Indian Winter by Kazim Ali
Indian Winter
by Kazim Ali
Coach House Books, 2024; 160 pages; $23.95
Reviewed by Kristina Rothstein
The narrator of this dreamy travelogue is unnamed and enigmatic. He, like the author, is a gay poet of Indian origin who lives in America. but he is adrift. “It is not that I will die if I stay here but that I am already dead. I am dead and I never had the experience of dying.” An invitation to a series of literary festivals in India propels him to his ancestral homeland, a place where he feels like an outsider, but also feels embraced in a way that can never happen in his current Midwestern home. He leaves behind his partner Ethan, and the distance between them feels like a chasm, though it may also be liberating.
Even in India, he is drifting, as he moves from one place to another. After a whirlwind of readings in junior high schools and bookstores in Chennai, the narrator flees south to Varkala, in Kerala, for the peace of the beach. He is charmed and calmed, and cancels other plans to stay longer, spending days doing yoga and receiving Ayurvedic treatments. The healing respite ends, and he returns to the sweaty literary world and the desires it engenders, absorbed into the bitching and infighting, and embroiled in the gay subculture everywhere he goes. He experiences casual attractions, making friends easily despite his tendency to observe from afar. Though there are long sections of solitude and reflection, the story is also about making instant connections and finding intimacy with people in away that rarely happens in one’s home.
The narrator remains an observer and outsider, and there are traces of writers like Paul Bowles and Marguerite Duras, who he references. “I feel like a character in a Duras novel, abstract personality, giant empty hotel overlooking the sea, days unrolling their length in the heat. And so on. There is some dangerous feeling of possibility inherent in the generic.” Throughout his journey the narrator reflects on a relationship he had with a former lover who has recently died. This will be a framework for a novel, he thinks, but both the story and the meaning of the relationship transmute and morph, impossible to capture. Thoughts of the past lover send him deeper into an excavation of his own selves, as he searches for a state of nothingness or stasis. Even the raucous literary parties and personal dramas carry a piece of this stillness, as if the hero is reluctant for his being to re-coalesce.
Indian Winter successfully navigates the boundaries of fiction and memoir, specifically referencing techniques of autofiction and producing a version of that style while also conjuring something new. “The writer himself in a relief too real to be real,” the hero muses, wondering how to tell a story naturally and authentically. The language of the novel is beautiful, but it is specifically prose rather than poetry. It is thoughtful and dreamy, but also austere and extremely readable. The story is fragmented into episodes in different locations in India, but each of the scenarios the author presents is satisfying, even the short ones. For this writer, travel brings freedom, but also the temptation to stay in a country where his audiences are large and enthusiastic, and where poetry still has a significant social and cultural impact.