http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2005/05/siddhartha-deb-and-new-heart-of.html
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Siddhartha Deb and a new heart of darkness
Reading Siddhartha Deb’s Surface, I felt the rare thrill of seeing a talented writer working closely with the template of a revered book that’s more than 100 years old, and still managing to bring something new to it - reworking its themes and ideas in a different setting. The older novel shifting beneath the translucent surface of Deb’s book is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and more than once while reading Surface I was tempted to stop midway and give the Conrad a quick re-read. But Deb’s novel was gripping enough in itself to stop me from acting on that temptation.
In Surface a mercenary journalist, Amrit Singh, working half-heartedly for a Calcutta newspaper, travels to the north-east mainly to investigate a photograph that points to the possible killing of a porn actress by insurgents. But Amrit becomes intrigued, and then obsessed, by the talk he hears of an "alternative community" known as the Prosperity Project, located somewhere in the heart of this wilderness, and run by a visionary named Malik: "A creator of order in the wilderness. A messenger of hope for an area plunged in darkness." Everything in the novel now starts to converge towards this mythic figure, and Amrit’s journey increasingly starts to resemble the journey of Conrad’s protagonist Marlow, travelling through the African jungle in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Kurtz.
In Conrad’s novel, Marlow’s journey ends with an understanding of how a once-great man was corrupted by forces beyond his comprehension; of civilisation destroyed by the cruelty inherent in nature. In Surface, we eventually learn less about Malik and the forces that might have made and unmade him. But the similarities between Conrad’s Kurtz and Deb’s Malik are startling: from the words used by admirers to describe the two men - "remarkable", "extraordinary", "genius" - to the presence of a woman who never loses faith in the fallen figure despite all evidence to the contrary. And, in what is a telling nod to the earlier book, Deb even uses the line "Mr Malik. He’s dead" - an echo of one of literature’s most famous four-worders: "Mistah Kurtz. He dead", which is associated not only with Conrad but also T S Eliot, who used it as the epigraph for his poem "The Hollow Men".
I wasn’t all that surprised by the Conrad influence on Siddhartha Deb’s book. I’d interviewed Deb around three years ago when his first novel The Point of Return was being launched, and while the interview wasn’t a huge success (I was a bit of a greenhorn then and my questions were maybe a couple of rungs further up the Sensibility Ladder than "How do you get the idea to write a novel?") one of the things I gathered was that Deb was a big admirer of Conrad (and Faulkner, Melville and W G Sebald among others). And I remember noting with interest that his email ID had the domain name secretsharer.net ("The Secret Sharer" being a Conrad story).
Heart of Darkness was written around 1900 and published a couple of years later. So much has happened in the intervening hundred years; the world has opened up so much more than it had in several centuries previous, and it’s easy to be deluded into thinking we now know everything there is to know about the planet - that no region is inaccessible, that there are no dark places left. But as recent fiction has shown, that’s far from true. A few months ago we had Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide shedding light on the Sunderbans, a region so little is known of. Surface is another important reminder, one that also fills an important gap: that of quality fiction set in the pockets of darkness in northeast India.
-----
"And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth."
- Marlow, speaking on the banks of the river Thames, in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Siddhartha Deb and a new heart of darkness
Reading Siddhartha Deb’s Surface, I felt the rare thrill of seeing a talented writer working closely with the template of a revered book that’s more than 100 years old, and still managing to bring something new to it - reworking its themes and ideas in a different setting. The older novel shifting beneath the translucent surface of Deb’s book is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and more than once while reading Surface I was tempted to stop midway and give the Conrad a quick re-read. But Deb’s novel was gripping enough in itself to stop me from acting on that temptation.
In Surface a mercenary journalist, Amrit Singh, working half-heartedly for a Calcutta newspaper, travels to the north-east mainly to investigate a photograph that points to the possible killing of a porn actress by insurgents. But Amrit becomes intrigued, and then obsessed, by the talk he hears of an "alternative community" known as the Prosperity Project, located somewhere in the heart of this wilderness, and run by a visionary named Malik: "A creator of order in the wilderness. A messenger of hope for an area plunged in darkness." Everything in the novel now starts to converge towards this mythic figure, and Amrit’s journey increasingly starts to resemble the journey of Conrad’s protagonist Marlow, travelling through the African jungle in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Kurtz.
In Conrad’s novel, Marlow’s journey ends with an understanding of how a once-great man was corrupted by forces beyond his comprehension; of civilisation destroyed by the cruelty inherent in nature. In Surface, we eventually learn less about Malik and the forces that might have made and unmade him. But the similarities between Conrad’s Kurtz and Deb’s Malik are startling: from the words used by admirers to describe the two men - "remarkable", "extraordinary", "genius" - to the presence of a woman who never loses faith in the fallen figure despite all evidence to the contrary. And, in what is a telling nod to the earlier book, Deb even uses the line "Mr Malik. He’s dead" - an echo of one of literature’s most famous four-worders: "Mistah Kurtz. He dead", which is associated not only with Conrad but also T S Eliot, who used it as the epigraph for his poem "The Hollow Men".
I wasn’t all that surprised by the Conrad influence on Siddhartha Deb’s book. I’d interviewed Deb around three years ago when his first novel The Point of Return was being launched, and while the interview wasn’t a huge success (I was a bit of a greenhorn then and my questions were maybe a couple of rungs further up the Sensibility Ladder than "How do you get the idea to write a novel?") one of the things I gathered was that Deb was a big admirer of Conrad (and Faulkner, Melville and W G Sebald among others). And I remember noting with interest that his email ID had the domain name secretsharer.net ("The Secret Sharer" being a Conrad story).
Heart of Darkness was written around 1900 and published a couple of years later. So much has happened in the intervening hundred years; the world has opened up so much more than it had in several centuries previous, and it’s easy to be deluded into thinking we now know everything there is to know about the planet - that no region is inaccessible, that there are no dark places left. But as recent fiction has shown, that’s far from true. A few months ago we had Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide shedding light on the Sunderbans, a region so little is known of. Surface is another important reminder, one that also fills an important gap: that of quality fiction set in the pockets of darkness in northeast India.
-----
"And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth."
- Marlow, speaking on the banks of the river Thames, in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness
posted by bitandpieces at 12:35 PM
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