Neel Mukherjee Tells Ghost Stories: The NYPL Podcast Ep. 203
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A State of Freedom is the new novel by Neel Mukherjee, who describes the book as a conversation with the 1971 novel In A Free State, by Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul. I had the chance to speak with Mukherjee about it recently when he came down to New York from Harvard, where he is currently a visiting professor.
Somewhere around the middle of the title story in Naipaul’s book, one of the main characters, somewhat offhandedly, observes that "the most terrifying thing is how quickly you can adapt to having your whole life written off." The man who says it, an English diplomat named Bobby, is on a Conrad-esque journey through the hinterland of an unnamed African country that is in the middle of a coup. Whether he is thinking about himself or the inhabitants of the country he is traversing, he could be describing just about any character in the book.
Or, for that matter, any character in Mukherjee's. A State of Freedom takes ideas of abandonment, isolation, and alienation—among the themes that Naipaul employed as connections between In a Free State's five independent sections which otherwise share neither character nor plot—to tell his own five interlinking stories of poverty in modern-day India.The book is as at turns brutal and compassionate, haunting and humane. It is also, in certain places quite literally, haunted.
We spoke about Naipaul’s work and complicated history, and Mukherjee’s evolving notions of home, migration, and ghosts. ”A ghost is someone who belonged to a particular world who had an unhappy or tragic or violent ending to that particular life and hasn’t found a resting place in another world,” Mukherjee says, “this could be a very a good working definition for who a migrant is.”
Photo by Daniel Hart
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