Books we read
A cross-section of people, from school students to university teachers, write about the best book they read in 2004
Kajal Bandyopadhyay, academic and translator
Talash by Shaheen Akhtar for handling the theme of our Liberation War with depth, dimension, and truthfulness, for raising questions only very honest thinkers will raise, for evaluating the contribution of our women to the Liberation War. The novel is finally a talash, a search, for what little has survived after the sacrifices that were made during the Liberation War.
Syed Manzoorul Islam, academic and literary critic
Poet Shamsur Rahman’s Kaler Dhuloy Lekha. Basically an autobiography, the book nevertheless touches on important historical, political and cultural developments of his time. Written in a simple and moving style, the book is also a veritable portrait gallery as Rahman writes feelingly about his family, friends, fellow poets and others he came close to in different times of his life. Rahman take his reader by hand in a journey through a rich and colourful lifetime, dotted with events – some interesting or exciting, some sad, but described with passion and gusto.
Kaiser Haq, academic and poet
I was delighted to come across Sartre: Philosopher of the Twentieth Century
(2003) by Bernard Henri-Levy, in an English translation published by Polity Press. It evinces a renewed interest in Jean-Paul Sartre, who is being rediscovered by young intellectuals in France as well as the Anglo-Saxon world. Bernard Henri-Levy is a leading French intellectual of the generation immediately following that of Foucault, Barthes and Derrida. He was the most prominent of the group journalistically labelled “les nouveaux philosophes” and was considered a maverick disciple of Foucault.
Haroun Al-Rashid, banker
Undoubtedly The Algebra of Infinite Justice by Arundhuti Roy for being an illuminating exposition of World Bank’s dark side in the name of development and U S A’s criminal activities and violation of human rights and promotion of warfare as business – all in the name of democracy, liberty and freedom.
Naziha Amin, O’ Level candidate
The best book I’ve read this year is the book Harry Potter fans all over the world have awaited with great anticipation. It is the fifth Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. J. K. Rowling’s magic is intensified with the portrayal of the famous boy Harry’s life in the fifth year of school, which pretty much all “non-magical” teenagers like myself can relate to.
Nausheen Rahman, O’ Level English teacher
Seeking the Taj by Elaine Williams for its style (simple, yet vividly descriptive), its fairy-tale-like narration (while dealing with very real issues), and the fact that it was almost like a travel-guide (which gives a lovely picture of the real India).
Nazma Alam, kindergarten teacher
Strange Pilgrims (collection of short stories by Garcia Marquez) because it was easy to read with its simple, fluid yet beautiful style.
A.K.M. Bari, businessman
The best book I read this year was The Seal of the Prophet by Syed Ali Ashraf. It taught me many events I hadn’t known in the life of the Prophet.
Rasheduzzaman, academic and research scholar
As a student of international relations, I found Michael Howard’s The Invention of Peace and the Reinvention of War (2002) simply riveting. In one hundred and twenty-six pages, Howard presents the changing pattern of war in Europe from AD 800 onwards till the 9/11 attacks on the US. He also writes about the invention of peace since " War appears to be as old as mankind but peace is a modern invention." I find it difficult to believe that someone can write so lucidly and cogently about issues as complex as war and peace. It is a book I would recommend to anyone trying to understand issues which have affected us since the beginning of time.
Fakrul Alam, academic and literary critic
The book that I enjoyed reading the most this year was Caryl Phillips's novel A Distant Shore. It was the last novel that I read as part of my work as a member of the jury of this year's Commonwealth Prize for the Eurasian region. Till then, I couldn't figure out which book would get my nod for the Best Book Award. (I had decided that Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time would get my nod for the first book.) But as soon as I finished reading Phillips's book, I knew that here was a superb book by the Caribbean-English novelist about cultures colliding, diasporas, human relationships, violence and the search for stability and peace in a world that is unsettled, written in a simple and understated manner which reminds us that the art that conceals art is the most moving.
Nuzhat Amin Mannan, academic and poet
From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet by Vikram Seth for its wry, humane view of China and its scintillating prose.
Zerin Alam, academic
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon for its novel approach. It’s a crime thriller told from the unusual perspective of an autistic child.
Tahmina Ahmed, academic and drama director
Re-read Anna Karenina after watching Anna of the Tropics, a play about Cuban refugees settling in the US. I liked Anna Karenina because of the way Tolstoy has built up the picture of a whole society, starting with a forbidden love between two people. It’s like a circle of ripples created when you throw a stone in the pond – the ripples ultimately reach the farthest edge of the pond. Anna’s love changes the lives of all the people around her.
Musharrat Hossain, English Honours student
Dream Catcher by Margaret Salinger is the best book I’ve read this year. This is a memoir by the daughter of the remarkable writer, J.D. Salinger. Extremely lucid and colloquial, the book throws light on the life of the most “idiosyncratic recluse” of the twentieth century.
