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The Hindu
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Review of The City Under the City by John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil
If you are a fan of the dialogic epistolary novel, where a story unfolds through an exchange of letters between two characters, or the jugalbandi in Hindustani classical music, where two performers create a unique blend with their individual styles, do consider reading poets John Kinsella and Jeet Thayil's new book The City Under the City. It is a compendium of what they refer to as 'call-and-response poems', birthed over two years across multiple cities. The collection is dedicated to 'cities that have welcomed us and turned us away', without allowing the specifics of autobiographical information to meddle with the reader's enjoyment. Bombay, New York, Perth, Amsterdam, Dhaka, Rome, Edinburgh, Jaffna, Wellington, Zurich, Paris, London, Galway, Johannesburg are among the cities that find a mention. On the one hand, this geographical expanse feeds the notion of the poet as a global citizen. On the other hand, it also underscores how the literary life creates opportunities for writers to travel and engage with unfamiliar worlds. The two poets push readers to open their eyes and see what the urban landscape has to offer beyond cement and concrete, loss and loneliness. In a poem titled 'Dead Fingers', Thayil writes, A blood moon pours raw honey/ over the dry land. The image is tantalising because of the sudden burst of beauty and softness it evokes. In 'How Many Shopping Days Before Christmas?' he writes, Rain collapses into mud-red,/ like a butcher's soufflé, goading the reader to dispense with old metaphors for natural phenomena. In 'Beckett Bridge', he recalls long walks always at night along the river Seine to relish streets sacred in their emptiness after the buzz of tourists and office workers in the daytime has died down. Rare experiment In a poem titled 'Small City', Kinsella writes, The shadowed garden/ is full of insects and birds./ The small buildings in the garden/ hold echoes and prayers. The desire to experience life outside a narrow anthropocentric universe resurfaces in his poem 'Reconfiguring Geometrics', where he writes, I think we all have to conjure the gall/ to rethink what a city will be. With Kinsella's 'wish for a forest', one cannot help but think of what town planning in the future might look like if poets were invited to be a part of the brainstorming process. Thayil was born near the river Muvattupuzha in Kerala. Kinsella, born in Perth, is a vegan, environmental activist and scholar, and an advocate for the land rights of indigenous people. His home is on Ballardong Noongar land at 'Jam Tree Gully' in Western Australia. These significant aspects of both poets' lives are reflected in the poems gathered here. Poetry collections rarely carry footnotes or bibliographies, which are considered the domain of scholarly research. However, this book delights with the plethora of intertextual references woven into verse, including writers such as Eunice de Souza, Andrew Duncan, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Daniel Defoe and Ezra Pound. What one misses, however, is an introductory essay offering a glimpse of how the collaborative project came into being, was sustained, and then shaped into a book. One hopes that publishers will let go of limiting beliefs, and venture more confidently into such literary experiments that give readers a chance to be surprised by what words can do. The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Home run: Wknd sits down with Jeet Thayil to talk about his deeply personal new book
It's a 'conundrum of a novel', says Jeet Thayil, of his new book, The Elsewhereans. It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding. The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways. The reader isn't meant to know which is which. 'I want you to wonder… to keep guessing,' Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add to the sense of confusion. A few years on, he enters the tale, born in the backwaters of Kerala, followed by his sister Sheba Thayil (who would also go on to be a journalist and writer). The family would move from Bombay to Bihar, then Hong Kong and New York; the novel unfolds also in Vietnam, France, Germany and the UK. As it traces his teen years, when he 'lived to defy and dismay my father', and builds itself around his deep love for his mother, what emerges is Thayil's most personal novel since The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017; a pacy, autobiographical work that also married memory and fiction). Incidentally, in 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, for his debut novel, Narcopolis, about opium, Mumbai and one man's struggles with drugs. (The novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.) 