Revisiting the best of 2022

Our senior reviewers look back at their reading in the year almost gone by and list out the best of Indian fiction and international non-fiction they picked up.

By Sheila Kumar

My reading this year turned out to be both substantial and satisfying. This is a listicle of Indian fiction of 2022 that fulfilled my one-point criterion: it had to touch a chord within me.

* Valli: Written by Sheela Tomy, and translated by Jayasree Kalathil, this book is part-allegory, part-homily, and wholly eco-fiction. It tells of the people who populate a hamlet in the Western Ghats, the steady encroachment of tribal lands, the abrogation of tribal rights, and the destruction of the land itself. It blends environmental concerns with societal dissensions, it pitches oppressors against the victim, and it shows us just what we can and are doing to this land of ours, beyond Wayanad, across the country.

* The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: Shehan Karunatilaka sets this Booker prize-winning story in 1989, and populates it with other-worldly beings who had ghastly things done to them in the name of the terrible war that wreaked havoc in Sri Lanka for 26 long and miserable years. Do read this book for the creativity of the satirical plot, the lovely relationship between Maali and the two people closest to him, for descriptions of the Mahakali, and for the very real cynicism when contemplating how many war manipulators have walked free.

* Black River: Nilanjana Roy turns to crime fiction with all the skill she brought to her delightful cat books. The black river of the title is the beleaguered Yamuna, and the story tells of what takes place near it, as well as some distance away from it. A little girl has been murdered and while the tale proceeds in pretty much the manner you want crime thrillers to proceed (with no gratuitous trail of red herrings, thankfully), it's Roy's evocative sketches of the characters that really tugs at the reader's heart.

* The Body By The Shore: Tabish Khair's cerebral sci-fi thriller situates the action on an oil rig-turned-dubious resort in the North Sea just off Denmark. Set in the future, around 2030, with frequent references to the Coronavirus pandemic that hit the world a decade ago, the reader sees that the world has not changed drastically in the wake of Covid. The mess of politics, the dire state of economics, and the manipulative games being played by those with political and economic clout, all seem to be the same-old, same-old.

* Villainy: This sardonic take on villainy, Delhi style, by Upamanyu Chatterjee is all the more effective for its matter-of-fact, unemotional tone of the narration. Villainy takes a cynical look at how the rich live in a bubble that is impervious to even murder charges and prison stints; a rueful look at caste and community hierarchies; a resigned look at how utter villains walk away from acts of dire villainy.

* The Immortal King Rao: Vauhini Vara's debut work is speculative fiction but the dystopian new world that she draws seems culled from an ongoing or impending reality. Much is explored in this book, like caste, race, politics, capitalism, technology and the repercussions of all this on human lives. There is great skill at work here in drawing worlds, real and imagined, incorporating technology and philosophy, and yet keeping human relationships at the heart of the story.

* The Living Mountain: Amitav Ghosh takes us through a series of moral lessons using an allegory about a living mountain, the Mahaparbat in Nepal, and how over time it went from being a revered deity that no one set foot on to a peak to be conquered, a massif to be mined for its precious metals, a mountain to be verily desecrated. The mountain is the point of focus and we are shown the results of man's insatiable greed, man's desire to control other men, and what happens when nature strikes back.

* Everything the Light Touches: Janice Pariat's climate change novel is a reflective one, to be read and savoured slowly. Multiple voices tell the story of three people who embark on personal and professional journeys. A botanical leitmotif runs through and anchors the stories of these individuals, and when the prose suddenly transforms into poetry, it leaves the reader astonished and delighted.

The writer is a manuscript editor, author of four books and a journalist who reads a whole lot of books and reviews many of them.

NON-FICTION

By Sudhirendar Sharma

Here are the six non-fiction titles I read this year which I enjoyed and valued.

* Atlas Of The Heart: Based on extensive research, Prof Brene Brown of the University of Houston tells us that part of why most of us are stressed is because we are limited in our understanding of emotions to be able to manage and regulate them. We need emotional granularity for nuanced understanding. In Atlas of the Heart Brown has found 87 human emotions to enrich our vocabulary with more power to better articulate and understand our emotional experience. It is a virtual tour de force on human emotions, revealing more than what we may know about ourselves.

* Regenesis: Provocative and somewhat outrageous, it is hard not to agree with writer-activist George Monbiot’s proposition of reinventing our food system because farming has emerged as the greatest cause of environmental destruction. Having got us on a worse diet, longer hours of work, greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions, increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms of hierarchy, modern agriculture might well be the greatest crime in human history. Packed with factful case studies, Monbiot argues that it is still possible to feed the world without devouring the planet. Regenesis is a clarion call to unlock the farming system that has made over 800 million go to bed hungry while the demand for growing food continues to grow. Drawing on astonishing research, the book opens up a vital debate on how to value and protect the most precious substance on which we’re so reliant and yet so little talked about: soil.

* Burning Questions: In seven decades of a colossal career, Margaret Atwood has achieved great literary success but her occasional pieces and essays are no less imaginative and inspiring. While her milestone ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ remains a literary masterpiece on women’s reproductive rights amidst intersectional failings, Burning Questions has 65 non-fiction pieces written by her over a period of 17 years which are wide in scope and reach. From literature to human rights, and from feminism to environment, Atwood provides direct access to her thinking and feeling on the challenges confronting us. It is not all bad, as she swings between hope and despair. Written in her characteristically tongue-in-cheek style, Burning Questions is a serious treatise on questions that must be addressed if we care about our own human wishes.

* Lessons in Chemistry: This sits at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, blurring the imagined from the real, in narrating the story of Elizabeth Zott who becomes the face of a cooking show ‘Supper at Six’ through which she educates her viewers in chemistry, self-worth and agency. Zott, a single mother and a chemist, triumphs through a sexist 1950s establishment with hard work and pragmatism and uses the media available to women of her era to new ends, daring them to change the status quo. It is no exaggeration to say that when Elizabeth Zott finished cooking, an entire nation sat down to eat.

* Hijab: Hijab is a burning question of our times. What is more, the issue of unveiling and veiling has been initiated by Muslim women. The lingering question is: is it a woman’s sartorial choice or it is linked to religious and patriarchal enforcement? There are no easy answers though, as hijab gets new meanings under changing political and social contexts. In this timely collection of essays, the writers explore the politics of Muslim women’s attire as a site of contestation. It goes without saying that the meaning of veiling is neither stable nor singular, irreducible to any one reason or justification. The Hijab makes a significant contribution to understanding veiling in the context of the wider community, and the very idea of citizenship itself.

* A New Deal For Cancer: Far from winning the war over cancer, it has become the emperor of all maladies with an estimated 18 million new cases diagnosed each year. A decade from now, however, the global burden is projected to grow to 21 million new cancer cases with no less than 13 million succumbing to it. A New Deal for Cancer while detailing the ways in which our deeper failing as a society has held us back from winning the war over cancer offers bold new plans to win humanity’s battle against the dreaded scourge. All said the war against cancer continues to remain humanity’s most ambitious undertaking.

With a background in agriculture and environmental sciences and professional engagement in the political economy of development, the writer has over 400 book reviews published to date in the mainstream press.