Sanjeeda Islam, Project Officer, international organization
Next to Kin by Joanna Trollope which I read on a plane journey. I am not sure why I liked it, but it could be because I was hating my journey and took the book to be my travel companion. Apart from that I liked the novel as it described very minutely the intricacies of family relationships, a father-daughter relationship and the conflict between farm life and city life. Characterization was also one thing I liked in the book.
Badiuddin Nazir, consulting editor, publishing house
Rotting from the Head: Donors and LDC Corruption edited by Salim Rashid because of its courage and documentation of facts.
Shawkat Hussain, academic
The book I loved most this year is Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? Why? Because it is the funniest, most irreverent, and most devastating critique of President Bush and his neo-con cronies that I have read.
Khondakar Ashraf Hossain, academic and poet
The book I enjoyed reading the most this year is Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey which tells the story of a Parsi family based in Bombay, but the background is provided by the Bangladesh War of 1971. The book is virtually unputdownable, and I nearly missed the train as I was reading it at Chittagong Station, waiting for Turna Nishitha. It is immensely humorous too, spattered with erotic jokes and word-play. But the real treat is the piercing irony with which the central character, an army major working with RAW, is portrayed, and with such humane understanding.
Syed Badrul Ahsan, journalist
It is a trifle hard to have to choose a favourite book, for obvious reasons. Every work has its own appeal because of its distinctive theme. Even so, for me two books in the year 2004 have made quite a difference. Sardar Fazlul Karim’s Nanakotha Ebong Nanakothar Porer Kotha has had particular significance because of the wide range of essays the work encapsulates. You get, in a nutshell as it were, a running commentary on Bangladesh’s history as it evolved between the 1960s and 1980s. The other work is a new edition of Qazi Motahar Husain’s Smriti Kotha. The recapitulation, in conversation format, of what was truly an intellectual past holds the work together. Besides, the anecdotal aspects of the work, particularly Husain’s narration of his ties to Rebel Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, bring out the poignancy associated with an age now irretrievably lost to us.
Nurul Karim Nasim, academic
Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher for its focus on women’s rights.
Farhana Ahmed, Lecturer in English
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri which I read on my return from Canada this year as I could empathize with the mother figure. I’m sure all immigrants experience the way of life Lahiri portrays in the book. The book interested me so much that I was inspired to read Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
Munasir Kamal, English Honours student
George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Some wise person once said, “You really love the ones you hate.” This phrase perfectly describes my relationship with Orwell. I detest the way he paints such a pessimistic picture of life, but at the same time I have to admire his dexterity in pointing out the truth.
Zayd Omar, school student
The best book I read this year was The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. I liked it because of its complexity and the hardship people had to go through during the reign of the aliens from outer space. I also liked it because it shows that small things even microscopic things can destroy things a hundred times their size.
Tahmeed Omar, school student
The best book I read this year was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. I liked the book because Charlie who was very poor was given the best chocolate factory in the world by the factory owner, Willy Wonka.
Pavana Khan, school student
The best book I read this year was The Twits by Roald Dahl. It is an old book and I read it last week for the second time. I liked the book because the monkeys and the Roly Poly Bird and the other birds tricked the Twits and at last they both shrunk to death because of their foolishness. I felt happy because they deserved this punishment for their meanness.
Poems on 1971
Abdul Mannan Syed
Liberation War
It was civil war
Inside of me.
I flared like a moon against the night.
At first a thin moon,
It flashed in the dark field of the horizon
Like a golden scythe.
A two-edged sword of comfort and despair,
cut me asunder,
the two halves warred with each other.
No sooner did I step on the inviting grass
than a hidden mine blew me
into smithereens.
Squatting on the grass, I again put myself
together.
A barricade of pushcarts
stretched the entire length and breadth
of the street
Against onrushing tanks,
Humanism against brutality
Moon against night,
Green leaves against dark cannons.
A battalion of stars marched along the
southern sky
while the north was swallowed up
in black darkness.
My hope-illumined ship, moving smoothly
along a stretch of dark waters, suddenly sank,
hit by a submarine.
Surfacing again, I reassembled it
like a toy ship.
A golden cannon of a moon,
screened by sand-strewn green coconut leaves,
silently roared and fired a volley
of strong moonshine.
This went on all night,
a ceaseless strife
between darkness and moonlight.
Towards dawn
my civil war was transformed
into a war of liberation.
Translated by Kabir Chowdhury
This translation is included in Hayat Saif and Mahbub Talukdar ed., A Selection of Contemporary Verse from Bangladesh
Nature at the Slaughter Ground
Humayun Kabir
Ask the wind with your eyes
very close to the river,
See if there is any sign there.
The watery ferns surely knew the place,
but they are silent now.
They were surely here.
See, how a bird scratches her feathers
with her melancholy beak.
Even when the sun moves away
the shadow persists.
