Tales of Two Cities

Book Review

Some authors have the capacity to infuse the book’s setting with a personality and vigour all its own. I read two such books recently.

London

The Walworth Beauty by Michèle Roberts brings to life one city, in two different time periods, threaded through with a common theme – women earning a living. The book paints the streets of London and its inhabitants as experienced by Joseph in 1851 and Madeleine in 2011. There is a plot and character development, but it’s the descriptions that bring this book to life and make it memorable. For example:

“The simpers and flapped eyelashes of the two gaudily dressed women hovering at the bar, leaned in on by half-tipsy men, seemed banal; much too obvious. One gay creature wore a cape of emerald lace and carried, under her arm, a pug dog, which she was extravagantly kissing and caressing. Her sister tart wore a bonnet topped with a heap of fake cherries, and made a great show of tapping the clustering men with her frilled maroon-and-white striped parasol as she laughed.”

Even more unusual is Roberts’ ability to capture the heart and soul of a city, making it perhaps the most important personality in the book:

“She strides along the edge of Borough Market. Green-painted iron struts rise above French delis on one side, newly restored pubs on the other. Gap of grey-blue sky roofs the cobbled street. The railway soars and clatters overhead. Groups of tourists photograph heads of wild mushrooms. She turns along Borough High Street, wanders in and out of its side alleys: Mermaid Court, Kentish Buildings, Queen’s Head Yard. She zigzags towards Newington, through squares and streets named after Dickens and his characters. The vast Elephant and Castle roundabout stumps her: a shiny metal fortress circled by hurtling traffic.”

Further Reading Options: Nikki French has written a series of mysteries about Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who follows the traces of London’s hidden rivers at night as she ponders the problems she has encountered [Publishers Weekly]

Calcutta

While The Walworth Beauty is a work of fiction, The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury is a factual description and history of Calcutta from a personal perspective. Choudhury was born in India, emigrated to the United States, and moved back to India on several different occasions. The book is an exploration of being torn between origins and destination. As Choudhury says,   

“In the end it always came back to themes we had debated from our earliest days together, between the Indian who did not want to live in India – amid its mediocrity and moral compromises – and the American who insisted on returning for reasons he could not yet fully articulate, for reasons that were sentiments and intuitions, not really reasons at all.”

The book is also a dialogue between old and new Calcutta, the rich, thriving city established by the British Empire and the poverty-laced misery and corruption of modern Calcutta, the legacy of colonialism. (I am haunted by the descriptions of the famine instigated by the British hoarding grain to support their troops during World War II.)

The descriptions bring the city and its people to life:

“Heading off College Street, I turned into an alley that was only a yard wide. Nabin Kundu Lane went past a sweet shop, an open garbage dump, a Kali temple with a fantastic sculpture glaring through a grill, and several offices of book publishers. Through all this, Nabin Kundu Lane never widened beyond a yard until it dropped me off on College Row. Two steps down and I was at Naren Sen Square, sipping tea at a stall with a few old timers while taking in the cricket match on the dirt-patch square.”

Further Reading Options: Top 10 Books about Calcutta [The Guardian]