Tuesday, September 4, 2018

KEYWORD: बन्दूक -- Amitav Ghosh goes 'cli-fi' in new novel 'Gun Island' set for publication in June 2019

बन्दूक 

UPDATES: after Dr Ghosh did a reading from his new novel GUN ISLAND at a university in Canada in November, some tweets worth noting:

Larissa Lai tweeted: ''Fabulous reading + talk by Amitav Ghosh tonight ! Loved especially the image of the temple in the mangrove swamp, where nature meets commerce... and the ghostly cobra inside.''

Kristal Turner tweeted: ''More people should have come to Amitav Ghosh’s reading. The lack of attendance tonight speaks volumes to how much society wants to ignore the effects of climate change. Yes, it’s not new to our planet, but damn if this current iteration isn’t a call to arms in changing our lifestyles.''

Kristal added: ''Normally, these readings are sold out, held in a larger venue, and his words were epic and haunting. Beautiful. We need to listen.''

 

Amitav Ghosh goes cli-fi in new novel 'Gun Island' set for publication in 2019 in India, Britain, New York and Italy

Billed as ''a 350-page cli-fi novel set in several locations around the world''

It's historical fiction with a ''cli-fi'' theme, about a descendant of Neel from Ghosh's ''Ibid Trilogy'' of novels.

PREVIEW

Amitav Ghosh is one of the world's top novelists writing in the English language today, and Brooklyn-based author of "The Ibis Trilogy" has a new novel set for publication in June 2019.
Billed as a 350-page cli-fi novel set in several locations around the world, it's historical fiction with a cli-fi theme this time. According to those who have had early peaks at the manuscript, "Gun Island" is about a descendant of a character named Neel who wants to learn more about his ancestry and who first appeared in the author's earlier trilogy.
The well-received ''Ibis trilogy'' was set in the first half of the 19th century and dealt with the opium trade between India and China that was run by the East India Company and the trafficking of coolies to Mauritius. The three books were titled "Sea of Poppies" (2008), "River of Smoke" (2011) and "Flood of Fire" (2015).
There really is a Gun Island off the coast of India, and according to book industry sources, that's where Ghosh ''might'' have taken the title for his much-anticipated new novel, his first in four years. Readers will have to wait for publication day in June 2019 to find out.
The novel will appear first in India and Britain in June in early summer and later roll out in September in New York and Italy, according to Ghosh.
Meru Gokhale, editor-in-chief in the Literary Publishing unit of Penguin Random House India, who has read the book in manuscript form, said on her Twitter feed that "Amitav Ghosh's new novel 'Gun Island' is amazing -- lively, humane, fast-paced, almost mystical, contemporary, utterly engaged."
Meanwhile, a brief online synopsis of the novel sets the scene this way: In Kolkata the main character of the novel named Dr. Anil Kumar Munshi ...aka A.K. Munshi....meets, by complete chance, a distant relative named Kanai Dutt, who upends the scholar's view of the world with a single Hindi word: ''bundook'' (gun in English) [ बन्दूक in Hindi]

बन्दूक 
In the captivating story Ghosh tells within the 350-page novel, Munshi, a writer and a folklorist, at Dutt's suggestion realizes that his family legacy may have deeper roots than he imagined, in the tale of a merchant that Munshi had always understood to be the stuff of Bengali legend.
And we're off in a tale
of an extraordinary journey that will take readers from Kolkata to Venice and Sicily via a tangled route through the memories of those Munshi 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.
[By the way, readers and literary critics around the world will be surprised to learn that the main character's name of Munshi is also a fictitious name that Ghosh uses on his personal blog -- "A.K. Munshi'' -- as a virtual pen name for Ghosh himself, which he has given to a ''virtual assistant'' who handles the novelist's reader and media email inquiries online.]
The author of a book of essays in 2016 titled "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable," Ghosh, while not a climate activist per se has never-the-less found himself at the front lines of literary circles discussing the role of novels and movies that deal with global warming. In a way, "Gun Island" is the globe-trotting novelist's answer to himself and his critics and his own attempt to write a cli-fi novel.
A self-admitted fan of some of Hollywood’s cli-fi disaster epics, such as ''The Day After Tomorrow'' and ''Geostorm,'' Ghosh recently told an interviewer that he enjoys those two films.
"I love them! I watch them obsessively," he said, adding: "My climate scientist friends joke and laugh at me for this because the practical science in a movie like 'The Day After Tomorrow' is bad. But I find these movies very compelling. And I do think both film and television are very forward-leaning in dealing with climate change."
As for his new novel, Ghosh describes it as a story about a world wracked by climate change "in which creature and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth at an ever-increasing pace."
"Climate change is the most important crisis of our times and it’s hitting us in the face every day," he has said. "Look at these devastating typhoons and tornadoes, or the wildfires in Canada and California. These are deadly serious weather events and lived experiences.''
Two years after publishing "The Great Derangement" in 2016 to great fanfare among literary scholars worldwide, Ghosh now in 2018 now finally admits that the essays actually began as a sort of personal ''auto-critique,'' challenging himself for failing to adequately tackle the issues of climate change in his own novels.
The result may very well be "Gun Island."

