CLAS Acts January 2023

Monthly newsletter of the TT faculty of CLAS

A Note from Dean Drake

“New Year’s Poem” by Margaret Avison ends:

 

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.

 

This poem reminds me of the Danish concept of hygge which, here in the Midwest, we understand in our bones.  Something about retreating into our cozy space for a little while at this chilly time of year marks the season and makes us ready for new things.

I'm delighted that the feature article in this issue is about one of those new things: Oindrila Mukherjee’s novel The Dream Builders, which is about to be published by Tin House Press.  Reading a good book is a great way to begin a new year.
 

As we dive into the winter term, it repays us to think about how many things are new to our students.  Recently, our CLAS Student Advisory Committee impressed upon us that they really appreciated the resources that faculty aggregate in their syllabi and on Blackboard.  As you do the work of assembling these materials, it is easy to wonder if they will be used.  The students assured us that they read your caring for them into the provision of these resources, and that they do use them.
 

Wishing you a rewarding semester full of creative energy and inspiration,

 

Jen

A Dream Transplanted

Her debut is an homage to the human spirit as well as a quiet warning about our future path. She gave me an entirely new way to see India, and for that I am both pleased and grateful.

~Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore

 

I loved this portrait of modern India, and the ways that America casts its long shadow across the globe.

~Rachel Cass, Harvard Book Store

 

Mukherjee allows full life for these characters who are often real enough to remind us of ourselves, even as they betray one another. . .  even as they betray themselves.

―Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition

 

 

After abandoning a first manuscript, Writing’s Oindrila Murkherjee embarked on a second.  With the help of her writing group, she brought it into focus, but not before much sabbatical work on the book had to be put to one side and re-engaged in a new way. This process was not wasted because the resulting novel’s character Maneka, also an Indian-born academic in America, is undergoing a similar inner dialectic about her book plans. As Rick Simonson of the Elliott Bay Book Company wrote, the character “Might be someone like her, but also may well not be.”

 

After years of work, in March Oindrila learned that Tin House Books would green-light her novel, The Dream Builders. The joy was immense, and the publication target both auspicious and daunting: January 10, 2023, Oindrila’s birthday. 

 

“Debut novelist” is a term like the old adage about swans–gliding on the water to all appearances, but paddling madly underneath the surface. In nine short months while teaching, serving on UAS, and performing the usual substantial lift of university faculty, Oindrila was also reviewing potential covers, scouring iterations of the 360+ page proofs, learning about her obligations for upcoming book tours and radio interviews, reading the pre-publication reviews, and following the negotiations for simultaneous publication in Australia and the UK (which occasioned some tweaks to terminology).

 

Then the audiobook rights went to auction with Blackstone the winner. “I was glad to hear that the versatile and accomplished reader Soneela Nankani will be the voice of the book.  I’ve just finished providing a pronunciation guide and am so grateful to the publishers for consulting me as there are so many words, names, etc. from different parts of India,” Oindrila explains.

 

Soneela will need that versatility for the many narrative perspectives of the novel which one reviewer termed polyphonic.  As Cori Cusker of Bright Side Bookshop noted, “The breadth of the characters and a peek at their lives results in extraordinary depth and perspective as we are given privy to a wide range of experience and emotions highlighting the tension between dreams, loss, and uncertainty that is being experiences regardless of resources, social standing, gender, or class.”

 

The novel takes place in the fictional new city of Hrishipur where its characters have come in pursuit of dreams of post-globalization success that takes many forms and requires many sacrifices.  In some cases, the place is so dissimilar to their former homes as to make them almost as much an expat as Maneka is.  Along the way, a second country of dreams is portrayed by the characters’ partial, yet monolithic, understanding of America fueled by media and consumer culture.  Just as rural hometowns in India contrast with the germinal glitz of Hrishipur, Maneka’s experience of a Midwest college town contrasts with the urban America imagined by many of the characters she encounters.

 

While to know all is not necessarily to forgive all, several characters, from whom we initially recoil, return to provide context that cannot but shift our view or at least make us examine our prejudices. 

 

Oindrila hints at one of the main drivers of the novel when she recalls seeing a sign that said, “Trump has arrived, have you?”

 

Oindrila is very grateful for a 2012 CSCE grant that allowed her to travel to India and re-immerse herself in a country that was quickly changing.

 

“Since I had been there, it was more westernized–even celebrating Halloween.”  She was able to talk with the facialists, cab drivers, and people in many other circumstances who come to life in the novel. She simultaneously explores the many impacts of property development and other manifestations of American culture on India.

 

Wish our debut novelist a happy birthday at the launch of The Dream Builders at Schuler Books on 28th Street in Grand Rapids on January 10. Her book is the number one choice on the Independent Book Review list!