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Book Review: The Lives of Others

Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker prize for The Lives of Others, Neel Mukherjee talks to Gargi Gupta about the inspiration behind his second novel

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Book: The Lives of Others

Author: Neel Mukherjee

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 528

Price: Rs 284

It's only mid-morning, but Neel Mukherjee is already wrapping up his first interview of the day as I walk into a lounge on the 20th floor of a posh hotel in Delhi. An early start, I think as I sit waiting, listening idly to the last of the conversation. It's been hectic, Mukherjee agrees, as I take the newly vacated spot on the couch opposite him — three interviews a day, one after the other. Mukherjee is on a six-day visit arranged by his publishers after news of The Lives of Others making it to the Booker shortlist came in. But Mukherjee is not complaining. "One has to do it," he says, stoically, alive to the "great good luck" that the Booker shortlist means, the spike in sales and readers, the fact that it'll make it that much easier to sell his next book, or two, and yet, all too aware, that in the larger scheme of things, "one is only as good as one's last book".

How did you come to pick 1960s Bengal as the setting of The Lives of Others? Were you thinking of a narrative around the Maoist insurgency that has riven large parts of eastern and central India, which traces its origins to the students' movement in Calcutta and the Naxalbari peasants' rebellion in that decade?
I don't remember why I took on that period. whether I took it on because I wanted to write about the Naxal movement, or picked the Naxal movement because I was writing about the period. Perhaps, the former because I wanted to write about a time of idealism and great optimism, about a generation of people who thought they could change the world for a better place. I find that a very moving idea — what else would one want to do with the world except change it?

When I began, I thought I would finish the novel in 1970. The two epilogues came much later. I wanted to give an indication of the afterlife of the Naxal movement — the Maoists, as they are called now. It's a strange fruit that revolution bore, I think.
Decay interests me a lot. One etiology of Naxalism you could draw is that revolutionary changes and movements arise from decadent cultures that, I feel, are inevitably self-destructive. A new order can only come in from the destruction of the old, riven apart by contradictions.

Kolkata is an integral part of your novel. When did you leave the city and do you go back now?
It's been 22 years. I don't go to Kolkata at all now. I went many times when I was writing the book — to Kolkata, to Medinipur. I come every year to India, to Mumbai, where my brother stays, and spend a month every time. I find Mumbai an urban place unlike Kolkata which is provincial — people watching, twitching curtains, gossiping...

Your portrait of the Ghosh family, with all its dysfunctionalities, is meticulous, intimate, and true to life. Was it like yours in any way?
No, no, I was not born in this class bracket at all, but (in one) far lower. North Kolkata is foreign...I know south Kolkata much better. Neither did I grow up in a joint family with three generations under one roof. But this world was not unfamiliar to me. I knew people who were growing up in joint families. I had a very good idea of what a family, once rich, now fallen on slightly harder times, could be like. It also forms a big spine of Bengali literature and Bengali culture, and I allude a lot to Bengali novels like Aranyer Din Ratri, Hazaar Churaari'r Maa, Uttaradhikar, Kalbela and Kalpurush, and Manik Bandopadhyay's short short on the 1943 Bengal famine, Chhiniye khaay'ni keno?.

Your idiom and syntax is closer to Bengali than English. Many of the allusions and situations are also laden with cultural specificity. Weren't you worried that readers who were not Bengali wouldn't get the drift?
I worried a lot that it would be a really dense and 'foreign' book for people who are not Bengalis, that people outside Bengal would not get the cultural registers. Only Bengalis would get the allusions to Bengali literature. Satyajit Ray is my template, in some ways, for this — Bengalis would 'understand' it on one level and would get something extra out of it, while those not steeped in Bengali culture would not be alienated.
I have been a bit stunned by the very kind reviews in the West. I had thought the book would be very critically received because people would just not be able to get into it. Most people have had problems with the first 70 pages, because they got confused by the number of people and the fact that they aren't addressed by their proper names but as mama, masi, kaka, kakima, etc.

What are you working on next?
I will write a book based in contemporary India. But I have to go about it differently. It's a different place altogether. I need to live here for a while to see exactly how it has changed. Even Calcutta, that most stultified place in the world, seems to have changed...and for the worse.

The contenders
How to be Both- Ali Smith
J- Howard Jacobson
The Lives of Others- Neel Mukherjee
The Narrow Road to the Deep North-Richard Flanagan
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour- Joshua Ferris
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves-Karen Joy Fowler

The winner will be announced on 14 October, 2014

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