protagonist—who is later christened “P” by the only woman he will ever love—is the least sheeplike. Celebrated as a drummer in the local Vodou rituals but equally subjected to the lakou’s terrors, the narrative follows his life as he manages to flee its confines, reincarnating himself as a newspaper deliveryman in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The Emperor is written in a stream of consciousness style, and this design of P’s thoughts communicates the claustrophobic nature of his mental landscape, on which scurries a concoction of anger, anxiety, distrust, and a constant sense of imminent, lurking violence. Almost reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, the narrative is carried along an overarching tone of disconnection; in addition to his namelessness, the protagonist is also unaware of what he looks like. He ruminates on never having looked at his own reflection, and apprehends whether his appearance resembles the person he is inside. However, P is not the only one who remains nameless (and faceless); the host of characters he introduces—whether exploitative or comforting or everyday neutral—are never named. Fundamentally, this perhaps conveys the extent of withdrawal the protagonist embodies due to his past experiences, because such is how power shapes its subjects. P, whose only close companion is the “Other Within” (the voice inside his head), speculates: “How could I survive until now in this immeasurable solitude?” READ MORE…

The Ghost of Coexistence: On a Narrative of Jewish-Muslim Kinship

May 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Moumita Ghosh

A Land Like You is a historical rendition . . . but it is also, much more, a testament of a multicultural homeland that no longer exists.

On May 12, Egypt joined South Africa in its International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide. As one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, Egypt has continually occupied a close position in this ongoing catastrophe; the nation opposed Zionism in the 1930s and accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba but, in more recent decades, the government has worked to covertly “normalize” relations with Israel. This seeming contradiction culminates from the complex, multi-cultural, and syncretic history of the region, in which Jewish and Muslim peoples lived with intertwined fates, and it is that increasingly implausible reality which the French writer and psychologist Tobie Nathan explores in A Land Like You, an absorbing, panoramic narrative of Egypt in the twentieth century. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh looks at how the nation of Egypt formed out of an overarching Ottoman unity, and how Nathan’s stirring novel of this tumultuous period can inform our understanding of the region today.

We live beside the Arabs the way a man might live beside his innards. Our tales fill their Qur’an, their tongue fills our mouth. Why aren’t they us? Why aren’t we them?

—Tobie Nathan, from A Land Like You (translated by Joyce Zonana)

In Ottoman Brothers, Michele U. Campos writes about how objective distinctions between empires and nations are often murky, especially as demonstrated in the late Ottoman context. In the years before the First World War, the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Zionism and Arabism were essentially in negotiation with the responsibilities of imperial citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim empire. Rather than separating from the Ottoman empire, there were attempts to preserve its existence. As familiar calls for a two-state solution re-emerge in Palestine, now undergoing a second Nakba, this history of collective identity and a shared homeland in the Middle East—though short-lived, incomplete, and within the context of imperialism—has gained a new relevancy.

In the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the collapse of the old Hamidian absolutist state, the new epoch of democracy linked the individual Ottoman citizen—irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or mother tongue—to the reforming constitutional state, and citizenship to the “Ottoman-nation” became a distinct socio-political identity. Palestine, even under rule, somewhat differed from the other Ottoman provinces in terms of being a site of worldwide religious devotion, as its daily life involved a mutuality whereby local Muslims, Christians, and Jews came together—especially in Jerusalem—to execute the vision of a “modern” urban city.

Sephardi Jews in particular were grateful to the Ottoman Empire for being their historical saviors, and were consistently mediating between the ideological commitments of multicultural, civic Ottomanism and the European import of particularistic Zionism in the years following the 1908 revolution. Shaped by cultural Hebraism, the Sephardi Jews of Palestine believed in the compatibility of Ottomanism and Zionism; they thought that the socio-cultural and economic rebirth of the Jewish community would be enriching for the Ottoman Empire and, most importantly, that such a revival would be taking place within the Ottoman body-politic. However, such views were not free of contentions—especially due to the continual forces of territorial colonialism. READ MORE…