Sea of Poppies

by Amitav Ghosh
(Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008) First aired on NPR November 12, 2008
Imagine if Charles Dickens had signed on for a voyage with the Pequod, and you get some idea of what Amitav Ghosh's sprawling new historical novel, Sea of Poppies, has in store. Ghosh conjures up a former slave ship called the Ibis, in the year 1838. It's packed with a multitude of characters: a mixed-race novice seahand from Baltimore named Zachary Reid; a mob of indentured Indian peasants, including a woman named Deeti and her giant of a paramour, Kalua, both important to the plot; and figures high and low, such as a rajah in debt to a British businessman, a Chinese criminal, farmers and soldiers, Malay crewmen, and a female French stowaway. They're all sailing to the island of Mauritius, on a voyage that will somehow play a role-some sea fog rolls in here to make this end somewhat unclearin the British war to open up China to the opium trade. Ghosh tells the story of how all these characters, Indians and crew alike, end up on this voyage in an appealing, somewhat modified, lingo of the period-when British English mingled with Indian Englishes, and dallied with dozens of other dialects: ship's lore, pirate talk, Lascar pidgin, and all the other verbal music of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. And beneath it all, like the endless rolling salt sea, Ghosh's own beautifully made sentences and paragraphs buoy up ship, plot, characters, and

Like the endless rolling salt sea, Ghosh's own beautifully made sentences and paragraphs buoy up ship, plot, characters, and the setting itself, with a natural ease and beauty.

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the setting itself, with a natural ease and beauty. As in this passagepun intended-when the ship, with its indentured passengers, most of whom have never seen the ocean, anchors for one last night in Indian waters: "The last place from which the migrants would be able to view their native shore: this was Saugor Roads, a much trafficked anchorage in the lee of Ganga-Sagar, the island that stands between the sea and the holy river.... The very name GangaSagar, joining, as it did, river and sea, clear and dark, known and hidden, served to remind the migrants of the yawning chasm ahead; it was if they were sitting balanced on the edge of a precipice, and the island were an outstretched limb of sacred Jambudvipa, their homeland, reaching out to keep them from tumbling into the void." Reading this novel over a number of days-it takes its time and so it takes your time, but in only the best of ways-I came to understand that all the good books do that, don't they? Help to keep us from tumbling into the void.

DU

FU

DAVID

YOUNG

Du Fu: A Life in Poetry

Trans. & ed. David Young (Knopf, 2008) First aired on NPR November 24, 2008 An eighth-century Chinese poet named Du Fu, one of the most admired lyric poets in the world, left behind some fourteen hundred poems and a record of a life that translator and editor David Young, himself a poet, has now turned into a biography in verse. Du Fu, who

lived from 712 to 770, spent his life making his poems, raising a family, trying to find patronage at the courts of emperors, and sometimes moving back and forth across the Chinese countryside as warring armies advanced or retreated. The record he left of his ambitious apprentice days and inebriated young manhood as a poet taking in the natural world around him is superb. In a poem about crossing a famous lake near the capital, for example, he writes: "As we come to the lake's middle / we see in its dark depths // the southern mountains, mirrored / upside down in the water / / here and there a quiver / as if the mountain moved // maybe our boat will collide / with a high mountain temple / / maybe the moon will swim / out of the mountain pass..." But as a wife and children come to depend on him, he adds to his wonderful views of nature worrying lines about politics. "The State goes

to ruin," he writes, but "mountains and rivers survive." He takes note of the passing of time: his hair turns white, money grows scarce, his children grow older. "Here's my wife at last / wearing a much-patched dress // sobbing uncontrollably / like any tumbling brook and there are my two daughters // their clothes all patched as well." But the stillness of nature's beautiful moments remains, no matter how tumultuous his personal life, his finest subject even as he and his family make one of their many journeys because of political turmoil in the capital. "We leave at night / with carts," he writes, "overhead a moon / and a wilderness of stars / / here and there / clouds and mist / / this universe is enormous, // my road goes on and on." As does his work, even into our present day.

The Ghost in Love

by Jonathan Carroll (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)

Death with Interruptions

by Jose Saramago (Harcourt, 2008) First aired on NPR December 9, 2008 Two new novels featuring the Angel of Death were published in October: The Ghost in Love, by Jonathan Carroll, and Death with Interruptions, by Jos6 Saramago. Expatriate writer Carroll is, to put it bluntly, the best writer of fantastic-notice I didn't say fantasy-novels in English, and his new work is no exception. As the result of a seemingly temporary glitch in the age-old chain of life to

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TITLE: [Sea of Poppies] SOURCE: World Lit Today 83 no2 Mr/Ap 2009 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/