#Karan Mahajan

[whimhaven]

before heading back home to henford-on-bagley, delilah stopped by foxbury to discuss the surprise of her pregnancy with karan. but her eagerness about the wedding and the baby quickly died when she opened the dormitory door to the sight of her unfaithful fiancé.

[timelesslords]

I’ve been meaning to make a post like this for a while, so here are some fiction anti-colonial/anti-apartheid/anti-genocide books that I read for the cultural studies concentration of my literature degree, that I think are super readable/accessible and don’t see recommended often:

1. The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

A novel about a boy who was a victim of a terrorist attack as a child and how he becomes radicalized by the same terrorist group that killed his friends as a young adult.

Additional/background reading:

2. The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

a 24 hour snapshot of the last few weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war where the Sri Lankan goverment bombed a no fire zone, killing as many as 70,000 civilians, the vast majority of whom belonged to the Tamil ethnic minority. (this book is extremely graphic but very worth reading imo)

Background/additional reading:

3. White Teeth by Zadie Smith

A post-colonial novel spanning several decades centering on two WWII veterans living in Britain; one a white Englishman, one a Bangladeshi immigrant.

additional/background reading:

4. An Imperfect Blessing by Nadia Davis

A novel about the Indian community in South Africa, told primarily through the lens of a teenage girl and taking place during the dissolution of the apartheid state.

background/additional reading:

5. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

A modern retelling of Antigone set in post-9/11 Britain and Pakistan.

additional/background reading:

[alightinthelantern]

Books read and movies watched in 2023 (July to December):

Bolded verdicts (Yes!/Yes/Eh/No/NO) are links to more in-depth reviews! Should you watch/read them?

Books (fiction):

The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern): No

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (Zoraida Córdova): Yes

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): No

The Association of Small Bombs (Karan Mahajan): No

Pond (Claire-Louise Bennett): NO

Heaven (Mieko Kawakami): No

The Verifiers (Jane Pek): No

The Old Capital (Yasunari Kawabata): No

Falling Man (Don DeLillo): No

A Free Life (Ha Jin): Yes

People of the Book (Geraldine Brooks): No

The Spectacular (Fiona Davis): No

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro): Yes

Children of the Jacaranda Tree (Sahar Delijani): No

This Place: 150 Years Retold (anthology): Yes

Books (nonfiction):

The Forgetting River (Doreen Carvajal): Eh

Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II (Lena S. Andrews): Yes

Mozart's Starling (Lyanda Lynn Haupt): Yes

Poetic Form & Poetic Meter (Paul Fussell): No

Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (David Mason & John Frederick Nims): No

A Poetry Handbook (Mary Oliver): Yes

We Should Not Be Friends (Will Schwalbe): No

Seen from All Sides (Sydney Lea): No

Books (poetry):

Afterworlds (Gwendolyn MacEwen): Eh

Sailing Alone Around the Room (Billy Collins): Yes

Be With (Forrest Gander): No

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (William Carlos Williams): Yes

