Samanta SchweblinMouthful of Birds

Abstract

Rosella Postorino At the Wolf’s Table Trans. Leah Janeczko Flatiron Books Rosella Postorino’s novel, translated from the Italian and winner of the distinguished Premio Campiello prize, has become an international best-seller. At the Wolf’s Table is a gripping account of a young German girl during World War II begrudgingly chosen to help ensure Adolf Hitler’s survival. Postorino’s prose is honest and precise; breathing life into her characters, she takes readers back in time and down into some of the darkest depths in human history. Kiriti Sengupta Rituals Hawakal This smartly designed collection pairs Sengupta’s airy aphoristic poems with Partha Pratim Das’s blocky but stylish illustrations. Many of the poems in the collection have a kind of koanlike quality to them but draw deeply from Indian mythology and ritual, evoking spiritual atmospherics to foreground the mundanity of the everyday. Nota Bene Born into a middle-class family in 1905, he became an early leader of a liberal-progressive movement to free the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir of its monarchic repressions long before it was carved in half between India and Pakistan. The personal history of this seminal force for Kashmiri liberation is well documented elsewhere; this book contains a compendium of Abdullah’s letters, lectures, and press articles, which carefully document his laws-into-sausages struggle to achieve a free, independent Kashmir based on pluralism , a rejection of the religious split between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that ultimately truncated South Asia into endlessly combative , nationalistic, and regressive regimes. Often, Barack Obama being an example, a leader with progressive principles who works tirelessly to achieve compromises to improve conditions, while avoiding backlash wars, is destined to be reviled in doctrinaire quarters as a centrist, a neoliberal, or even a traitor to certain principles. Ideological purists will never fail to find some fault in those leaders tasked on the ground with making democracy work in a world where political divisiveness is as rampant as domestic conflict and divorce. Both in Khan’s insightful introduction and concluding remarks, and in Sheikh Abdullah’s own words, it is clear that he was determined never to sell out any constituents and always to keep their true—only apparently disparate —interests in tandem. Whereas we yet have no account of Obama’s struggles in steering a snaking course for America’s spaceship of state, reading this book and its compendium of Sheikh Abdullah’s resonant, unflagging, and articulate pursuit of Kashmiri welfare would perhaps enlighten those who delude themselves into thinking that achieving freedom and a vibrant democracy means hacking a straight line through the tangled jungle of competing interests and egos that is real politics. Abdullah struggled for real accord between all religious, ethnic, and political groups and was rewarded with long years in prison followed by roller-coaster years as Jammu and Kashmir’s prime minister and chief minister, and throughout his life he enjoyed the adulation of the ordinary people whose cause he adopted. Abdullah’s path thus provides a stellar analog to Nelson Mandela’s. Both negotiated without bitterness with those who had incarcerated them to further their just aspirations. Sheikh Abdullah never focused on enemies , but always on Kashmiri agency. This book is an intuitive primer in democracy for anyone who would take a practical, holistic view of the democratic enterprise. Jim Drummond Round Rock, Texas Samanta Schweblin Mouthful of Birds Trans. Megan McDowell. New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 240 pages. Following up on her 2014 novel Fever Dream (nominated for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize), Samanta Schweblin’s collection of short stories, Mouthful of Birds, takes readers on a road trip full of surprising and surreal pit stops, populated with characters that hover on the edge of familiarity. WORLDLIT.ORG 103 Books in Review The minimalistic and uncanny stories contain enough of everyday life—french fries, ailing parents, exact change—to make the incursions of strange figures like a merman , or a teenager who eats only live birds, seem acceptable, even plausible. Often compared to her compatriots Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, Schweblin does share their mastery of short fiction. Her eerie, not-quite-right settings, however, hearken...