A Burning

 A Burning 

A novel by Megha Majumdar 

This 2020 novel is very current to the moment globally although set entirely in India.

It is a very personal story of a very poor Muslim young woman who gets accused of being a terrorist involved in a horrible torching of a passenger train filled with people; a burning.

This occurs because of a casual Facebook “friendship” she has with someone she doesn’t really know who is said to be a “terrorist recruiter”.
She only has facebook because she was able to finally earn enough money for a smartphone.

  The novel is a very engaging story of Jivan, the accused, PT Sir, the physical education teacher in a school that Jivan has attended, and Lovely, a young hijra outcast taking an acting class and dreaming of Bollywood stardom. Jivan knows Lovely because she has been helping her to learn English.
  We follow these three into the story. The Jivan sections are written in first person and she tells her sad life story. A third person voice tells us about Lovely and PT Sir.
The reader becomes very intimate with Jivan, who is a fine young woman just struggling to make a better life, a marginal life, up from a not really sustainable slum life, for herself, her mother and disabled father.  

Our pathetic hunger and dreams of stardom are a major part of this story that can be transferred to most anywhere in the mass media saturated world. We all seek status. Want to be seen by our peers as doing well, achieving, succeeding. And maybe catching the eye of something bigger, fame and fortune.  This varies widely depending on need, and situational circumstances. This is clearly illustrated in the characters of PT Sir and Lovely. Status seaking, although directly related to economic improvement, really comes from a deeper emotional need to be seen, to matter. The novel shows us how that works on PT Sir and Lovely.

PT Sir comes upon a mass outdoor rally of a right-wing populist Hindi political party. The microphone fails and PT Sir leaps to the stage to quickly remedy the situation. This act brings him to the attention of the leaders. He is thrilled and sucked in by the leaders who begin to use him.

Lovely and PT Sir must learn to compromise their ethics and truths or abandon their dreams of recognition and economic improvement. They are uneasy with that. The thoughtful reader is invited to question themselves. Would we sacrifice justice to secure elevation of status, and to what degree?

This is a very fine novel. It is written in a spare style. That lack of florid prose seems to clarify and heighten the reality of the story. It draws us into the story of these individuals rather than impressing us with writing style.
The result is a stunningly impressive and fully realized story.
The Jivan parts, written in first person, are particularly moving.

I cannot think of a better novel than this. Totally of the moment with an underlying theme of how we can be manipulated through our need of status,
It is great, vital and deals with things that touch all our lives. 

By Steve Carter (Aug 2021)

A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi

This novel is a snapshot of current affairs, the emotional environment of USA, and we who inhabit it.
The USA is not really a easy place to find a feeling of home and community. Some of us feel that is made worse by clever marketing strategies of international corporate interests that have learned that divide and sell is a profitable business model. I don’t mean to suggest that there was necessarily a conspiracy meeting of big business cabals that came up with this, but rather it is a result of mass media run as for-profit business by for-profit businesses and supported by the backing of for-profit business, naturally supporting its interest. We are set against one another to sell things. The buying choice of children is not understandable to parents, this aids in moving product and causes more alienation from one another since we have little to identify ourselves with other than our product purchase choices.

This novel is not about business and mass media, but this has set the mood.
It is simply a story of teens in Los Angeles area, Southern California and blowback of US imperialism. The man figure of the novel is Raz, the USA born son of middle aged Iranian immigrants. In a way it parallels the stories of early 20th Century European immigrant children whose parents have made the very bold and radical move to an attempted a new better life in America, once A Good Country, only to find their children groundless, between worlds, subject to abuse by the children of the those who came here a generation or so before them, looking for a place to belong and susceptible to conscription in street gangs.

Here the setting is not the tenements of the Lower East Side with its poverty, but the children of very successful immigrants in fine houses with swimming pools in Laguna Beach, yet still lost, abused by religious intolerance made far worse by religious fundamentalism global terrorism that is a result of USA’s and The West’s century of manipulations in the mid-east. And what does popular USA

corporate secular culture offer? It is apparently void of a spiritual center, or even basic community. This environment is ripe for the fundamentalist fringes, of whatever origin, religious, or political, to come to the rescue.

The novel is really a very simple story, lucidly and believably told, of a bright sweet teen boy’s final high school years and his yearning for a place to belong with loving partners, friends.

The novel is written by a woman who is very good at creating the world of a young man including his sexuality and the casual marijuana use of him and his young friends.

In the news terrorist attacks cause the plot to shift toward tragedy in this engaging yet simply plotted novel.