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Calcutta: Two Years in the City

2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2013.0024

1945-8134

Graziano Krtli,

South Asian Studies and Diaspora

Jean-Baptiste Murangira recounts his participation in the genocide in Rwanda. In “Encounters,” Mohammed Dib (Algeria) describes his first encounters with Europeans. Nisa shares her life (with Marjorie Shostak) of hunting and gathering during the early twentieth century in Botswana. Like Nisa’s account, Tepilit Ole Saitoti’s “The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior” is moving in its simplicity, with the attendant theme of survival and longing. One of the most powerful pieces in the collection is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (Nigeria) “African ‘Authenticity’ and the Biafran Experience .” Echoing Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, Adichie writes, “The problem with stereotypes . . . in literature . . . is that one story can become the only story: stereotypes straitjacket our ability to think in complex ways.” Rejecting the notion of monolithic authenticity , she asserts that “to be an African in precolonial Africa was not one single thing.” Emily Ruete’s (Tanzania ) “Memoir of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar” is touted as being the first biography of an Arab woman ever written. Similarly, Ruth First’s (South Africa) “117 Days” recounts her experience of being the first white woman ever to be detained under the apartheid government’s ninety-day detention law. In his interview, Ousmane Semb ène (Senegal) explains that “creation is never detached from the social context of the man himself.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o observes during his prison stint, “A writer needs people around him. He needs live struggles of active life.” Compared with fiction , Wisner reasons that nonfiction is not taken seriously as an art form. Judging from the recent memoirs of lost boys, boy soldiers, and women of the continent, this state of affairs is surely changing. Wisner concludes that the “best African memoirs, like the best memoirs from anywhere in the world, are literature, but they are a kind of literature that is complicated by social and political dimensions .” Geoff Wisner has made a wonderful contribution to the emerging tradition. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Amit Chaudhuri. Calcutta: Two Years in the City. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307270245 In his last work, Lebensanschauung (1918), the German sociologist Georg Simmel articulated a concept of the modern individual as a boundary between boundaries and the dialectic of double boundary as the fundamental relationship of individual and society. Simmel was born, studied , and taught in Berlin, the “maximum city” that inspired his reflections on modernity and modern culture, including his famous 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In the same city, a century later, Amit Chaudhuri was contacted by his agent with the idea of him writing a nonfiction book on Calcutta. After declining, saying that he’d rather write a book on Berlin, it took him three years (and a comment from a poet friend on Calcutta’s homeless citizenry) to change his mind and three more to deliver what is arguably his most personal and perambulatory book to date. November–December 2013 • 75 Ian Reid That Untravelled World University of Western Australia Publishing In 1912 Harry Hopewell is an enthusiastic young man ready to accept the challenge of moving to Perth and working on the wireless station established by the new Australian Commonwealth government. But when his friend Nellie and her parents vanish without a trace, Harry’s world begins to crumble. Celebrated author Ian Reid’s latest tale is the incredible journey of a young man through the Great War, the Depression, and the years after. Nota Bene Edward Reicher Country of Ash Magda Bogin, tr. Bellevue Literary Press Edward Reicher, a Jewish doctor in Poland during World War II, kept copious notebooks detailing his experiences in the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes. He witnessed countless acts of horror and violence but also many instances of heroism and compassion. Along with his wife and daughter, he managed to survive the war by a combination of wit and miraculous luck. Country of Ash is a moving memoir, a finely crafted and beautifully written story. Covering approximately the biennium leading to the historic victory of the Trinamool Congress over the Communist Party of India (Marxist ), in the West Bengal assembly election of May 2011, Calcutta: Two Years in the City is a long, elliptical, meandering, and largely...