Very glad to read of this news of a newly discovered novel by Claude McKay.
Black History Month this year brings with it a significant addition to the history of African-American literature: “Amiable With Big Teeth,” a “lost” novel by the notable Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay.
In 2009, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, was working toward his Ph.D. at Columbia University when he came across a double-spaced manuscript that appeared to be by McKay among the archived papers of Samuel Roth, a publisher who had often found himself in First Amendment battles.
When The Times reported on the manuscript’s authentication in 2012, the writer and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said McKay’s lost novel was important, in part, for the way it extended our view of the Harlem Renaissance, which “continued to be vibrant and creative and turned its focus to international issues” as the 1930s progressed.
I have wanted to write something about the only book by McKay that I've read - Home to Harlem. It is such a boisterous, lively book that the story becomes almost addictive, what with the almost bohemian descriptions of Harlem club life - but also the grittier side of much of the patrons...
McKay describes a quarrel between some West Indian patrons at a club and it seems in this new novel he has the story revolve around West Indian characters.
Home to Harlem is crackling with energy, especially the descriptive powers of McKay's prose that bring the Harlem of the 30s alive.
The autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois; a soliloquy on viewing my life from the last decade of its first century. Paperback – 1969
It is almost acutely amusing to read this urbane New Englander's move to Fisk and then back up north to Harvard...and his deliberate aloofness while at Harvard from his white colleagues and peers - and all along, the cool academic brilliance of this rising star...
Just getting started with Yoshihiro Tatsumi's quirky comics...the protagonist is mostly silent, under-dog-ish who goes from one difficult scenario to another...
Reading Tatsumi's stories is almost a relief - a relief to know that Japan is human after all. In not just the orderliness, precision and spare-on-emotion image (of modern Japan?) that is better known, but also in the stark spirituality of Zen as epitomized by centers such as Osaka...the idea of a boisterous humanity is somewhat alien to the image of Japan. Yes, notwithstanding the rush hour Tokyo subways and...news of Japanese parliamentarians throwing chairs - and punches - at each other...there is something about Japan and maybe Japanese character that does not let itself get out of line too far. A Japanese-stiff-upper-lip? Perhaps...
But Tatsumi's world is starkly different. Many have characterized it as representing the "Japanese underbelly." Or is it? Tatsumi frames his world as the (only) Japanese world that exists - that is the universe that his characters inhabit...there is no other "non-underbelly" out there, it seems.
These characters of Tatsumi's are certainly not high-flying bankers or automobile executives. They are not monks or landed gentry. They are ordinary folk in urban settings. And they have very ordinary jobs - window-cleaners, sewer cleaners, factory workers...the women work in bars or are housewifes, mothers, sisters...the men frequent the bars, looking for love and company and are often racked by loneliness, lack of companionship, unhappy relationships...they often find themselves in-between jobs or simply no longer employable (Occupied - Mr. Shimokawa - Children's Books Editorial Dept - "You're ranked at the bottom according to our reader polls") and strapped for cash. Their lives are visceral, raw; the tug of their needs and feelings is real - just like the reader's. And that is where Tatsumi establishes connections with the readers, I think. He does not seem to paint a pitiful picture...the hard-scrabble life is the hard-scrabble life, that is it, he seems to say. The idealized world of comics, one of super-heroes-and-heroines, of chivalry and clear-cut images of good and evil is not Tatsumi's. Nothing comes easy here. This is the real world. It is tough out there. And for every such tough moment the reader may have experienced, she is able to see one's own strife in Tatsumi's characters.
If there is a "base emotion" that we all indulge in - on the sly, perhaps - then Tatsumi's bares it in front of everyone without prudery or affectation, showing us every part of that process. He shields nothing. He explores, shares and makes visible every human act his characters decide to perform. That is how it happens, that is what people tend to do, he seems to say...in their vulnerability, in their human reactions that Tatsumi does not conceal for niceties sake, lies the universality of his appeal...
His Art -
Tatsumi's illustrations, in black and white whereby he creates a wide variety of shades - is vivid, to say the least! Industrial landscapes, steel beams or a market scene...Tatsumi gets the massiveness, the solidity, the fluidity all into his drawings.
