Posts filed under 'Bengali Literature'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 8, 2024  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from France and India!

This week, our editors report on literary prizes around the world — from an intergenerational family saga to a new approach to the trope of the madwoman in literature, get ready to add some exciting titles to your to-be-read list!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

A few weeks back, I wrote an update for Asymptote about France’s Prix Goncourt shortlist, which at the time had just been announced—and this week, the results are in! On Monday, from among a shortlist of seven other authors, the Academie Goncourt awarded the prize to Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s Houris. Daoud’s novel follows a young Algerian woman as she navigates her country in the aftermath of the civil war of the 1990s and is Daoud’s second Goncourt success—the first being his novel Meursault, contre-enquête, which won the Prix du premier roman in 2015. I’m on a mission to read all of this year’s shortlist and only just started Houris– but from what I’ve read so far, it certainly deserves the accolades it’s received.

The Prix Femina—another of France’s coveted literary prizes—also named its winner this week. Franco-Venezuelan author Miguel Bonnefoy took home the award for his most recent novel, Le rêve du Jaguar—an intergenerational story that explores the bonds of family amid the turbulent political climate of 20th century Venezuela. The novel was also awarded the Prix du Roman de l’Academie Française last month. READ MORE…

Macabre Absurdities: The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam

July 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

Violence is the throughline of Mashiu Alam's fiction ... it remains viscerally bubbling, right under the surface.

The Meat Market by Mashiul Alam, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, Eka Westland, 2024

From its first story, The Meat Market amply indicates the weirdness that awaits readers. Written by Mashiul Alam, who was born and brought up in northern Bangladesh, this collection brings together short fiction originally written in Bengali, translated into English by Shabnam Nadiya, who continues to prove her skill. Described as “surrealist political horror,” the politics of The Meat Market is not an extraneous element limited to politicians and statecraft, but an omnipresent, embodied aspect of people’s lives; there is not a single sphere, no matter how small, devoid of it. Alam makes full use of affective disgust to drive this point home, letting the macabre and the absurd rise as the defining forces, thereby showcasing the hypocrisies of Bangladeshi society and the daily realities of the citizenry. These stories challenge social mores and underline existing fault lines, hidden behind the veneer of normalcy.

Perhaps the most chilling work in this collection is “Field Report from Roop Nagar,” which is written from the first-person perspective of an editor at a daily newspaper. As a regular work day passes, he slowly discovers that he is unable to get in touch with anyone who lives in Roop Nagar. He tries friends, colleagues, relatives—but the call either does not connect or just keeps on ringing, no one ever picking up. He asks people who live near the area to go and ascertain the situation, but they too become unreachable. Soon, the general public and the government also catch up to the fact that there is no way to connect to Roop Nagar. Only one piece of evidence is revealed: supposed field notes from one of the narrator’s eccentric colleagues, consisting of a video clip and some audio recordings. Together, they relate, in graphic detail, the horrific murder of a girl. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 4, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Areeb Ahmad, Charlie Ng, and José García Escobar

Dispatches from Hong Kong, Central America, and India!

In this week of dispatches from around the world, our Editors-at-Large report on literary awards, the establishment of a literature museum, and book fairs! From controversy surrounding the new museum in Hong Kong to the most recent Indian texts in translation, read on to learn more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

Public voices demanding for a museum of literature have been around for years in Hong Kong. On July 22, during the Hong Kong Book Fair 2023, Poon Yiu-ming, the Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Writers, announced that the Museum of Hong Kong Literature would be inaugurated in April next year in Wan Chai with support from Chief Executive Lee Ka-chiu and the Hong Kong Jockey Club. Poon petitioned Lee last year on the establishment of a literary museum. However, the announcement has attracted controversy in the literary arena. 

The concept of a museum for Hong Kong literature was proposed by a group of local writers and scholars, including Dung Kai-cheung, Tang Siu-wa, Yip Fai, Liu Waitong, and Chan Chi-tak, among others, who formed the “Hong Kong Literature Museum Advocacy Group,” in 2009. A signed petition that successfully solicited signatures from hundreds of local and international Chinese writers and scholars was published in Ming Pao, which proposed to establish a literary museum in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Since the suggestion was not adopted by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority then, the Advocacy Group proceeded to establish the House of Hong Kong Literature as a non-governmental organization for promoting and preserving Hong Kong literature.

READ MORE…

Political Mythmaking: On Barricade by Utpal Dutt

November 3, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

...in his attempt at creating a political myth, Dutt does not lose sight of his characters’ humanity.

Barricade by Utpal Dutt, translated from the Bengali by Ananda Lal, Seagull Books, 2022

The Indian playwright Utpal Dutt wrote that myth is one of the most crucial forms of political storytelling because of its ability to transcend time and space, becoming relevant over and over again in new contexts. In Towards A Revolutionary Theatre, which is simultaneously a memoir of staging radical plays amidst the tense politics of his native Indian state of West Bengal in the 1960s and 1970s, and a manifesto about the necessity of leftist theatre, he cites William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as an example of a literary work that has “freed itself of the trappings of its own age and has become a gigantic myth,” continually reinventing itself for new political circumstances. This is seen in productions set in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, which form a critique of the tyranny, demagoguery, and mob rule that make such regimes possible. 

Dutt’s play Barricade, which has been translated from the Bengali original by Indian theatre critic Ananda Lal and published by Seagull Books, is an attempt at such mythmaking. Set in the period just before the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany, the text is ostensibly about the party’s attempts to scapegoat their Communist rivals for the murder of an elderly political leader, but Dutt suggests throughout that the actual subject is the turbulent political situation then prevailing in West Bengal; the play was written in 1972, when the Congress-ruled government in Bengal was actively suppressing all forms of direct dissent. 

However, as Lal said in a recent interview, “The fact that he set Barricade in 1933, when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, didn’t make his viewers think that it was remote from their lives. On the contrary, they connected with it viscerally, sympathised and cheered at the right moments.” This speaks to Barricade’s power as political myth, one which is increasingly relevant in the contemporary Indian context exactly fifty years after it was written, especially for its narration of how various democratic institutions such as elections, the judiciary, and the media are slowly co-opted and corrupted by the ruling party. 

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Panty

May 24, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Arunava Sinha

"The panty seemed to offer itself as a second presence in this solitary place. A feeling of companionship."

I entered the apartment at eleven at night, unlocking three padlocks in succession. The flat took up the entire first floor of a tall apartment building. I paused for a few moments after entering, trying to make out my surroundings in the light coming in from the passage outside. I found the switchboard near my left hand. Stepping forward, I turned on all the switches. One after the other. And not a single light came on. But I could tell that a fan had started whirring overhead. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I found myself standing at one end of a hall. The main road below me had begun to quieten down. The light from the street lamps filtered into the dark hall through large windows, creating an unfocused chiaroscuro that came to my aid. Advancing in this hazy glow, I realised that there were doors running down both sides of the hall. On a whim I turned towards an open door on the left.

The room I entered was a large bedroom, with an ensuite. This time, too, I succeeded in locating the switchboard. I swiftly flicked all the switches on. Still not a single light came on. But this time, too, the ceiling fan began to rotate. I tried to understand the layout of the room. It wasn’t empty like the hall; rather, it was crowded with furniture. I found myself standing before a mirror stretching across the wall. The reflection didn’t seem to be mine, exactly, but of another, shadowy figure. I touched my hair. Eerily, the reflection did not. I paid no attention. Setting my bag down on the floor, I returned to the hall.  READ MORE…