Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing

Abstract

Hilde Østby & Ylva Østby Adventures in Memory: The Science and Secrets of Remembering and Forgetting Trans. Marianne Lindvall. Vancouver. Greystone Books. 2018. 312 pages. It sounds like a lovely pastime, diving to observe sweetly absurd-looking seahorses (genus Hippocampus), but what is its relevance to a book about memory? For this is indeed a wide-ranging book about how we remember past experiences and so also can predict the likelihood of future events. The Østby sisters—Hilda is a journalist and historian of ideas, Ylva a neuropsychologist— focus on human memory, though they can’t resist digressing now and then to tell us about, say, the uncanny ability of birds to memorize and adapt their songs or of slime molds to learn how to navigate mazes. Nothing about what seahorses remember , though, but instead a lot about the hippocampal gyri, a paired, deeply buried structure of rolled-up cortex in the vertebrate brain. Each hippocampus (it actually looks not so much like a seahorse, more like a tapering sausage) acts together with adjacent cortical areas to drive the consolidation of experiences into memory traces. Damage to one hippocampus is not incapacitating, but the loss of both seriously impairs memory retention for more than the few minutes of the short-term memory span. We are given a fascinating, if brief and somewhat eclectic, account of how the hippocampus works and connects to brainwide networks, but the writers are more at home with the psychological aspects of memory. They review hypotheses about why we can’t remember childhood events and then widen the discussion to the role of autobiographical (episodic) memory: so central to self-awareness yet some people manage with very little—how is that possible ? Why do we create persistent false memories of experiences we haven’t had (problematic for the police and the courts, for a start)? They confirm the everyday observation that memory is context dependent —“Where have I been before missing my car keys?”—and relate this to the hippocampal networks that encode place and direction of movement. Place- and direction-sense turn up again in answers to the question, “How can I improve my memory?” as professional “memory performers,” including actors and musicians, discuss their techniques. The rest of us are reminded, kindly, that forgetting can be a kind of benign pruning of the retention system. Only brief mentions are made of pathological variants of forgetfulness, as in attention deficit disorder , clinical depression, or dementia. Overall, the scientific and clinical material is solidly researched but brought alive in personalized anecdotes and in sisterly discussions. They write with such a persuasive mixture of intelligence, enthusiasm, and charm that occasional irrelevances (those seahorses) and too-long chatty passages merge into the engrossingly readable, thought-provoking whole. Anna Paterson House of Glack, United Kingdom Name Me a Word: Indian Writers Reflect on Writing Ed. Meena Alexander. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 410 pages. The poet and critic Meena Alexander begins her introduction to the anthology Name Me a Word with a personal anecdote about her encounter with the novelist Raja Rao. Rao spoke about the “invented English ” he had gradually perfected with practice . The word “invented” provides a key entry point into the major concerns of this timely anthology of more than a century of major Indian writers reflecting on writing. Alexander deftly sidesteps the wornout clichés that permeate discussions of the “alienness” of English versus the “authenticity” of Indian languages. Indeed, World Literature in Review 90 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 invention in the face of a multiplicity of languages characterizes both anglophone Indian writing and works in other Indian languages. As Alexander writes, “The porous slipping borders of multiple languages that Indian writers inherit is often in evidence, if not overtly in the work, whatever the language of its composition, then in its dream life, the undertow that takes hold of the reader and tugs her in.” These porous, slipping borders of literature ’s “dream life” are evident not only in the self-conscious attempts at linguistic invention in anglophone writers like Rao or Rushdie but also in the writings of Bengali poets like Jibanananda Das. I mention Das especially because his poem “Name Me a...