Novella November: Ghachar Ghochar + Aura

Consider me embarrassed as Ghachar Ghochar is my first introduction to South Asian/Indian literature. It shouldn't have been. It won't be my last for sure, but I do kind of wish I had read something a bit more...profound. 

Vivek Shanbhag is a good writer. That above statement isn't a slight to his talent. His sentences are crisp, clean, with no frills, but are plentiful in meaning. Srinath Perura is also a great translator as the translated prose goes down smooth and easy...but that's this book's exact problem: It's too easy. 

There isn't much...here. A family was once poor and then they become rich and the money ruins them --- everything becomes ghachar ghochar: a tangled mess. Money can't buy it. Money's too tight to mention. Money changes everything. Mo' money mo' problems. I have heard all the songs, thus there isn't anything enlightening, or arresting about this family's downfall, it was just the inevitable.

"It's true what they say--it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us. When there's only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. Money had swept us up and flung us in the midst of a whirlwind."

Interest lies in the narration, this done by the loafer son. He's neither hero or voice of reason, and it's a quiet, bold choice for Shanbhag as this unnamed manchild (what is with me reading books with nameless characters this year?) isn't likeable in the slightest, and yes, that must be the point. He is observant in how his family has devolved, but nonchalant and self-victimizing in the tell. He wanders and lays about, has a "job" in the family's spice business but it's only a baseless title, as he never works for the hefty paycheck he receives like clockwork in his bank account. His sister is a selfish temperamental snob. His mother a blind loyalist to the shift of dynamics, with fears she'll be encroached upon by whatever woman her son or brother-in-law bring into the home. His father morphs from a hard-working provider to a standby mute. As they become shells of themselves, they all orbit around the ambitious, borderline autocratic uncle whose questionable business practices have gifted them this lush life --- and they dare not question it for fear of losing their newfound wealth. <--- The characters are there, but they don't evolve beyond this and feel predictable. Happy and supportive when poor, apathetic and amoral when rich. No shading, no surprises. Honestly, the family didn't seem that wholesome and devoted even while poor, so the impact of their greed wasn't jarring to me. 

There's an additional whiff of sexism that wafts in the text that didn't sit right with me. The intrusion of our narrator's wife, Anita, a liberated woman disrupts the family dynamic with her "quaint" middle-class ideals, and headstrong, yet empathetic personality. While she's painted as an disagreeable outsider by our narrator, she's actually the character I agreed with the most (#nastywomenunite). Not sure if Shanbhag is flexing realism within the fictitious or making himself a stand-in for his narrator (I always expect the latter when the character is mysteriously ~unnamed~), but there are some cringing dialogue that volleys between the family that is quite chauvinistic and bizarre, especially a really weird conversation about justifying men murdering their wives. Yeah... I'm not well-versed on the treatment of women in Indian culture, but since shitty men come in all colors, creeds and nationalities, I can deduce within the book's world, women are considered second class and a nuisance, especially to our pissbaby narrator.

Flipping that argument is how Shanbhag ascribes a double standard when it comes to our narrator's marriage to Anita. First it's a little...funny our narrator disparages strong women, this while he chooses Anita for a wife, this as she seems to be of independent mind and purpose, traits and drive he lacks. His interest in marriage is also...funny, as he's much more eager to get married to Anita than she is to him, which is quite the switch of gender dynamics. In a way, our narrator is emasculated from both sides, by his 'feminist' wife and by his moneyed uncle, and that's why this book is almost a lengthy complaint of this realization. <---Fascinating sketch there, but for how slim this book is, it doesn't feel satisfying or harbors much depth. And that ending? Oof. So unfulfilled.

All while reading I kept thinking that there was something missing, and that maybe this would be one of the few times I felt a novella needed more pages, more subplots, more depth. This book just lacks a point, or rather a unique outlook. Sure money corrupts, sure money is the root of all evil, sure mo' money breeds mo' problems...and what? This book is too flimsy to be a morality tale, as it ends up being no more than an elaborate synopsis. Disappointing.

////

"What is Aura expecting of you? What does she want, what does she want?"

I'm wondering that still after reading. What is Aura, Carlos Fuentes' most well-known, celebrated story expecting of me? What does it want? --- and maybe the questions lingering is the point. 1962 knocked back this quick drink of Gothic horror that broke ground for its warped magical realist imagery and just plain weirdness. Some decades and even weirder horror stories and films later, it has lost its luster a touch. Just a touch...

