Books 19
including her four beloved brothers and their friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. Desperate to act, she must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?
The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Nesha Dixit, Juggernaut, ISBN 9789353453541, £12.99
What does the life of an ordinary working-class Indian look and feel like? In this book, Neha Dixit traces the story of one such faceless Indian woman, from the early 1990s to the present day. What emerges is a picture of a life lived under constant corrosive tension. Syeda X left Banaras for Delhi with her young family in the aftermath of riots triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling multiple jobs a day – from trimming the loose threads of jeans to cooking namkeen, and from shelling almonds to making tea strainers. Syeda has done over 50 different types of work, earning paltry sums in the process. And if she ever took a day off, her job would be lost to another faceless migrant. Researched for close to a decade, this book introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: a rickshaw driver in Chandni Chowk who ends up tragically dead in a terrorist blast; a doctor who gets arrested for pre-natal sex determination; a gau rakshak whose sister elopes with Syeda’s son; and policemen who delight in beating young Muslim men. In the end, things comes to a grotesque full circle for Syeda. Her life is upturned for the umpteenth time during the
Delhi riots of 2020. But displacement, tragedy, and hardship are the things she is used to – being poor, Muslim, and a woman.
The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories edited and translated by Arunava Sinha, Penguin Classics, ISBN 9780241562635, £35
Te prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonisers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the 20th century, a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions. Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy that reflected the turmoil of their times: these stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition, and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction, and intimate domestic tales. A first in English, this anthology gathers together a century’s worth of stories.
Before the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb, translated by Kay Kelkkinen, MacLehose, ISBN £10.99
Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy’s clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father. Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Maleka prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in
Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up. Habayeb weaves an affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai.
The Good Women of Fudi by Liu Hong, Scriber, ISBN 9781915590572, £10.99
Best friends Jiali and Wu Fang know that no man is a match for them. In their small harbour town of Fudi, they practise sword fighting, write couplets to one another, and strut around dressed as men. Jiali is a renowned poet and Wu Fang is set to become China’s first female surgeon. But when Wu Fang returns from medical training in Japan, she is horrified to hear of Jiali’s marriage to a man who cannot even match her couplets, and confused by her intense feelings of jealousy towards her friend’s new husband, Yanbu. Ocean man Charles has arrived in Fudi to start a new life. He eschews the company of his fellow foreigners, preferring to spend time with new colleague Yanbu, his wife, Jiali, and her friend, Wu Fang. Over the course of several months, he grows close to them all, in increasingly confusing ways, but what will happen when he is forced to choose between his country and his friends?
The Factory
by Hiroko Oyamada, translate by David Boyd, Granta, 9781803510590, £12.99
Within the sprawling industrial complex, three employees are assigned to different departments. Tere, each must focus on a specific
Table For One: Stories by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231192033, £15
An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrols in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up
hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm. In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Yun’s fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Troughout the book, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Yun’s stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humour highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialisation and the displacement of traditional culture.
task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work. Days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What is going on with the strange animals here? And after a while – it could be weeks or years – the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: what am I doing here?
The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, Faber, ISBN 9780571382309, £10.35
Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something ‘like you would see in a Spielberg movie’. But while
her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she’s forgotten something important about her past. Deciding to take a break, she stays with her eccentric but beloved aunt Yukino. Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.
Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Maki Kashimada, translated by Haydn Trowell, ISBN 9781787704954, £14.99
A housewife finds herself haunted by visions of a mushroom cloud. She abruptly leaves her husband and son to travel alone to the city of Nagasaki, where she soon begins an affair with a young Russian-Japanese
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ASIAN ART | WINTER 2024
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