Ask the glow-worms at dusk,
There are quivering signs
on the muddy shore.
No fishermen came here.
Whose footprints then are these
on the muddy bank?
The members of Nature
know certain things.
Grass, tell us of the blood that was spilled.
Tell us, who did you recognize?
Was there one who had forgotten all his sorrow
thinking of the beautiful face
of his grieving beloved,
someone who had grown pale with pain?
Who was he that had wanted to see his father for the last time,
had called out to his brother, mingling his cry with the cry of a water-fowl?
They were here.
The trees stand motionless now.
Now there is no sign of blood anywhere
Only a few leaves of grass look singed,
only the earth shows a few scratches
here and there.
Translated by Kabir Chowdhury
This translation is included in Kabir Chowdhury, ed. and trans., 14 Young Poets of Bangladesh. The poem refers to the swamps and marshes of Mirpur, a suburb of Dhaka, where a number of Bangladeshi intellectuals were killed by the Pakistani forces and their collaborators in December 1971.
BOOK REVIEW
Whispered love and tremors of the heart
by Syed Badrul Ahsan
Poetry suffers when it does not throb in shades of the reflective. It is a point Nuzhat Amin Mannan clearly remains aware of, which is just as well. Having travelled through a pretty long road studying, and coming to terms with, English literature, Mannan now deals head on with poetry which works its way up in her mind, seeps into her heart and goes out to reach the soul in people around her. That is the idea one can draw, if one were inclined to, from a reading of the collection of poetry she calls Rhododendron Lane. There is something of the sensuous about the title, and something which comes draped in memory. The memory is hers, or it could be someone else’s. The poet leaves it all open to interpretation. Poetry is, after all, a matter of interpretation.
Rhododendron lane / sometimes, in a mostly unvisited / letter box, shivering all by itself / a foreign stamp grows damp in rain
Mannan displays an easy facility with the use of imagery. And yet she does not cause fatigue, a basic reason for it being her comprehension of all those modern sensitivities which have in these times characterised poetry. In “Koch and Devjani,” it is a canvas – twisted and unkempt – she draws of the relationship between man and woman. Or is it a relationship at all, seeing that it has gone sour? The point the poet seeks to drive home is the sheer trauma of the age that has seeped into the dialogue between Koch and Devjani:
I am not saying sorry, Devjani / I am not saying sorry because I / was able to live happily without you / there was no deception . . .
The sense of loss, of new yearning despite the old loss, courses through the poetry here. Glimpses of it are to be had in the poem “Love Song.” The plaintive question, the secret wish for one to wait, all come tempered with the possibility of desire ultimately not in a state to be fulfilled. Observe the searing opening:
Will you wait for me? / before the afternoons crush / and the evenings make a mistake / before the shadows curl like a / cruel grin and the windows become shut / against a short smileless date?
Echoes of Eliot? Perhaps. But then, few poets writing in English have been able to stay out of the long, insistent shadow of the undisputed literary voice of the twentieth century. Mannan makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. She only gives herself away a little more:
I am not Prufrock / I wasn’t ever / meant to be Ophelia either / I know I won’t linger forever. I know / I can’t bear to drown by myself alone
The poetic consciousness thus moves on, from Eliot and comes to rest with Shakespeare. At the edge of twilight, though, the question remains the original one:
Will you wait for me, by any chance?
Nuzhat Mannan’s handling of the tenuous beginnings of love are essentially a fine tuning of emotion. She speaks of the silence, perhaps incoherence, of men and women who understand the language in the wild beatings of their hearts. But such a state of uproar in the sensibilities comes as well in all the trappings of fear, of apprehension at the uncertain nature of a moment seemingly trapped in time. “In Love” is a convergence of feelings which may define the inviolable quality of romance. Listen to the tremor in the voice of the one in love, addressing the other one in love:
Then one of us just / had to do it / You rose and said / it was / very late / and I / reassured / you that / it was.
Spot the coming dawn in that late hour of day. The truth that the dawning of love in the heart goes beyond time and space, that in the setting of the sun is the possibility of its rising anew are thoughts Mannan sets forth within and beyond the poem. But love also holds within it the possibility of stumbling into disappointment. The present does not hold the past, which is when the time comes for the heart to break or the mind to take a realistic, even prosaic view of things. There are no bridges between the varied phases of time, and the landscape can only turn into a new definition of elemental amazement. That is how the past experiences the stones hurled at it by a callous, or shocked, present – in “Love Story”:
She saw him standing / a hundred and fifty inches away / after twenty-three or thirty-two years / And Nothing happened / no electricity / no chemistry – nothing at all / nothing blatantly happened.
Nothing happens, in the everything that happens. Poetry happens, amidst the falling leaves of autumn, in the whispered love that ought not to be. And thus in “The Other Woman”:
Her husband sleeps in / my arms / with him a part of / her I had not / bargained for.
MAIN PAGE | TOP
|
|
|