For Fuentes' aromatic and engaging writing, Aura is disjointed --- appropriately so. It has the feel of entering an opaque, congested nightmare, where it strips the fear to its naked core and breeds doubt and confusion. Told in the second person --- to where I got the nostalgic feels of it being a Choose Your Own Adventure tale --- but "we" are supposed to be Felipe Montero, a young historian who is lured by an job advertisement that seems destined for him. The advertisement leads him to the doorstep of Consuelo Llorente, a spectral, aging widow who wants Montero to organize, transcribe, and publish the memoirs of her deceased husband, General Llorente, this before she dies. Montero has some apprehension about the job till his eyes meet the magnetic green ones of Aura, Consuelo's niece, whom becomes Montero's focus of desire as much as the catalyst for his destiny. To say more would ruin the twisted trip this short novel draws one into. 

If I could go back, I'd have carved out time in my insomniac hours to read this straight through, as this story demands that you're about as delirious and woozy as the prose itself. Reading a chapter daily, I suppressed a lot of dread and suspense, leading me to feel a bit lukewarm about the whole ordeal. Still there was a lot of weirdness to go around to unmoor me during my readings: There is a red-eyed rabbit named Saga, scuttling rats and screeching unseen cats, thick, heady foliage that shrouds the perception and senses --- you have no exact grounding of where you're at that is unsettling. 

Consuelo has a Miss Havisham vibe about her, her lounging in her bed, drifting around her home, and dancing with her dead husband's military uniform was some chilling character imagery. The collision course of the past intruding into the present, blurring the distinction of the two is a special kind of terror that I particular enjoy. For all its talks of it being 'magic realism', Aura has more in common with the crumbling mansions by the moors in 19th Century Gothic romances and Lovecraftian grotesque theater, than the usual surrealistic pillows Latin literature offers, but that's just me.

Still, for me, there was *too much* going on. Cats, goats, rodents, a Voodoo doll even shows up under a dinner plate...its a exhaustive mosaic of people, animals, plants, hallways, rooms, lights, colors, objects --- of course all colliding together to stoke the eeriness --- but it lent things to become too abstract in a way that left me questioning where Fuentes was going with this and if he had made an oops by overstuffing his narrative with every horror trope known.

...then again (and once again) that's probably the point, to be unsettled, disoriented and confined in this batshit macabre nightmare, and nothing more. Not sure if I really enjoyed the journey Aura took me on, but the writing and the weirdness made this still a worthwhile read.

The Memory Police

"My memories don't feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear."

Imagine waking up and discovering your loved ones, the necessities, and freedoms of day-to-day living have vanished, one by one. Where sustenance becomes scarce, the conditions of living have devolved into a frigid, hollowed squalor, and where the protesting of such vanishings proves impossible due to your lack of remembrance of them ever existing. It in itself is difficult to fathom, but it's the life on an unnamed island where an oppressive regime has held its occupants and their memories hostage. Yoko Ogawa has created this barren totalitarian alter-verse in The Memory Police, where a young writer copes with a vacant livelihood and loved ones she can't recollect, this all as the world slips away. 

While attempting to regain a sense of herself within her writings, out unnamed narrator lives life in a limbo of fear and indifference. Fear is in the form of the shadowy Memory Police, a militarized force that dictates what is to be disposed, and erased from conscious in order to maintain control of the island's citizens. Those that thwart the disposal of, or resist to fall in line with the memory erasure are whisked away to never be seen again --- this a fate our nameless narrator's parents have endured. Indifference follows once these particular items --- whether its roses, birds, photographs or perfume --- are disposed or destroyed. Our narrator is aware of the absences of particular items, and can "feel" their absences upon waking up, but once the disposal or disappearance of such is gone, her concern, and sympathies about the losses ceases.

With haunting and understated pacing, The Memory Police draws a fascinating premise, as its world mirrors the real-life autocratic police-state regimes in North Korea and Russia, as much as arouses thoughtful 'cautionary' dialogue for Westerners about the preciousness of memory, and the dangers of censorship and corrupt surveillance operations. With these kinds of books we're always wondering how individuals can become ensnared in such a suppressive environment, and The Memory Police provides a horrible world that teeters away from fiction into reality, but somewhere down the line it becomes tangled up in its own philosophy and leaves with more questions than answers.