'This is a story about a family of Indians out in the world,' says Thayil, 65. Excerpts from an interview. * Where did the idea for The Elsewhereans come from? This is material I've been saving, or hoarding, all my life; material that never found its correct form. The novel — discrete stories, some written in the third person, some in the first, set in different eras, on different continents — assumed its true shape only towards the end of the writing. Some of those stories were gratifying to relate. For example, the story about my father starting AsiaWeek in Hong Kong. They sold a majority stake to Reader's Digest, which sold the shares on to Time, and then Time eventually shut AsiaWeek down. This is a story only journalists in Asia, Europe, America and India knew about, that AsiaWeek was a magazine run by Asians for Asians, in the '70s, and that it was killed by Time… Like that story, there are others that illuminate forgotten corners of history. * This is also a book about your difficult relationship with your father…. For most of my teens, I tried to be the opposite of what he wanted me to be. My father (now 97) is gifted in many ways, but not so much when it comes to the minutiae of fatherhood. He comes from a long line of conservative Malayali Syrian Christian men for whom parenting is about distance, punishment and anger. But if you don't have a relationship where you're also a friend to your children, you miss out on a lot. The child may end up self-destructive or recalcitrant. For a long time, I wanted to upend his image of himself by becoming the black sheep, by doing things that would have made any parent upset. I think of it now as a waste of time, but… that's how it was. I don't think I got over that very childish way of dealing with myself, my parents, and the world until my 40s. I was living in New York, working for a newspaper, trying to get by, and I realised it takes so much space in one's head to define oneself in opposition to a single person or idea. I realised it just wasn't worth it. It seems like a basic lesson, but it took me ages to get there. * Your love for your mother forms the sort of nucleus of this book. She was always my biggest champion. And yes, she is the moral centre of this book. Her story begins the narrative and her end ends it. In terms of our financial lives, if it weren't for my mother, I wouldn't be writing novels. I'd be working, earning a living, trying to pay the rent. She was the one who, right from the beginning, invested small amounts of my father's earnings. My father had very little sense of money as a living quantity. She always did. Which is why I can afford to spend the day writing a poem or a song. In that sense, I suppose I owe her everything. I wanted to chronicle her life in The Elsewhereans. A life can be remarkable, but unless you put it down, unless you record it in some way — not necessarily in the form of a novel, but in some way — what's the point? All those extraordinary moments are gone. * Her death (six months ago; aged 90) was an emotional trigger to the ending of the book… Yes… I knew it was finished the moment she passed away. Obviously, I couldn't do anything for a while, but once I got back to work, I finished it very quickly. I rewrote portions, added the last few pages, and it just put a lock on the book for me. * Did the idea of a documentary novel, a blurring of truth and reality, make The Elsewhereans easier to write? At first, I thought it would be a work of non-fiction, but that would have made for a narrow narrative. One can't inhabit other people's heads and other people's lives in an immersive way unless one is writing fiction. At the same time, a number of elements here are factual, taken from life, with actual photographs, letters and documents. Which is why I think of it as a documentary novel. The point is, life isn't easily categorised. Life is open-ended. It doesn't have labels, and it doesn't have happy endings. I like the form of the documentary novel. I might do another in the same vein. * You suggest that we are all on a lifelong journey, never belonging to a place. And yet you capture how the world is turning to hate because of ideas such as nationality and race… As someone who began travelling at the age of eight, I've known for a while that all travellers are not equal. A traveller of colour understands this before they begin to understand cultures other than their own. It's more than the colonial-era hierarchy of the visa process. It's also a question of belonging. As the world becomes increasingly intolerant, it becomes increasingly intolerable. When divisions between nations and races deepen, you realise there are places you are not welcome. For me, the sense of being an outsider has always had an upside. It has sharpened my perception. * Are we all Elsewhereans then? All of us. There's a moment in the book that describes what it's like to feel like a foreigner in one's own house. Even if you've never left your hometown, you might feel as if the world around you has changed so much it doesn't feel like home anymore. * Given that it is set across 70 years and a dozen countries, what did the research for this book involve? I looked up accounts of the various time periods and places in which each chapter is set. I interviewed my parents over the course of about three years. That was a useful thing about moving to the family home in Bengaluru in 2018. I started work on this book in 2020. As soon as I knew I was going to write it, I began talking to my parents about the past. They remembered a lot of it, in striking detail. Then I looked at my dad's notebooks. He kept extensive notes of his years as a journalist. I went through a lot of material and asked both their permissions before I started to write. My mother may not have been very pleased with the idea, but there's no way she was going to say no, which is why the first epigraph in the book is Czeslaw Milosz: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.'
