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Фото автораNikolai Rudenko

«Sea of Poppies», Amitav Ghosh

Обновлено: 4 дек. 2021 г.



Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. His most recent novel, Sea of Poppies, is the first volume of the Ibis Trilogy.


Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986.

A spacious alluring world, distant wanderings, exciting adventures, exciting secrets and cute heroes, unconditional empathy for which does not require the slightest mental effort from the reader - the Indian writer Amitav Gosh shows that all these simple-minded, purely childish, seemingly literary joys can be experienced and in adulthood. His epic trilogy, the first part of which The Poppy Sea was finally published in Russian in an exemplary translation by Alexander Safronov, is an amazing and, perhaps, unparalleled in modern literature, a hybrid of serious postcolonial prose and a light adventure novel in the best traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson or, if you like, Raphael Sabatini.


The year is 1838, the first rumbles of the imminent Opium War are already being heard in China, but in Calcutta and its environs, under the rule of the all-powerful East India Company, life is still going on as usual. A young peasant woman Diti's husband, an opium addict, dies, but instead of going to the widow's fire in a way worthy from the point of view of relatives, Diti rushes to run with an untouchable neighbor who becomes her second husband. The young and naive French orphan, Paulette, who was raised by her botanist father in natural purity and a complete lack of understanding of vain social propriety, is forced to flee from under the shelter of a rich and vicious Englishman who gave her shelter after her father's death. Paulette's foster brother, the Muslim Jadu, dreams of going to sea and becoming a laskar - this is the name of the brotherhood of skilful and wayward natives sailors serving on European, Indian and Chinese ships. A pampered and sophisticated Indian aristocrat, Raja Neil Rattan Halder suddenly loses his fortune, title, and freedom - years of hard labor away from his homeland await him.


The fates of these and a dozen other heroes intersect aboard the schooner Ibis, sailing to Mauritius with a full hold of coolie workers - they are needed on the island to cultivate sugarcane on the fertile soils there. And of course, both at sea and on land, the characters of the "Poppy Sea" are waiting for a lot of interesting - love dramas, almost magical transformations, sudden meetings, fights, escapes, shootings and dizzying plot twists.


However, for all its fascination and general plot-like character, the novel by Amitav Gosh would not be worth a separate conversation if it were not for one important and not quite obvious feature of it, namely the specific author's optics shifted along the west-east axis. Unlike the traditional adventure novel, which in one way or another places the white man at the center of the universe, European values ​​and Europe in general - sometimes symbolic, and sometimes quite specific, even if it slips beyond the horizon, Gosh's prose is completely devoid of this habitual and deceptively natural civilizational imbalance.


The focus of his attention is the entire large colonial world - from India and further to the East. Europeans are, of course, present in it, but on the same (or significantly lesser) rights than its original inhabitants, and there is no Europe as the sacred heart of the universe in the space of the novel - some of the supporting characters sometimes go on business to London but it could just as well be Canton, Bombay, New York, or Singapore. Moreover, one of the heroes - a half-blood young man, born of the union of a rich Parsi merchant and a Chinese washerwoman and dreaming of going "to the West", by "West" means his father's homeland, India, and not England or France - and Ghosh neatly underlines the irony inherent in this geographic relativity.


Unfolding the globe at such an angle, as well as imposing an old-fashioned and, to be honest, a purely European genre canvas on such a cosmopolitan, emphatically non-Europocentric method of perceiving the world, Amitav Gosh achieves an amazing effect. The adventure novel in his interpretation looks both fresh and modern, but at the same time comfortable, understandable and predictable in a good way. In a word, the very case when new wine poured into old wineskins not only does not spill on the ground through the holes, but, on the contrary, acquires a new exotic taste and aroma.


Well, and the best news - the second part of Gosh's trilogy, "The Smoky River", in which the heroes will continue to travel and master the world, fall in love, take risks, part ways, get into dangerous alterations and get out of them with honor, has already been published in Russian and is also available in the shops.


This article was sponsored by Sammy Yung

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