Compiled by Selma Carvalho
In a year when lives were disrupted in a most unexpected manner, 17 of Goa’s literati spread across the world, tell us of the books they found comfort and meaning in. This splendidly diverse list which includes everything from love, sex, spirituality, self-healing, decolonisation, and displacement to World War II and queer writing, makes for curious reading.
Ben Antao
Author of Penance, Toronto
Caste:The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House) by Isabel Wilkerson, a black American journalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Although those who have lived in India are familiar with systemic caste discrimination, what makes Wilkerson’s work a compelling read is how she draws parallels to societies in Germany, India and the U.S. Drawing upon the evidence of anthropological research as well as the lived experiences in the three countries, the author lays bare how human beings are dehumanized in today’s world through the prevalence of the pernicious caste hierarchy.
Jane Borges
Author of Bombay Balchão , Bombay
Loss (HarperCollins) by Siddharth Dhavnant Shanghvi, is a memoir of death and grief, where he examines his personal losses — his parents and pet — one essay at a time. He does this with “surgical detachment". His enquiry has a purpose, which is to see the joy in loss and loneliness. It’s a book for our times, to not just prepare us for the inevitable, but to also rise from it, less scarred, more healed and hopeful with the thought that those who love us, never really leave. Their memories and stories make up for their absence, and that's how we should celebrate their life, and ours, too.
Selma Carvalho
Author of Goan Pioneers of E. Africa, London
Cleanness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Garth Greenwell. Without a doubt, Greenwell is the definitive voice of 21st century queer writing. The story follows the life of an American professor teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria. Greenwell’s ability to observe, coldly detached, his own sexuality and that of his lovers, and to draw from it an understanding of queer desire, love and possession, makes this book a foundational guide in finding our universal humanity. Beautiful prose, quite un-American in its lyrical tenor, takes us on a journey through Bulgaria’s political, cultural and architectural landscape.
Venita Coelho
Author of Whisper in the Wind, Goa
The Scar (Penguin) by China Mieville brings extreme erudition, a fantastical imagination and great story-telling chops to this steam-punk fantasy. A woman fleeing a city ends up on a flotilla that is heading for the Scar — a rent in the world that throbs with power. The armada is ruled by the Lovers who wind each other to show their devotion, and is made up of the rags and tags of races, species and ‘remades' — half human, half machine. A thrilling saga that reinvents the boundaries of fantasy.
Maria Aurora Couto
Author of Goa: A Daughter’s Story, Goa
Saint Thomas Aquinas (Sheed and Ward) by G. K. Chesterton. Aquinas was an ideologically influential 13th century Italian Dominican friar and Catholic priest. My husband Alban was passionate in discussing comparative religion and Thomas Aquinas. Decades have been lived thinking about Humanism, Humility, Aquinas’s work as a building block for contemporary thought, the life of the mind. Though my limited intellectual grasp made comprehension difficult, Chesterton who is an old favourite since student days was a good guide for beginners!
Jessica Faleiro
Author of Afterlife: Ghost Stories, Goa
Living Beautifully with Uncertainty & Change (Shambhala) by Pema Chödrön is a self-help book. As the months wore on, the uncertainty of living with the COVID pandemic, unable to plan, unable to travel for work, began to sink in. Plans and goals became heavy burdens and I've always struggled with uncertainty at the best of times. The title spoke to me, and its mindfulness practices have stayed with me. I don't follow the structure she recommends but a few reminders of how to live open heartedly and with patience were just what I needed to steady myself again.
Jason K. Fernandes
Author of Citizenship in a Caste Polity, Lisbon
Bombay Balchão (Tranquebar) by Jane Borges. There is something that fiction can do, which academic work cannot, and that is to fill in the shades of emotions which colour our personal histories, something the book does admirably. It speaks not merely of the Goan experience of Bombay, but also that of the larger Indo-Portuguese community, which includes the East Indians and Mangaloreans, and demonstrates how they get along, or not. What made the book standout, was that it was not merely a tender history of this community, but also alive to the political challenges that face the survival of this community.
Leonard Fernandes
Owner, Dogears Bookstore, Goa
Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Simon & Schuster) by Richard Bessel, kept resonating with me, for its depictions of Germany in the immediate years following the end of the Second World War. It speaks about the denial that many Germans lived in even as the war approached its end, and their country was being destroyed by the actions of a man who refused to see reason. And it stayed with me because we seem to be living in similar times.
