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| Kathmandu Sunday March 31, 2002 Chaitra 18, 2058. |
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Learning From Granta
By Manjushree Thapa
Twenty-One: The Best of Granta Magazine is an
anthology of one piece of writing for each year that Granta has been in publication,
since 1979 to 2000.
In the introduction, editor Ian Jack writes that
Granta began as a student periodical in Cambridge, a periodical that had become defunct
when postgraduate students decided to revive it in 1979. ‘All literary magazines are
brave ideas,’ writes Jack; ‘often—perhaps usually—they become broken,
brave ideas.’ The new team hoped to revitalize British literature, which they found
dull and insular. Across the Atlantic, American writing was breaking boundaries; writers
such as Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth and Donald Barthelme were writing
experimental anti-stories. Granta’s first issue deferred to such experimentation, but
in the following issues, the magazine swiftly veered away from ‘writing about writing’
to favor non-fiction writing such as reportage and travel writing, and to favor realistic
stories. Jack writes, ‘Urgency and clarity became important qualities, as did the
subject, what the stories were about.’ This is the expectation that readers now bring
to Granta; the writing in each issue may not excite stylists, but the topics covered are
always illuminating.
Twenty-One tries to capture the breadth of
Granta’s publications, and in the process sacrifices some of its depth. (Granta’s
Book of Travel and Book of Reportage offer more sustained examinations of the magazine’s
contributions to travel writing and reportage). Twenty-One reads more like an ordinary
issue of Granta, offering readers a hodge-podge of fiction and non-fiction, in a variety
of styles, and covering a wide range of issues. The book is, then, a great introduction to
the journal for those who haven’t—or in Nepal, can’t afford to—read
the regular issues, which, when they are available at all in Kathmandu bookstores, sell at
above nine hundred rupees apiece.
The fiction in Twenty-One shows how unwaveringly
the editors of Granta focus on interesting subject matter. The first story, from 1979, is
a story by Leonard Michaels on men trying, self-consciously, awkwardly, to be emotionally
vulnerable with other men in a men’s club. Next is a story by Raymond Carver, a story
of a failing relationship that captures, as does all of Carver’s work, the harrowing
spiritual loneliness of middle America. Nadine Gordimer’s 1982 story is set in
apartheid-era South Africa, and shows a woman choosing between political struggle (which
forces her family to live underground, like the dead), and political passivity, which
allows her to go on with her life, maimed though it is. This is followed by a merciless
story by Richard Ford, on a car thief trying to make a new life. The next story by Adam
Mars-Jones focuses on a club of gay men who are mourning the death of a friend who has, in
some way, betrayed them all by committing suicide at a time when so many among them are
dying of AIDS. Seamus Deane’s story is more lyrical in style than most Granta
fiction, focusing on a ghost story. A short experimental piece by Harold Pinter is thrown
in next, as though to pacify experimentalists. Then it is back to realistic fiction.
Lorrie Moore’s 1996 story shows a woman stuck in a parochial life, yearning for
something greater, more exotic, more fulfilling. Tim Lott writes of the mess made by a
couple as they separate and head for divorce. The last story of the anthology is by Joy
Williams, on the relationship between a woman and her dog, which she must put to death
after it attacks her. There is something a bit limited in the fiction list, in that the
writers included are invariably from European backgrounds.
By far the most diverse and exciting writing in
the anthology comes in its non-fiction selections. The non-fiction starts off with Bill
Buford’s essay on the end of the English novel, and the rise of the British novel—an
ambition that seems a bit modest in these days of global literature. Norman Lewis’s
‘Jackdaw Cake’ is a disturbing look at his Wales childhood amid insane
relatives. Hanif Kureshi’s 1985 piece focuses on the upper classes of Pakistan, those
who alternately party and drink bootlegged liquor, or erase their own modernity and
espouse the tenets of fundamentalist Islam. James Fenton’s ‘Snap Elections’
cover the last weeks of the Marcos regime, as his attempts to rig elections were exposed.
This is followed by a kind of suicide note by Primo Levi, a meditation on weightlessness
by a writer who—according to the Italian papers—plunged off his home to his
death. ‘Among Chickens’ by Jonathan Miller is an absurd, dry meditation on
humor. This is followed by a collection of short ruminations by European writers on the
eve of momentous changes—the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the collapse of the
Berlin wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union. This was a time, as George Steiner wrote,
when everything could go wrong.
The final non-fiction selections include a short
essay by Martha Gellhorn on anti-Semitism in Germany, ‘Why I Shall Never Return to
Germany;’ as well as Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant documentary on the demise and
revival of traditional dance in war-ravaged Cambodia. Linda Grant writes on her mother’s
deteriorating memory as she succumbs to dementia. The anthology ends with a selection from
Diana Athill’s memoirs of her work as an editor, focusing on the challenge of editing
VS Naipaul.
As for poetry, there is one atrocious poem by
Salman Rushdie included in the anthology, a poem written as calls were being made for his
life: ‘Now misters and sisters, they’ve come for my voice./ If the Cat got my
tongue, look who-who would rejoice—/muftis, politicos, ‘my own people,’
hacks.’
Is there any lesson that Nepali literary
magazines could learn from Twenty-One? Yes, surely, there is much to learn from Granta.
Perhaps we can most learn to curb our indulgence of highly stylized but not particularly
insightful writing.
(M. Thapa is the author of The Tutor of
History and Mustang Bhot in Fragments)
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