Essays

World on Fire

Amitav Ghosh characterizes the essays he has collected in Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (Houghton Mifflin, $25) as a kind of collective answer to a question he traces back to Mahatma Gandhi: "Is it possible to write about situations of violence without allowing your work to become complicit with the subject?" To offer a simple example, giving the name of the man who killed John Lennon helps fulfill the killer's crazed desire to go down in history; yet a writer who wants to shed light on the incident can hardly avoid discussing and analyzing its perpetrator. Ghosh, a journalist who divides his time between Brooklyn and India, is also a novelist, and in an essay on the assassination of another Gandhi -- Indira, the Indian prime minister killed in 1984 -- he notes the temptation in store for any fiction writer who takes on a violent subject: "It is all too easy to present violence as an apocalyptic spectacle, while the resistance to it can easily figure as mere sentimentality or, worse, as pathetic and absurd."

In other pieces, Ghosh writes about the Cambodia of Pol Pot, 9/11, the 2004 tsunami and the winning of the Nobel Prize by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz. In the charming "The March of the Novel Through History," he recalls his wonderment at his grandfather's bookcase in Calcutta, which contained Maxim Gorky and John Steinbeck, Henry Sienkiewicz and Henri Bergson; the panoply of 19th-century greats (Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, etc.); and now-obscure folk such as Marie Corelli and Grazia Deledda -- names that for Ghosh "have become a kind of secret incantation . . . a password that allows entry into the brotherhood of remembered bookcases."

-- Dennis Drabelle