VIDEO CLIP -- '' बन्दूक '' ---- ( ''bundooki sadagur'' ) -- Amitav Ghosh reads from the opening pages of his new ''cli-fi'' novel GUN ISLAND during a public event in London in late May
After his epic Ibis trilogy, a rip-roaring, hugely detailed imagining of the Opium Wars, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh turns his hand to ''cli-fi'' — ''climate fiction.''
''Gun Island'' by Amitav Ghosh
a new cli-fi novel reviewed in The Times of London
reviewed by Siobhan Murphy on June 7
Headlined: "Magic and Mangroves
''This tangled tale takes in the refugee crisis and climate change,'' says Siobhan Murphy in her review below
After his epic Ibis trilogy, a rip-roaring, hugely detailed imagining of the Opium Wars, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh turns his hand to ''cli-fi'' — ''climate fiction.''
Gun Island blends Bengali folklore, the historical and present-day links between India and Venice, climate change, the refugee crisis, the power of storytelling and the supernatural in a tale that sometimes wobbles under the weight of such a load.
Dinanath Datta, known as Deen, is a seller of rare books living in New York City, who on a trip home to India humors an old aunt by taking a trip to the Sundarbans, the vast mangrove forest that lies on the Bay of Bengal.
Knowing his interest in Bengali folklore, she had entreated him to visit a shrine she remembered glimpsing there, dedicated to the ''Bonduki Sadagar,'' or The Gun Merchant.
Legend told how the Bonduki Sadagar was chased across strange lands by the snake goddess Manasa Devi, whom he had angered, meeting all manner of calamities until he was saved by a miraculous intervention of nature and returned home a rich man.
The bookish Deen, initially reluctant about the trip, becomes fascinated by what he discovers and begins picking apart the clues in the legend that reveal it could be a true story. Meanwhile, strange events and coincidences — and a preponderance of venomous beasties — start encroaching on his life, shaking his faith in himself as “a rational, secular, scientifically minded person”. [MORE SCROLL DOWN]
The marine biologist named Priya (a character from Ghosh’s 2004 cli-fi novel The Hungry Tide) tells him there is a logical explanation for deadly spiders in Venice and yellow-bellied sea snakes off Venice Beach in Los Angeles; climate change is pushing these creatures to more northerly regions.
But his old friend Cinta, an Italian professor of history, believes in more supernatural causes and that stories from the past contain something “elemental and inexplicable” that can be unleashed.
Through her, Deen starts to see the parallels between the tale of the Bonduki Sadagar and our present day – how the 17th-century merchant’s world was being rocked by the climatic disturbances of the Little Ice Age, and how this ancient traveller’s voyage has much in common with those being made by the refugees flocking to Europe.
Called to Venice to help a documentary-maker make contact with the many Bengalis now in the Italian seaside and canal-linedcity, Deen is plunged into the middle of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, as all eyes turn to one overcrowded boat that the Italian government has vowed to refuse a safe port.
Flitting across continents, Ghosh deftly summons up a pungent sense of place, whether in the mangrove swamps of Bengal or the misty, cobbled streets of Venice. The past lurks convincingly in the present.
However, you can’t help feeling bashed over the head by all the talk of cyclones, wildfires, oceanic dead zones, dolphin beachings and flooding crises.
And with such a host of characters representing opinions or merely in place to move the plot along, the narrative, and particularly the dialogue, are often stilted.
As such, sadly, ''Gun Island'' is more a fusillade of finger-wagging than a display of sniper-like precision. Gun Islandby Amitav Ghosh,
After his epic Ibis trilogy, a rip-roaring, hugely detailed imagining of the Opium Wars, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh turns his hand to cli-fi — climate fiction.Gun Island blends Bengali folklore, the historical and present-day links between India and Venice, climate change, the refugee crisis, the power of storytelling and the supernatural in a tale that sometimes wobbles under the weight of such a load.
After his epic Ibis trilogy, a rip-roaring, hugely detailed imagining of the Opium Wars, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh turns his hand to ''cli-fi'' — ''climate fiction.''
This tangled tale takes in the refugee crisis and climate change, says Siobhan Murphy... After his epic Ibis trilogy, a rip-roaring, hugely detailed imagining of the Opium Wars, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh turns his hand to cli-fi — climate fiction. ''Gun Island'' blends Bengali folklore, the historical and present-day links bet ... Read full article: thetimes.co.uk- Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh review — magic an ... →
KEYWORD: '' बन्दूक'' in Bengali, or Bangla ''bundook'' ... written in English... and meaning "gun" --
and "bundooki sadagur" = the gun merchant, (h/t Dr. Arin Basu)
Amitav Ghosh goes 'cli-fi' in new novel 'Gun Island' set for publication on June 16, 2019 (Bloomsday in Ireland)
Above is the entire video of the event, about 90 minutes long, and about two minutes into the video, Dr Ghosh begins to read from the first chapter to the assembled audience of about 100 people from his new cli-fi novel GUN ISLAND... HERE IS THE self-TRANSCRIBED TEXT by Dan Bloom:
Standing on stage, Dr Ghosh, born in 1956 but looking half his age and with an engaging, broad smile and a handsome shock of shiny white hair, gave a brief reading from the beginning pages of the novel, and the 5-minute reading turned out to be a stellar performance by the gifted orator and storyteller. I could have listened to the entire novel spoken out loud by the author on video, just to hear his wonderous voice and watch his animated face as he tells the tale. [Sign me up for the ten-hour performance if he ever gets coaxed into doing it!]