R. Benedito Ferrão
Asst Professor, William & Mary, Virginia
Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World (Bloomsbury) by Pamila Gupta, connects Goa, Mozambique and other parts of Africa, as well as Portugal during the period of decolonization, and its aftermath. The book’s use of the photography of Ricardo Rangel (1924-2009) and Zanzibar’s Capital Art Studio (est. 1930) will be of interest to those wanting to know more about the Goan presence in Portuguese Africa. If there is a field that can be called Goan Studies, this book demonstrates that it cannot exist without interrogating Goa’s historic and extant linkages with other parts of the world, and especially across the Indian Ocean.
Roanna Gonsalves
Author of The Permanent Resident, Sydney
A Burning (Simon & Schuster) by Megha Majumdar. This is a captivating, heartbreaking story about three characters whose lives intersect in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in Kolkata. I had the privilege of interviewing Megha Majumdar for the Melbourne Writers' Festival this year. I was utterly charmed and shaken up by Majumdar's brilliant storytelling in this book, her tender depictions of character and her insight into the sinister workings of power in contemporary India.
Steven Gutkin
Journalist, Publisher, Goa
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster) by Mary L. Trump, who is Trump's niece. The book sheds light on Trump's psychology, or better put, pathology, tracing his narcissism, deceit and lack of empathy to her overbearing grandfather, Fred Sr., whom she describes as a sociopath who denied Donald the ability to feel a wide range of normal human emotions. A trained psychologist, she provides a highly readable account of what makes Trump tick, tying his unlikely rise to the tragedy of her own father, who could not bear the family's brutal dynamics.
Vivek Menezes
Political columnist, co-founder GALF, Goa
Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation (Cambridge University Press) by Annie Zaidi, has stayed in my mind most intensely. You don't exactly expect to learn so much from, and fall so intensely in love with, a personal history by an author whose oeuvre is already entirely familiar — Zaidi has been an established favourite at the Goa Arts & Literature Festival (GALF) for years, and who is an entire decade younger than you, but that is exactly what happened in my reading of this book, which I found powerfully illuminating about different ways of understanding that most fundamental question: what is home?
Mayabhushan Nagvenkar
c0-Author of An Extraordinary Life: A Biography of Manohar Parrikar, Goa
Of Mice and Men (Covici Friede) by John Steinbeck, exploring a theme he would return to often, that of the disenfranchised and voiceless, their underlying motivations, and often their thwarted aspirations. Re-read this classic for perhaps the fifth time. It always gives me perspective when it comes to dealing with losing friends and when acquaintances play truant. It’s a slender book. Just 107 pages. Doesn't burden a bookshelf. But helps the reader unburden.
Augusto Pinto
Translator of The Salt of the Earth, Goa
People's Linguistic Survey of India, Volume Eight, Part Two: The Languages of Goa, (Bhasha, and Orient Blackswan), chief editor: G. N. Devy, Vol editors: Madhavi Sardesai and Damodar Mauzo. The entirety of the PLSI volumes is a massive undertaking which is the second most important linguistic survey of Indian languages after the legendary George Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1905). The Goa volume in question is a wonderful (but not entirely comprehensive), book that maps the languages of Goa although it does not try to rival Grierson's work.
Rochelle Potkar
Author of Paper Asylum, Mumbai
In Search of Heer (Tranquebar) by Manjul Bajaj. Through an incisive tapestry and absorbing symphonic prose, Bajaj reopens a legendary storyworld: that of Heer Syal and Deedho Ranjha, lovers from Panjab; a fascinating inquiry into love and sexuality from six differing viewpoints: that of Deedho, Heer, a crow, a pigeon, a goat, and a camel — motifs pegged at temporal milestones. The story is brought forth with vision and linguistic lyricism.
Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
Author of Tivolem, New York
The Power and the Glory (Penguin) by Graham Greene. In a year where so many books were devoted to the exploits of Donald J. Trump, I sought refuge by choosing between two books set in an earlier era: Orlando da Costa's O Signo de Ira, and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Greene won. It was published in 1940, and I read it perhaps five years later, but this eighty-year-old novel is very relevant historically and politically even today, when individuals of faith and conscience often find themselves confronted by tyrannical and unforgiving forces. Brilliantly plotted and written, suspenseful from first page to last. Moving, and unforgettable.
Jugneeta Sudan
Literary & Art Critic, Goa
Why Sex Doesn’t Matter (Mensch) by Olivia Fane, in which she debunks sex and decouples it from love. She writes, “Sex is a biological urge, nothing more and nothing less, we’ve made sex our god”. She clarifies that contrary to love, sex turns humans into a commodity and has nothing to do with human interiority. Olivia advances the argument to economics and the idealised institution of marriage, where sex usurped love in the modern era. Based on research, history, and empirical data, Olivia urges our sex-obsessed society to interrogate the dynamics of love & sex in human intimacy & relationships.
Banner image is by Katya Austin and downloaded from unsplash.com