Over the weekend, I’ve been reading Ananda Devi, recipient of the 2024 Neustadt Prize (which some call the American Nobel).

Three of her books have made their way to me via various Ontario libraries this month: Eve Our of Her Ruins from Don Mills Library in Toronto, Manger L’Autre (2018) from the Toronto Reference Library, and Indian Tango (2011) from the Ottawa Public Library.

Interlibrary loan: what a privilege. (And, as such, the perfect companion for Bookish Beck’s monthly focus on Library Love.)

In the January/February issue of World Literature Today, there’s a series of articles devoted to Anand’s writing. One of them by Jeffrey Zuckerman, who translated Eve Out of Her Ruins into English in 2016 for Deep Vellum, ten years after its original publication in French. (Indian Tango was her first to be published in English.)

He writes about visiting where this novel is set, an imagined place between Port-Louis and Signal Mountain on the island of Mauritius, where she creates Troumaron. This, Zuckerman learned, hearkens back to the Maroons “descendants of Africans in the Indian Ocean islands who escaped from slavery—a perfect allusion for this space where refugees holed up.” (From “Darkness and Beauty: On Translating Ananda Devi”)

Eve out of Her Ruins is spare and beautiful, opening in that scrap of land with the “eczema of paint and the tar beneath our feet” and ending where “the rain tastes sweet on her lips.” (If you’ve enjoyed or contemplated books by Karen Jennings, Omar el Akkad, Mohsin Hamid, or Sulaiman Addonia, you’ll want to take a closer look.)

Also in this issue is the lecture that Devi herself delivers, which offers consideration of her career from the publication of her first book, 1984’s Rue la Poudrière, and her most recent, La nuit s’ajoute à las nuit; in between, she published 28 books. (WLT offers two articles free each month.)

In writing about Devi’s consideration of “Barriers, Borders, Boundaries, and Crossings”, Julie-Françoise Tolliver says: “her writing bears witness to and tries to understand the origins of conflicts rather than simply pass judgement, weighing each word fr its aptness and its peal of truth.”

In an encomium for this issue, Fabienne Kanor (who’s published ten books and directed fifteen films herself) writes this:

“Do you believe that they [your stories] will become engraved in the memory of this world, will become the memory of this world? That readers will go on savoring them once love, peace, wars, houses, nightpots in houses, roads, turns, hllls, rivers, seas, volcanoes, libraries no longer exist? They will be read to experience infinitesimal human stories and infinite-seeming colonial histories alike.”

You see, this is how TBRs get out of hand so quickly. One month you do not know about Ananda Devi; the next month, you do, and you want to read thirty books more than you did the month before. This is how it happens.

Slowly, I am resuming my library habit as spring approaches. But with freezing rain most of the day yesterday, there’s a city-wide warning to consider all sidewalks and streets as though under repair: stay home if you can. ILLs like these, and a few new books, have been exceptions to my winter-reading-at-home experiment.

However, I’m looking forward to my holds for new books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Blair Stonechild, Teresa Wong, Charmaine Wilkerson, and Agustina Bazterrica as spring draws closer. Even if it will still be some time before weekly visits resume.

And how about you? Have you read Ananda Devi? Have you been to the library lately?
Have you recently “discovered” an author who’s written dozens of books?