Horoscopes For the Dead (Billy Collins): No

The Wild Iris (Louise Gluck): Eh

Moon Crossing Bridge (Tess Gallagher): Yes

Who Shall Know Them? (Faye Kicknosway): Yes

Great Blue (Brendan Galvin): No

Collected Poems (Basil Bunting): Eh

Paterson (William Carlos Williams): No

Selected Poems (Donald Justice): No

Dear Ghosts, (Tess Gallagher): No

The Death of Sitting Bear (N. Scott Momaday): No

Evidence (Mary Oliver): No

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? (Robert Bly): Yes

Blessing the Boats (Lucille Clifton): Yes

Source (Mark Doty): No

Tell Me (Kim Addonizio): Eh

Zoo (Ogden Nash): No

Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (Lisel Mueller): No

“A” (Louis Zukovsky): NO

Flying at Night (Ted Kooser): Yes

The Man in the Black Coat Turns (Robert Bly): Yes

This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (Robert Bly): No

Nine Horses (Billy Collins): Yes

Arabian Love Poems (Nizar Kabbani): Yes

Delights & Shadows (Ted Kooser): Yes

This Great Unknowing (Denise Levertov): Yes

Young of the Year (Sydney Lea): No

Pursuit of a Wound (Sydney Lea): No

The Life Around Us (Denise Levertov): No

Red List Blue (Lizzy Fox): No

It Seems Like A Mighty Long Time (Angela Jackson): No

Some Ether (Nick Flynn): Yes

Divide These (Saskia Hamilton): No

The Simple Truth (Philip Levine): No

Saving Daylight (Jim Harrison): Eh

Midnight Salvage (Adrienne Rich): No

The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (Billy Collins): Eh

My Brother Running (Wesley McNair): Eh

Whale Day (Billy Collins): Eh

Talking Dirty to the Gods (Yusek Komunyakaa): No

A New Selected Poems (Galway Kinnell): No

The Dolphin (Robert Lowell): No

Star Route (George Longenecker): No

Brute (Emily Skaja): Eh

No Witnesses (Paul Monette): Yes!

Blood, Tin, Straw (Sharon Olds): No

Town Life (Jay Parini): No

Dead Men's Praise (Jacqueline Osherow): No

Stag's Leap (Sharon Olds): No

Sleeping with the Dictionary (Harryette Mullen): No

Looking for the Parade (Joan Murray): No

Sparrow (Carol Muske-Dukes): Yes

You can't Get There from Here (Ogden Nash): No

Carver: a Life in Poems (Marilyn Nelson): Yes

The House of Blue Light (David Kirby): No

Ariel (Sylvia Plath): No

Caribou (Charles Wright): No

The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke: No

Letters from Maine (Mary Sarton): No

Diasporic (Patty Seyburn): Eh

The Five Stages of Grief (Linda Pastan): Yes!

Not One Man’s Work (Leland Kinsey): Yes

Wise Poison (David Rivard): Yes

The Continuous Life (Mark Strand): Eh

On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Rita Dove): Yes

Fuel (Naomi Shihab Nye): Yes

Ludie’s Life (Cyntha Rylant): Yes

Wise Poison (David Rivard): Yes

My Name on His Tongue (Laila Halaby): Yes

Messenger (Ellen Bryant Voigt): Yes!

Unfortunately, it was Paradise: Selected Poems (Mahmoud Darwish): Eh

The Collected Poetry of James Wright: No

The Unlovely Child (Norman Williams): No

The New Young American Poets (anthology, 2000): Yes

The Black Maria (Aracelis Girmay): Yes!

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Ocean Vuong): Yes!

Thoughts of Her. (Casey Conte): NO

Standing Female Nude (Carol Ann Duffy): Yes!

The Tradition (Jericho Brown): Yes

Girls That Never Die (Safia Elhillo): No

Repair (C. K. Williams): No

The Big Smoke (Adrian Matejka): Yes

American Wake (Kerrin McCadden): Eh

Collected Poems (Jane Kenyon): No

E-mails from Scheherazad (Mohja Kahf): Yes!

I Had a Brother Once (Adam Mansbach): No

Holding Company (Major Jackson): No

Hunting Down the Monk (Adrie Kusserow): No

Happy Life (David Budbill): No

Prelude to Bruise (Saeed Jones): No

Wade in the Water (Tracy K. Smith): Eh

Penury (Myung Me Kim): Yes!

Commons (Myung Mi Kim): Yes!

The Final Voicemails (Max Ritvo): No

Pieces of Air in the Epic (Brenda Hillman): No

Gone (Fanny Howe): No

A Vermonter's Heritage: Listening to the Trees (Rick Bessette): No!