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Soundgarden to release final album with late frontman Chris Cornell: ‘It's a gift to Chris'
Soundgarden will rise —and rock — again. And, yes, with Chris Cornell. Indeed, the black hole that was left when the grunge god died by suicide in 2017 will be filled with some sun again: The band plans to release the final album made with its frontman. 'It would be a great gift to the fans,' Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil told Rolling Stone. 'And I do think about this, and I don't know how strange this sounds, but I feel like it's a gift to Chris too.' 5 Seattle grunge band Soundgarden is among the 2025 class of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees. Redferns 5 Chris Cornell, who died by suicide in 2017, will posthumously rock again on a final Soundgarden album. Redferns The group, which was just announced as inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, plans to finish the LP that they never completed before Cornell's death at 52. 'Our objective and goal was always to complete that [album],' Thayil said. 'I probably have OCD enough to not want to leave something unfinished or incomplete like that,' he continued. 5 'We want to do it proud,' said Soungarden guitarist Kim Thayil of the band's final album with late frontman Chris Cornell. Thayil noted a desire to 'attend to our body of work and our catalog.' 'I think everyone in the band feels that way,' he said. 'I don't just to attend to my work, but the collective work, and in this case specifically, the work of Chris.' It continues the pride that Thayil has always taken in Soundgarden since the 'Spoonman' band formed in 1984 and became a part of the Seattle grunge movement with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. 5 Chris Cornell peformd in Atlanta just days before his death by suicide in May 2017. Getty Images 'I have pride for what I did and I want to see that come out,' he said. 'It doesn't exist in the vacuum. It exists as a collaboration with Matt [Cameron, drummer] and Ben [Shepherd, bassist] and Chris, but it takes on an entirely different weight when you think about what it is you're honoring, and the work that you're paying tribute to. 'It is us collectively. We want to do it proud. And that part of us is certainly one of the most intimate components of what Soundgarden has been since 1984.' On April 27, Soundgarden — including original bassist Hiro Yamamoto — was announced as part of the class of 2025 in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame along with Cyndi Lauper, Chubby Checker, OutKast, Bad Company, the White Stripes and Joe Cocker. Thayil told Billboard that Cornell would 'definitely be stoked' about the induction for the band, which was previously nominated in 2020 and 2023. 5 Soundgarden's Kim Thayil, Matt Cameron, Chis Cornell and Ben Shepherd appeared at the 2014 SXSW Music Festival. Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP 'He's the one who convinced me how appreciative the fans and our peers and the Soundgarden community — that includes the people that we work with and work for us — would be about it,' Thayil said. 'He realized how important that was, and he understood that would be important to us because it's important to people who cared about us and helped us and supported us all along. 'That's how I believe Chris would respond to this. I think he'd be very appreciative and thankful to all the people who have believed in him and believed in the work he did and the work that we all did, collectively.'
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Surviving Members of ‘80s Rock Band Plan to Release Final Album With Late Frontman
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways If you're a fan of grunge music, it's likely that Soundgarden is one of your favorite bands. After all, the rock group formed in Seattle in 1984, is credited — alongside groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam — for pioneering the entire grunge movement. After the death of Soundgarden's frontman, Chris Cornell, who died by suicide in 2017, fans feared that they might never get more music from the musicians again. 🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬 However, according to Soundgarden's lead guitarist, Kim Thayil, the plan is still to release their final album with Cornell. The beloved vocalist and rhythm guitarist was 52 years old at the time of his death. "Our objective and goal was always to complete that [album],' Thayil told Rolling Stone in an interview published on Monday, May 5. 'I probably have OCD enough to not want to leave something unfinished or incomplete like that, so I think the more we can attend to our body of work and our catalog,' he continued. 'I think everyone in the band feels that way. I don't just to attend to my work, but the collective work, and in this case specifically, the work of Chris." Related: Legendary Rock Band Rereleases Hit Song Like You've Never Heard Before Thayil explained, "I have pride for what I did and I want to see that come out. It doesn't exist in the vacuum. It exists as a collaboration with Matt [Cameron] and Ben [Shepherd] and Chris, but it takes on an entirely different weight when you think about what it is you're honoring, and the work that you're paying tribute to. It is us collectively. We want to do it proud. And that part of us is certainly one of the most intimate components of what Soundgarden has been since 1984." Soundgarden's other members are Ben Shepherd on bass guitar and Matt Cameron on drums. Hiro Yamamoto was the band's original bassist until 1989. "It would be a great gift to the fans,' Thayil said. 'And I do think about this, and I don't know how strange this sounds, but I feel like it's a gift to Chris too."
