Rosella Postorino
At the Wolf ’s Table
Trans. Leah Janeczko
Flatiron BooksRosella Postorino’s novel, translated
from the Italian and winner of the
distinguished Premio Campiello
prize, has become an international
best-seller. At the Wolf ’s Table is a
gripping account of a young German
girl during World War II begrudg-
ingly chosen to help ensure Adolf
Hitler’s survival. Postorino’s prose is
honest and precise; breathing life into
her characters, she takes readers back
in time and down into some of the
darkest depths in human history.Kiriti Sengupta
Rituals
HawakalThis smartly designed collection pairs
Sengupta’s airy aphoristic poems with
Partha Pratim Das’s blocky but stylish
illustrations. Many of the poems in
the collection have a kind of koanlike
quality to them but draw deeply from
Indian mythology and ritual, evoking
spiritual atmospherics to foreground
the mundanity of the everyday.Nota Bene
Born into a middle-class family in 1905,
he became an early leader of a liberal-pro-
gressive movement to free the princely state
of Jammu and Kashmir of its monarchic
repressions long before it was carved in half
between India and Pakistan.
The personal history of this seminal
force for Kashmiri liberation is well docu-
mented elsewhere; this book contains a
compendium of Abdullah’s letters, lectures,
and press articles, which carefully document
his laws-into-sausages struggle to achieve a
free, independent Kashmir based on plural-
ism, a rejection of the religious split between
Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that ultimately
truncated South Asia into endlessly com-
bative, nationalistic, and regressive regimes.
Often, Barack Obama being an example,
a leader with progressive principles who
works tirelessly to achieve compromises to
improve conditions, while avoiding back-
lash wars, is destined to be reviled in doc-
trinaire quarters as a centrist, a neoliberal,
or even a traitor to certain principles. Ideo-
logical purists will never fail to find some
fault in those leaders tasked on the ground
with making democracy work in a world
where political divisiveness is as rampant
as domestic conflict and divorce. Both in
Khan’s insightful introduction and conclud-
ing remarks, and in Sheikh Abdullah’s own
words, it is clear that he was determined
never to sell out any constituents and always
to keep their true—only apparently dispa-
rate—interests in tandem.
Whereas we yet have no account of
Obama’s struggles in steering a snaking
course for America’s spaceship of state,
reading this book and its compendium of
Sheikh Abdullah’s resonant, unflagging, and
articulate pursuit of Kashmiri welfare would
perhaps enlighten those who delude them-
selves into thinking that achieving freedom
and a vibrant democracy means hacking a
straight line through the tangled jungle of
competing interests and egos that is real
politics. Abdullah struggled for real accord
between all religious, ethnic, and political
groups and was rewarded with long years
in prison followed by roller-coaster years
as Jammu and Kashmir’s prime minister
and chief minister, and throughout his life
he enjoyed the adulation of the ordinary
people whose cause he adopted. Abdullah’s
path thus provides a stellar analog to Nelson
Mandela’s. Both negotiated without bitter-
ness with those who had incarcerated them
to further their just aspirations.
Sheikh Abdullah never focused on ene-
mies, but always on Kashmiri agency. This
book is an intuitive primer in democracy for
anyone who would take a practical, holistic
view of the democratic enterprise.
Jim Drummond
Round Rock, TexasSamanta Schweblin
Mouthful of BirdsTrans. Megan McDowell. New York.
Riverhead Books. 2019. 240 pages.Following up on her 2014 novel Fever Dream
(nominated for the 2017 International Man
Booker Prize), Samanta Schweblin’s collec-
tion of short stories, Mouthful of Birds, takes
readers on a road trip full of surprising and
surreal pit stops, populated with characters
that hover on the edge of familiarity.WORLDLIT.ORG 103