Book Review: Exploring Identity and Home in Jeet Thayil's 'The Elseweans'

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Jeet Thayil. (Getty Images) Summary Jeet Thayil’s new book is a hybrid of fiction, biography, history and imagination, and reviews the story of his parents Jeet Thayil’s new book The Elsehereans has been published as fiction, but it is a neat generic classifications. With his light in the memoir, biography, travel, photography and history, it is immediately an impulsive being as well as recognizable part of a literary tradition in August, which was ushered in by writers such as WG Sebald and JM Coetzee, which dissolved the line between fact and fiction in their work. The style of these authors inspired labels such as ‘Facto-Fiction’ or ‘Ficto-Fact’, both of which accurately describe the relationships of the story that Thayil tells us in this book. At its core is the Elseweans Thayil’s approach to his parents’ life: TJS George, a prominent journalist with multiple careers in India, Hong Kong and New York (‘the first editor of independent India charged with sedition’, as Thayil tells us) and Ammu George, a former school teacher who lived a Peripathetic life and have. The basis of the book. It began in 1957 and lasted more than 60 years, alternating with Vignettes from Thayil’s own life, as well as important moments in the social and political history of India. The story is told by two votes and switched between the first and third person, although it is clear that the narrative consciousness is one. The occasional “I” vote belongs to a character named “Jeet”, which grew up between different places, although he was not completely unleashed from his roots in Kerala. A poet with a nomadic life who tragically lost his wife fell into the habit of using drugs and alcohol. But these autobiographical details – which Thayil examined in finer detail in his 2020 Low novel – do not deduce him from the track. His focus remains the story of his parents’ life together and for this reason he needs the third-person-aligning voice to place some distance between himself and his subjects. The urge to visit and understand our parents’ past is not uncommon. British-American writer Christopher Isherwood wrote a masterful version of his parents’ lives in his classic Kathleen of 1971 and Frank, smart subtitle, the autobiography of a family. The Elseherean also pays tribute to this truism. A biography of one’s parents is, in the broadest sense, an autobiography of all the people they have come from and everyone who leaves them behind. In this sense, the first -person narrator is just as essential to the story as the gallery of eccentric aunts, grandparents and cousins. Everyone comes to the narrative at random, but remains in the reader’s memory. The Elsereans have a relationship with books such as Michael Ondaatje’s exciting memoir running in the family (1982), but it unfolds at a slower pace. It winds like a river and collects memory pieces, such as flowing water carries stones and silt along the way. There are many disorders – a volatile look is thrown on the opium wars as he talked about a midwife’s addiction to the dust, for example. The anecdotes sometimes get gossiped, and the reader gets a glimpse of the failed marriage of a cousin, which she agreed to as a setback for a heart strings about a lesbian relationship. Look at the full image published by HarperCollins India, 224 pages, £ 699 The narrative usually flows chronologically, as George and Ammu move from place to place with their two children, tents in Bombay (now Mumbai), Patna, Hong Kong, New York and Bangalore (now Bengaluru), along with the winds of change. At the end of their restless peregrinations, there is always the promise of refuge in Ammu’s ancestral home in Mamalassery, a hamlet in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. That house remains the only quiet point in a world where the idea of ‘home’ moves faster than any of the characters can keep up. In his most abstract as well as permanent, the word “home” brings to every family member they have been attached to in the past. During George’s short lead in Vietnam, first as a journalist to cover the American War, and later as a teacher in the country’s north, he comes close to a beautiful Vietnamese guide, which is one of the most moving characters in the story. Ammu discovers a friend in Prasanna, a fellow Malayali -home creator in Hong Kong, and together they cultivate their financially illiterate men’s corpuses by investing in the stock market. Jeet ties to a drug dealer called Obelix in Berlin – his name is ominous of his appearance. A man and father who feels just as displaced as Jeet, is Obelix very desperate to find a foothold in the world if he, even willing to embrace the hardships of a city life for the sake of a better future. But Jeet has no such intentions. “I’m a migrant,” he explains patiently to Obelix, “not an immigrant. In some time, in a month or two or three, I leave. ‘ When his spotted interrogator asks, “But why?” He gives a spicy riposts: “Melanin.” The search for home is a well worn herd in fiction. In the hands of fewer writers, it can fall flat and turn into an exercise in solipsism. But there is no such danger in Thayil’s book. From the first page, with its long stack of epigraphic (including one of Ammu: ‘Age is a shipwreck’), to the sepia-tinted photos of people and places-all, and all too hurt from the imagination of the writer-not a single gesture in the book. Each page is filled with sadness for the disappearing present, including a brilliant call from Kerala’s uncontrollable wild monsons, but there is no trace of melodrama. As George and Ammu enter their 90s, their son stops. But the original itching of the family to be moving, to discover the world outside their door, never leaves them. At her great age, the third -person narrator tells us: “It seems to Ammu that she has no home, because the house is no longer a city or a country and the people in them, but the rooms of the houses she lived in.” She would be glad that her final resting place was written between the pages of this ghostly book written by her son. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Books Read Next Story