Roget's Illusion (Linda Bierds): No

First Hand (Linda Bierds): No

The Other Side (Julia Alvarez): No

Pig Dreams: Scenes from the life of Sylvia (Denise Levertov): Yes

Movies:

Winter Evening in Gagra (1985, Karen Shakhnazarov): Yes

My Tender and Affectionate Beast (A Hunting Accident) [1978, Emil Loteanu]: No

Fate of a Man (1959, Sergei Bondarchuk): Eh

Ordinary Fascism (aka Triumph Over Violence) (1965, Mikhail Romm): Yes

The Most Charming and Attractive (1985, Gerald Bezhanov): Yes

Gals/The Girls (1961, Boris Bednyj): Yes

Drunken Angel (1948, Akira Kurosawa): Yes

Stray Dog (1949, Akira Kurosawa): No

Viy (1967, Konstantin Yershov/Georgi Kropachyov): No

Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein): Yes

Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini): Yes!

Charade (1963, Stanley Donen): No

Dreams (1990, Akira Kurosawa): Yes!

Barton Fink (1991, Coen Brothers): No

Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (1967, Leonid Gaidai): No

Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974, Eldar Ryazanov & Franco Prosperi): Yes

By the White Sea (2022, Aleksandr Zachinyayev): Yes

Ivan’s Childhood (1962, Andrei Tarkovsky): Yes!

The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed): Yes!

The Kitchen in Paris (2014, Dmitriy Dyachenko): No

Optimistic Tragedy (1963, Samson Samsonov): Eh

White Moss (2014, Vladimir Tumayev): Yes

Oppenheimer (2023, Christopher Nolan): Yes!

Scarlet Sails (1961, Alexandr Ptushko): Yes

We'll Live Till Monday (1968, Stanislav Rostotsky): Yes

Vladivostok (2021, Anton Bormatov): No

Ballad of a Soldier (1959, Grigory Chukhray): Yes

The Theme (1979, Gleb Panfilov): Yes

A Haunting in Venice (2023, Kenneth Branagh): Yes

Barbie (2023, Greta Gerwig): Yes

Is It Easy To Be Young? (1986, Juris Podnieks): Yes

Badlands (1973), Terrence Malick: Yes

Satyricon (1969, Federico Fellini): No

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog): Yes

Fitzcarraldo (1982, Werner Herzog): No

The Illusionist (2006, Neil Burger): Yes

The Duchess (2008, Saul Dibb): Yes

Pride & Prejudice (2005, Joe Wright): Yes!

Emma (1996, Douglas McGrath): No

And here’s Part 1 of my 2023 list!

[coquelicoq]

#4 for the books asks please

thank you for the ask <3

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

hmm, i would say yes, except it was never the case that i read more than one book by a new-to-me author and liked all of them. so either i read one book and loved that book, so i think i love the author but i would really need to read more of their stuff to be sure, or i read one book and loved it so searched out more of that person's work and then found myself underwhelmed.

i only read one book by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (his book of short stories, Friday Black), but it was incredible.

also only read one book by Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring), but it made me want to read more of her stuff! and i've come across her short stories in scifi anthologies before and enjoyed them (which was what made me check out the novel). i guess that means she is not technically new to me, though.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquirel was fantastic. i get the hype now.

another author i only read one book of but loved was Valérie Perrin with Changer l'eau des fleurs. i do actually have another book of hers on my bookshelf right now and will be reading it next year, so we'll see if my opinion can be generalized to her œuvre in general or if i just really like that one book.

i'm not sure i would say i loved The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan, but i did really like his style, and i found his imagery original and at times quite breathtaking. so i'd be interested in reading more by him sometime!

loved the first book i read by Haruki Murakami (1Q84), felt disappointed by the second book i read (Kafka on the Shore), and in such a way that it retroactively made me like 1Q84 less, lol.

loved the first book i read by R. F. Kuang (Babel), then felt what i can only (and perhaps oxymoronically?) describe as "super meh" about her earlier Poppy War series (which i read all three books of even though i really should have cut my losses). but since that series was her debut, i'm hoping that just means my enjoyment of her writing is trending up as she gets more into her groove.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine blew me out of the water, but i got kind of sick of her style in the first half of the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. the book was still really good though. i would definitely read more of her work.

end-of-year book asks for the discerning follower

[lesliecafferty]

Leaving home.