The "flagship" story is Hell, which deals with a story post-Hiroshima and seems to question the very ethics of purveying stories of tragedies. The story has a very original twist in what seems to be the instance of a heart-wrenching image from Hiroshima. And the resolution of the twist is again typically Tatsumi - cold, calculated, raw...
"Just a man" has a soon-to-retire manager at "Dai Ichi Co. Ltd," Mr Saburo Hanayama who seems to be sliding into oblivion even before his actual retirement. "Tokyo was like a decrepit old man," the comic muses in the opening frames as it comments on the traffic gridlock...and in one of the buses, Mr. Hanayama - maybe like Tokyo - "was in no position to complain," because he was about to be "'retired' from society." The view is bleak and in his office Hanayama is already a by-gone. Yet, the young office employee, Ms. Okawa perks him up. "If only he was younger and she was interested..." - Hanayama looks on as Ms. Okawa, a seemingly impossible dream for him, moves away from his vision. Yet, some dreams come true, as does Mr. Hanayama's impossible dream - but not after he has splurged his retirement benefits onto some sort of debauchery - and yet, the dream remains just this short from true realization, in true Tatsumi fashion, who must inject human foibles and failings at the so called climactic moments...such is life, and Mr. Hanayama ends up taking his "revenge" out on an old cannon in a shrine, that had inspired him to live life after an initial bout of post-retirement depression.
"Night Falls Again" has pathos in the title itself - there is an inevitability, a sigh, a despair...the lead character is looking for some loving, like all of us. He frequents the usual places seeking some warmth and closeness. But even in that world he is made fun of, his move at establishing some proximity results in him being called a "pervert" in the crowd - and laughed at...he exits the club to mingle in the crowds, takes a shine to a particular damsel in the crowds and "follows" her...she of course realizes that he has been tailing her and she too turns around, demanding why he is following her...and calls him a "pervert"...
He moves on, his body language further seeming to crumble...he enters what seems like a park, sees couples making out...and he is not able to hold himself in any longer...at this point he looks up again to the faraway-but-always-visible iconic Tsutenkaku Tower in Osaka...and sighs, "Osaka...it is so lonely here."
On his way back home, he is confronted by an ad that promises "Hot Love..." and he throws up when he reaches. As he recuperates, we get some background to this lonely soul, as he remembers his mother in his loneliness and also complains about being the third son, about the selling off of the family farm which was not a viable proposition with the large number of family members...(here Tatsumi narrates a familiar story all over the world; yet, there is more direct pathos here, this acute loneliness, almost a helplessness, and then going over the past, as if tha would change anything...)...
There is a touching scene when the protagonist returns to the park he was in the previous night...and he comes across splotches on the grass from his nocturnal activity...and he tries to rub them out...to erase them..."FICH FICH" the sound effects go as as he rubs his shoes in the grass...
His request to learn driving at work is turned down; he goes to a restaurant to have his meal and watches two women talking about their lives, loves...but our protagonist's eyes roam, almost inexorably...to the way the women are sitting, to their legs...he wanders out into the city once again, and once again sees couples making out, sees voluptuous flesh and also just the contours of bodies he cannot have...
He ends up going to one of those places that advertise various pleasures...the last frame of the story has him at the ticket counter of one such place..."One Please," he requests through the window, looking downcast, melancholy, resigned...yes, "Night Falls Again"...and again...
As of Jan 24 2016
The Book of Gaza -
The first story, A Journey in the Opposite Direction, begins in an almost desultory manner near Gaza's border with Egypt - everyone in the "frame" of the story waiting...a sort of hopelessness and feeling of suspension in the air...but then a shift takes place in a startlingly quick manner...and you have what may be called a happy ending...
Fireflies in the Mist - Quarratulain Hyder
I remember reading Quratulain Hyder's more celebrated River of Fire/Aag Ka Darya a couple of years ago. I did not like it much - it seemed contrived then - maybe I was not ready for it...but Fireflies in the Mist is a sprawling, lush novel, largely set in what can be called undivided Bengal, moving between Dhaka, Sunderbans and Shantiniketan. There are some splendid descriptions of social scenese from a pre-partition Dhaka and the multi-cultural milieu then prevailing. The novel is pakced with details and moves at a fast clip...just a delightful read!
Sacred Spaces: A Journey with the Sufis of the Indus - Samina Quraeshi
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