We get sharply etched events, but no underlying fabric of realism. And the two parts of the novel are in different modes
Solo bypasses the famous"anxiety of Indianness" simply by locating his novel in Bulgaria. And thisBulgaria is no imaginary place, even though it has been imagined in formidablehistorical density. It is a particular place, with its material specificities– sights and sounds - in which recognisable historical figures appear in thebackground, and particular individuals enact recognisable trajectories – makefriends, fall in, and out, of love, commit extravagant crimes and also acts ofsubtle, baroque generosity. All this might suggest, misleadingly, that Solois your standard novel. It isn’t.
The first part of the novel consists ofthe memories of a hundred year man who, now blind, revisits bits and pieces ofhis unremarkable life and rollercoaster times. All of which could add up to afairly conventional account of a life and a time. Except that this is a peculiarkind of telling – in which the connecting bits, the narrative ligaments andfiliations which might have connected disparate bits seem missing. Solohas a haunting image of a "dancing bear" – and we are told of how the bearis tortured into dance-like behaviour: "It looks like dancing but it’snot." It seems curiously pertinent to Dasgupta’s characters. We getsnapshots of behaviour, but not the connective tissue of classical realism. Theeffect, oddly, is of a kind of strobe-lit realism. The bits that one sees aresharply lit. But the movement is too jerky for the accumulation of affect thatmakes reality seem "real".
The lack of connective tissue does notappear accidental. The second part of the novel moves abruptly into another modealtogether. And tells sharp, and sharply discrete, action-packed stories inwhich people and incidents from the first part are present as obscure echoes.One effect is that of suggesting that for any one story one tells – Ulrich inthe first part – there are an infinity of other stories happening in theinterstices of the narrated reality. Another is that of reinforcing the sense offragmentation that is implicit in the fraying of connective threads. So far sopo-mo.
It’s only fair to say that this is avery well-written book. The language is precise, the sensibility subtle, thenarration tight. The occasional verbal lapses appear accidental – simplybecause they happen alongside inspired linguistic choices, such as in thedescription of the rutting Magdalena as "luxuriant". Ulrich discovers her inadulterous congress with a preacher. But in that very same sentence, we are alsotreated to a view of the "…[flapping] fishy foot soles" of that selfsamepreacher – which implies too many soles, even for a preacher. For the mostpart though, Solo is a smooth, competent performance, and what is done isdone well indeed. But what that something is remains something of a puzzle. Thiscan’t just be a novel about Bulgaria, right?
As I read it, Solo enacts thedifficulty of narrating a story in the crowded desert of the Now – there issimply too much out there, and no available means, whether of theory ornarrative, to pull it into credible shape. So, fragments. Which has of coursebeen the case, at least in some circles, ever since Virginia Woolf identifiedthe radically transformative moment of the Cubist exhibition in London – "Inor around December 1910, human nature changed." The sense of a lostwholeness haunts modernism. And what is distinctive about postmodernism is aloss of that sense of loss – the loss of a framework against which theexperience of loss might even be registered. This comes either in light,celebratory flavours – polymorphous perversities, the unbearable lightness ofbeing. Or, sometimes, in darker, bewildered forms – haunted by a sense ofloss, but deprived also of the freedom to mourn – the tragedy that cannotspeak its name.
The odd combination of talent andpointlessness that characterises Solo seems like some kind of potlatch– the bizarre custom identified by anthropologists wherein status isdemonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. At one level, Solois an exploration of "failure", and contains the suggestion that it takes alot of failure to make some signal success. It is an interesting thought, andalso a curious advertisement for Dasgupta’s next book.
A shorter, edited verstion of this review appears in print