?? Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay,
Stories 
+
Though his name may be unfamiliar, this Bengali writer (died 1950) wrote the book that inspired one of the great classics of world cinema:
Pather Panchali. (He also wrote
Aranyak, which several others here have read and enjoyed.) He is one of my favorite authors and I have read many of his novels and many of his stories; this is yet another story collection. This selection of eight (out of several hundred) stories is generally well-translated and is a good introduction to the writer. The brilliance of his stories lies at once in his focus on people discovering their destinies amid their own complicated circumstances as well as for the feeling of intimacy he evokes even his manner of telling the stories is familiar, comfortable, and perhaps even a little rambling. Bandyopadhyay has a gift for expressing the landscape as well as an empathy for his characters even as he wrote about both rural and urban subjects. His narrative is notable for its ability to express the views of different characters honestly and sympathetically, and there is a pervading gentle-ness about his language. There is, too, among them, a persistence, a recalcitrance — a stubborn humanity — that makes them all recognizable. They are not all likeable, they are not all good people, but they are all deeply human in a way that seems all too rare in literature.
?? John Munonye,
The Only Son
Munonye wrote seven novels of which this is the first, published in 1966. He is one of the great Nigerian novelists and is particularly celebrated for his ability to convey the energy of Nigerian life in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of reading about Munonye online, I found
this article discussing his entire body of work and observing that “While for Achebe the Igbo encounter with Europe led to the death of several protagonists, and to the death of the Igbo way of life, for Munonye the coming of Europeans with their new administrations, religion, and schools offer his protagonists new challenges, opens new vistas, and provides better alternatives that lead to progress….” This book tells the story of a single mother raising a son; a mother who has poured her entire life and energies into that son, denying herself most things (including remarriage) only to have him turn away from traditional Igbo life and embrace Christianity. (It is worthwhile to note that Munonye was born into a family that had already converted to Christianity.) The book is the first volume in a trilogy and although the second and third volumes deal with the son’s marriage and eventual return to his home village as a success, the novel should stand on its own and I was disappointed in that regard. It ends with the mother happily (apparently) remarried and pregnant with another child; the son has left the village, rejecting his mother, his village, and tradition, wholeheartedly adopting Western religion and a “modern” way of life. The ending to
The Only Son is so unresolved for both characters that it is difficult to glean any message or meaning from everything that has happened. Munonye’s approval of Christianity and at least some of Western culture is implicit, as is Munonye’s optimism, but he communicates this approval only minimally and indirectly and gives no hint of what is to come.
?? Jalâl âl-e Ahmad,
The School Principal [unrated]
Jalâl âl-e Ahmad was a famous Iranian intellectual and writer (1923-1969). (You can find an entry on him at Wikipedia, but there are far better biographies
here or
here.) Virtually none of his works have been translated into English—shame on us—but since I read another of his novels a decade or more ago, he and it have stayed in my mind. So I decided to tackle this short book, really a novella at 100 pages; it is widely acknowledged to be his best work. Very sadly, the translation—though it often reads easily (and, also, too often, clumsily)—is a travesty. It is embarrassing that this ever saw the light of day and even worse that no other translation into English exists. I found it odd that I could find
nothing about the translator online. I was so completely baffled at why
The School Principal is considered a world-class book that I spent a long time online reading about the author and, in some cases, this version. It’s hard to find out much about the work since the author is all-but-unknown in the West and the book itself is extremely difficult to find. And although it took a lot of digging, I did eventually find a very helpful review of the book and this translation in a highly specialized academic journal by a professor in the field of Iranian literature. I excerpt from his review:
“Al-e Ahmad's works are esteemed as much for their sharply critical portraits of contemporary Iranian society as for the nervous, idiomatic quality of his prose. The School Principal is a generally successful wedding of both these attributes.”
“Despite the many passages which [the translator] has translated both accurately and well, the work as a whole is so marred by errors and inaccuracies of every sort that it only dimly reflects the quality of the original.”
“It is not the extreme wrongness of any individual error that makes the translation so objectionable…. Rather, it is the cumulative effect of renderings that are wrong or only infelicitous added to English that is too often clumsy or even ungrammatical, compounded by a rich variety of typographical and editorial mistakes which makes it so unsatisfactory."
The story is a first-person narrative by a teacher-turned-school principal in 1950s Iran. The principal quickly finds that, contrary to his expectations, his new responsibilities are disagreeable and frustrating. His teachers are self-involved, spending far more time on their own problems than teaching. The national ministry of education is a nightmare of bureaucracy, and the parents of the school’s students show up only when they have a complaint. Although the narrator may be capable and considerate, he is clearly also self-absorbed and very unhappy. The book is a critique of the social, economic, and intellectual circumstances Iran found itself in during the 1950s. But the translation makes it difficult to discern much more than that. (To be scrupulously even-handed, I will say that you will find
a different take on the work at “The Complete Review.” Though I generally find him a reliable reviewer, I honestly believe that he missed the boat on this one, unless he read a different and far better translation. Should I have succeeded in piquing your interest in Jalâl âl-e Ahmad, look instead for his other work—far better translated—called
By the Pen. It’s also scarce, but I found a number of copies by searching online.)
?? Lil Bahadur Chettri,
Mountains Painted With Turmeric
This 122-page novel is set in eastern Nepal. Though it has a rather basic plot centered on a young farmer’s efforts to provide for his wife and infant son and to help his younger sister get married, this book is ultimately not about the story line. For those familiar with Giovanni Verga, it resembles that author’s gut-wrenching
House by the Medlar Tree, another tale of poverty and bad luck. But even its Chettri rejected the simple view, writing that the book “might not entertain its readers, because that is not its aim. In it I have simply tried to give a picture of the villages in the hills of Nepal. Life in the hills -- the joys and sorrows of the villages and the events that happen there -- is the essence of [the book]. From a literary point of view, the standard of this novel is not high, because I have based it on reality.” Indeed, the author is at pains to be even-handed. The protagonist makes some unwise decisions, he has a run of bad luck, and—certainly—there are those willing to take advantage of him. But the book is not about the exploitation of the peasants by the wealthier land owners—a topic understandably common in many national literatures. Eventually, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the family loses everything and the book ends as the family leaves their former home and village, headed they know not where to do what they can. Indeed, the ending is left open. The strength of the book is in its portrayal of what the author says he aimed to do: offer the reader a detailed picture of rural life in Nepal. You learn how the village functions, how people of different classes (and sexes) deal with one another, how life proceeds. The writing is straightforward and unadorned. But I think that, perhaps unlike other works struggling to make a “statement,” this one succeeds in part because of its approach, its simplicity, and its fairness to all. Recommended.