She cried some more. She was thinking about how disappointed her father would be. He had gently warned her against marrying a man who lived abroad, but she had been adamant. She was a great lover of her family, of her boisterous brothers—no one had expected her to leave India. But the converse of this love of family was a need to discover herself. —"The True Margaret," Karan Mahajan

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Zadie Smith Makes 1860s London Feel Alive, and Recognizable by Karan Mahajan

By Karan Mahajan Her new novel, “The Fraud,” is based on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial, but it keeps one eye focused clearly on today’s political populism. Published: August 28, 2023 at 03:46PM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/tyGxT7V via IFTTT

[whimhaven]

the last day before these two head back to their respective schools and resume long-distance and they definitely made it worthwhile <3.

[orthotv]

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[newyorker]

“How’s it going?” I ask the barista. “How’s your day been?”

“Ah, not too busy. What are you up to?”

“Not much. Just reading.”

This, Karan Mahajan has learned, is one of the key rituals of American life. It has taken him only a decade to master.

[honeymooninthefridge]

A conversation between authors Aatish Taseer and Karan Mahajan.

[litandbasketball]

When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided.

- Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs

[skbooklist]

The Association of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahaj

“They always found that the militants were reasonable men, which was even more difficult than finding out the opposite.”

Gutsy to try to delve into the inner life of terrorists. They see themselves as political activists. 

In the current climate, who has the clear authority to determine what’s reasonable anymore?

[ravencromwell]

So Brown Girl In The Ring was one of those books it's difficult to talk about: I loved it with such ferocity that to try and articulate why only leads me into hyperbolic babble. It had such clear, elegantly simple writing but was somehow still so lush. It was a book I galloped through in less than a week, and post my depression meds that, gentlebeings, is an achievement, even for such a short novel. Hopkinson lets the narrative view and treat her characters with such compassion, even as the narrative examines the ways in which trauma begets trauma, the ways we break that cycle: redemption and regret and forging better paths for future generations. And those future generations taking those paths: grudgingly at first and then slowly coming into themselves: deciding that this world, this dystopian Toronto with all its beauty and solidarity alongside the ugliness, is worth fighting for and by God they're going to do it. With gentle, extended meditations on forgiveness and love: at its worst and best, and how we learn to distinguish the two. And it's all wrapped in Caribbean magic realism and I need y'all to go read it stat because I need a group of people to scream about this book with like I need to breathe.

But as I move on to The Association Of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan, I'm struck by the way these two masters of their craft use language in such divergent but skillful ways. * Hopkinson's style is simple: not spare by any stretch, but clear and economical. There's an excellent reason: much of the characters' dialogue is in marvelously unapologetic Caribbean dialect and unfamiliar English-only speakers are going to have to invest some time into picking up the linguistic ticks and rhythms. (Though OMG when you do, there's such a marvelous fucking return on investment, as particular characters adopt other characters' linguistic ticks to symbolize maturation in the most ingenious way--Nalo, just let me pick your brain for half an hour please; I'll become a thousandfold better writer--and the Caribbean dialect gives her this vast canvas of expression. There was such a power for me as someone insulated for so many years in the white English cultural bubble of being forced to not only absorb foreign concepts, but absorb them in their words, not tailored to my conception of the world.

The one drawback, if you can call it that, is that the way the coolest linguistic tricks Hopkinson uses require the full context of what came before in the novel to be fully appreciated makes it a profoundly difficult book to quote from out of context. Karan Mahajan, covering much more familiar subject matter, if from profoundly provocative angles, feels freer to use ornate language, equal parts gentle and so sharply incisive it feels like your skin is being flayed off. Lord help y'all, because I'm only three pages in, and I'm in love with the way they write and y'all's dash is like to be flooded with Mahajan quotes for the foreseeable future. Just look at some of these descriptions! On the way class effects even grief:

The two boys were the sum total of the Khuranas’ children, eleven and thirteen, eager to be sent out on errands; and on this particular day they had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khuranas’ old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there (the boy with them having escaped with a fracture), he said, “They’d gone to pick up my watch from the watch man.” His wife didn’t stop him, and in fact colluded in the lie. “All the watches were stopped,” she said. “The way they know the time the bomb went off is by taking the average of all the stopped watches in the watch man’s hut.” Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty—repairing an old TV that should have, by now, been replaced by one of those self-financing foreign brands—would have, in those tragic weeks that followed the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together. But of course they were poor, at least compared to their friends, and no amount of suave English, the sort that issued uncontrollably from their mouths, could change that; no amount of sobbing in Victorian sentences or chest beating before the Oxonian anchors on The News Tonight, who interviewed them, who stoked their outrage, could drape them or their dead children in the glow of foregone success.