ALSO SEE THIS:

Amitav Ghosh confesses 'The Great Derangement' was 'auto-critique' of himself

Amitav Ghosh, the Brooklyn-based public intellectual and author of a controversial book of climate change essays titled "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" is in hot water now. After publishing his collection of essays in 2016 with the University of Chicago Press and pressing his case that modern novelists were not adequately addressing climate change in their novels or short stories, Ghosh now has confessed that he framed the book in a dishonest way and that while he seemed to be criticizing 21st century novelists, he was merely engaging in what he calls an "auto-critique" of his own failings as a novelist who shied away from writing about climate change.

He hopes to set the record straight now and has even written a new novel titled "Gun Island" that deals with climate change on a global scale. While not a climate activist per se, Ghosh, who holds a PhD from Oxford, has never-the-less found himself at the front lines of literary circles discussing the role of novels and movies that deal with global warming. Could it be that "Gun Island" is the globe-trotting novelist's answer to himself and his critics and his own attempt to write a climate-themed novel?

Readers will find out in June 2019 when his novel is released in India and Britain. and then a few months later in September when it is released in New York and Rome.

Ghosh describes the novel as a story about a world wracked by climate change "in which creatures and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth at an ever-increasing pace."

"Climate change is the most important crisis of our times and it’s hitting us in the face every day," he says. "Look at these devastating typhoons and tornadoes, or the wildfires in Canada and California. These are deadly serious weather events and lived experiences.''

So two years after publishing "The Great Derangement" to great fanfare among literary scholars worldwide, Ghosh now in 2018 finally admits that the essays actually began as a sort of personal ''auto-critique,'' challenging himself for failing to adequately tackle the issues of climate change in his own novels.

And he is hoping that "Gun Island" will rehabilitate his reputation among literary critics and climate activists.

Dr. Ghosh is one of the world's top novelists writing in the English language today, and the India-born author of "The Ibis Trilogy" has the literary world waiting on pins and needles for his new 350-page novel to his bookstores worldwide.

Billed as climate-themed historical fiction set in several locations around the world, the book sure to please the author's legions of fans in several countries. According to those who have had early peaks at the manuscript, "Gun Island" is about a descendant of a character named Neel who wants to learn more about his ancestry and who first appeared in the author's earlier trilogy.

The well-received ''Ibis trilogy'' was set in the first half of the 19th century and dealt with the opium trade between India and China. The three books were titled "Sea of Poppies" (2008), "River of Smoke" (2011) and "Flood of Fire" (2015).

There really is a Gun Island off the coast of India, and according to book industry sources, that's where Ghosh ''might'' have taken the title for his much-anticipated novel, his first in four years. Readers will have to wait for publication day in June to find out.

Meru Gokhale, editor-in-chief in the Literary Publishing unit of Penguin Random House India, who has read the book in manuscript form, said recently on her Twitter feed that "'Gun Island' is amazing -- lively, humane, fast-paced, almost mystical, contemporary, utterly engaged."

Meanwhile, a brief synopsis of the novel sets the scene this way: In Kolkata the main character of the novel named Anil Kumar Munshi meets, by complete chance, a distant relative named Kanai Dutt, who upends the scholar's view of the world with a single Hindi word: ''bundook'' (gun in English).

In the captivating story Ghosh tells Munshi, a writer and a folklorist, at Dutt's suggestion realizes that his family legacy may have deeper roots than he imagined, in the tale of a merchant that Munshi had always understood to be the stuff of Bengali legend.

We're then off on an extraordinary journey that takes readers from Kolkata to Venice and Sicily via a tangled route through the memories of those Munshi 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.

Althought most of his fans don't know it, there's more to Dr Ghosh than first meets the eye. A self-admitted fan of some of Hollywood’s cli-fi disaster epics, such as ''The Day After Tomorrow'' and ''Geostorm,'' Ghosh says that that he enjoys those films.

"I love them! I watch them obsessively," he told an interviewer in Canada, adding: "My climate scientist friends joke and laugh at me for this because the practical science in a movie like 'The Day After Tomorrow' is bad. But I find these movies very compelling. And I do think both film and television are very forward-leaning in dealing with climate change."

What does the future hold for Amitav Ghosh? The answer may very lie within the lyrical pages of "Gun Island."

 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

बन्दूक

Anonymous said...

Amitav Ghosh is the author of several important novels, one of which, ''Sea Of Poppies,'' was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 — but GUN ISLAND, a cli-fi novel, his latest, is not his best.

The main character and narrator is named Deen Datta 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'', 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.

But it’s also a fussily written, hydra-headed mess of madly proliferating, credulity-stretching plot points.

manjuragul said...

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