In the meantime, this is the real world, and this is what Dr Ghosh said, transcribed by this blogger's secretary Lily Chen in Taiwan after they both watched the UK event live the night before. The host of the event was Jonathan Derbyshire, opinion page editor of the Financial Times newspaper in London.
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Dr Ghosh begins his tale this way: [The narrator of the novel, Deen Datta, is speaking:]
"The strangest thing about this strange journey was that this journey was launched by a word coinage which was in wide circulation from Cairo to Calcutta. That word is "bundook" which means ''gun'' in many languages, including my own mother tongue, Bengali, Bengla. Nor is the word a stranger to English by way of British colonial use of the word. ''Bundook'' found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary where it was glossed as "rifle".
''But there was no rifle or gun on the day this journey began, nor indeed was the word intended to refer to a weapon, and that precisely is why it caught my attention. Because the word in Bengali -- "bundooki sadagur" could be translated as ''The Gun Merchant.''
''The Gun Merchant entered my life not in Brooklyn where I live and work, but in the city in which I was born and raised, Calcutta.''
''That year, as in many others, I was in Calcutta for much of the winter months for my business. My work as a dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities required me to do a lot of on-site scouting, and since I happened to have a small apartment in Calcutta, the city became a second place for scouting operations for me.
''The day of my return to Brooklyn was almost at hand when I went to the last of my social engagements of the season -- the wedding reception of a cousin's daughter. I had just entered the venue, a stuffy colonial-era club, when I was accosted by a distant relative named Kanai Datta.
I had not seen Kanai in many years, which was not entirely a matter of regret for me, as he had always been a glib, precocious know-it-all who used his quick tongue and good looks to look for women and get ahead in the world.
''Tell me, Deeno,'' he said, "is it true that you hold yourself up as an expert in Bengali folklore?'' (The almost audible sneer rattled me.)
"Well," I sputtered, "I did some research on that kind of thing a long time ago, but I gave it up when I left academia and became a book dealer."
"But you did get a PhD, did you not?" he said, (with barely-concealed derision), "so you are technically an expert."
"I am not an expert..." I started to say... He cut me short.
"So tell me, Mr Expert," he said, "have you heard of a figure called The Gun Merchant?"
''He had cleary been intending to surprise me, and he succeeded. The name, 'The Gun Merchant,' was so new to me that I was tempted to think that Kanai had made it up...."
BOOK REVIEW FROM THE UK:
Amitav Ghosh is the author of several important novels, one of which, ''Sea Of Poppies,'' was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 — and GUN ISLAND, a cli-fi historical novel, "cli-fi-histo," his latest, is his best.
The main character and narrator is named Deen and is a Brooklyn-based rare book dealer born in Calcutta. On a trip back to India, he becomes obsessed with the old Bengali myth of ''The Gun Merchant'', [bundooki sadagur]
'' बन्दूक'' in Bengali...
who fled overseas to escape persecution from a Snake Goddess.
Visiting a shrine to the Merchant, Deen is almost bitten by a snake, and so begins a series of events in which the Gun Merchant’s story starts to become bound up in Deen’s own.
Spanning several continents, this novel is stuffed to bursting with ideas about climate change, migration, the interconnectivity of past and present and the way ancient stories can have a powerfully-imaginative impact on an individual consciousness.
And it’s a well written, hydra-headed mix of proliferating, magical plot points.
========== NOTES:
It is in his home town of Kolkata that Deen Datta meets, by chance, his distant relative Kanai Dutt, who upends his view of the world with a single word: ''bundook.'' Gun. A writer and folklorist, Datta has for years dedicated his research to the Halders of Raskhal, a once grand land-owning family, in whose downfall he sees the seed of his own misfortunes - his serial divorces and history of mental instability the legacy of his long-dead kinswoman, whose cruel impoverishment and suffering at the hands of that great family has been handed down from generation to generation. Now, at Kanai's briefest suggestion, he realizes that this family legacy may have deeper roots still, in the tale of a merchant that the narrator had always understood to be the stuff of Bengali legend. As the ground beneath him shifts, Deen sets out on an extraordinary journey that will take him from Kolkata to Venice and Sicily via a tangled route through the memories of those he meets along the way. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a man groping toward a sense of what is happening around him, struggling to grasp, from within his accepted understanding of the world, the reality with which he is presented.
''Bundook''. Gun. A common word, but one that turns the narrator of the novel Deen Datta’s world upside down.
A dealer of rare books based in Brookln most of the time, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him.
Amitav Ghosh‘s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.
Amitav Ghosh is the author of the Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis for forgeign language novels in France, and The Glass Palace. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his Amerian wife, the writer Deborah Baker and their two adult children, a son and a daughter.
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Streamed live
We were told we were nearing the end of history; that globalisation would lift millions out of poverty, and that the onward march of time would bring unprecedented peace and stability across the world. But globalisation is delivering on its promises only to a powerful minority, and the result is a global system that our planet can’t sustain.
Acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh visits the RSA to reflect on humanity’s condition in the Anthropocene era, and how the stories we tell can help us understand our place in a drastically changing world. What we need, he says, is to be able to think the unthinkable; if the climate catastrophe we’re facing is a collective failure of imagination as well as one of ethics and action, we need to think beyond the limits of realism to confront the state in which we find ourselves. Fiction, he tells us, can be a powerful force for good in helping us to recognise the realities of our condition, and navigate the constant change that defines the modern world.
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