Just...look at that for a while. This marvelous meditation on class--and on the lingering, awful effects of British colonization--wound inextricably with such a wonderful, dreadful little anecdote about how you survive the unsurvivable.

There's another wonderful passage around the funeral of the boys:

At the cremation, which occurred on the stepped bank of a Yamuna River canal speckled with a thousand ripply eyes of oil, tendrils of overgrown hypochondriac plants thrust deep into the medicinal murk, Mr. Khurana noticed that outside the ring of burning flesh and wood, little snotty children ran naked playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut. He shouldn’t have, but in the middle of the final prayers Mr. Khurana stepped out and shouted, shooing, the entire funeral party dropping back from the wavy black carpet of fire shadow. The children, not his, just looked at him and with beautiful synchronicity dove headfirst into the water, the rubber tires bobbing behind them, but the cow eyed him with muckraking glee and put its long wet tongue into the earth. The prayers continued but a tremor was evident: if the chanting had sounded before like the low buzzing of bees, the vocal swarm had now cleared and thinned as if to accommodate the linger of a gunshot. The exhilaration of Mr. Khurana’s grief gave way to the simple fact that he was a person, naked in his actions, and that as a person he was condemned to feel shame. He felt eyes rebuking him with sudden blinks between solemn verses. He stopped thinking of his two boys as they burned away before him in a flame that combed the air with its spikes of heat and sudden bone crack of bark. More ash for the cow.

That whole passage steals my breath every time: the insolence of the children, not so much cruel as bemused and grumpy. The way the weight of others expectations for how we're to deal with grief can be utterly crushing. All wrapped in a description of a part of the city as profoundly desolate as he is, as unable to get out of the cycle of desolation as he.

And one more, just cause it's my blog and I can damn it; probably my favorite so far:

Strange sights were reported. A blue fiberglass rooftop came uncorked from a shop and clattered down on a bus a few meters away; the bus braked, the rooftop slid forward, leaked a gorgeous stream of sand, and fell to the ground; the bus proceeded to crack it under its tires and keep going, its passengers dazed, even amused. (In a great city, what happens in one part never perplexes the other parts.)

He could, and probably is, as much talking about the way acts of terror are so often ignored in this vast, interconnected world of ours unless they target certain countries or people. But there's no condemnation there: it's just. a fact of life, and the rooftop incident is even used to levin the situation with a bit of gentle humor. Which makes it even more of a searing observation and indictment, makes you want to do better, pay witness and respect to more, just to live up to the gentleness about your failures in the past.

There's such kindness permeating both Hopkinson and Mahajan's tales. But Hopkinson expresses that kindness by letting complicated characters have their own povs to explain themselves and letting them have redemptive arcs and moments. Because she's being so careful with pros, her structure has to be her vehicle for reassuring us that yes, these characters attempts at betterment and redemption are being seen and will be rewarded. I don't know much about what Mahajan will do with their characters: I'm fascinated by so many questions about the victims and the bombers; there's so much grief the parents are expressing, but the why of grief, whether it's because they see their sons as whole people or extensions of themselves, is still murky. But I already adore that even the omniscient narrator exudes kindness and humor. They wrap you in these ornate sentences like blankets: yeah, the trip will be painful but see there'll be comfort along the way. It's just endlessly fascinating to watch such different stylists work their magic.

*Association is my first attempt to conquer the list of nonwestern litfic with badass voice and politics @tobermoriansass made for me. And damn, am I A. even more glad! she did and B. determined to devour it in its entirety this year after this introduction.

[asmaanixx]