On Ramin Bahrani/Goodbye, Solo

Thus writes Aravid Adiga on his filmmaker friend Ramin Bahrani (whose latest film is Goodbye, Solo)...

I’ve known Bahrani since the mid-1990s, when we were undergraduates at Columbia University in New York. Tall and thin, owl-like in his gaze, deeply knowledgeable about Dostoyevsky and Kokoschka, and full of tremendous plans to write and direct movies, he was so far ahead of everyone else at college that he seemed to us a creature beamed in from Mars to accelerate human civilization. Then we discovered that he had come from some place even stranger than that: North Carolina. The idea that the South had become cool and multicultural wasn’t really bought by anyone in New York back then, and his classmates settled scores with Bahrani by teasing him for his Southern twang. He has lost it now—but he remains, in many ways, a creature of the American South: in his easy-going manner, his ironic humor, but above all, in his ingrained resistance to the idea that America is defined by what its powerful or successful citizens do. America is central to Bahrani’s vision of his work, but this country, for him, lives (as it did for Faulkner, one of his literary heroes) at its margins; taxi drivers, old men without families, street-side vendors, prostitutes, and petty thieves challenge, expand, and enrich America in his films. The idea of an America defined at its fringe is again at the heart of the new script he is working on—called Ship of Fools—which promises to give birth to his best film yet.

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I'm in office now but after reading this piece, I wish I could be transported to a theater and watch Goodbye, Solo.

On "Solo" by Rana Dasgupta

Alok Rai on Rana Dasgupta's latest novel, Solo:

The sense of a lost wholeness haunts modernism. And what is distinctive about postmodernism is a loss of that sense of loss – the loss of a framework against which the experience of loss might even be registered. This comes either in light, celebratory flavours – polymorphous perversities, the unbearable lightness of being. Or, sometimes, in darker, bewildered forms – haunted by a sense of loss, but deprived also of the freedom to mourn – the tragedy that cannot speak its name.

The odd combination of talent and pointlessness that characterises Solo seems like some kind of potlatch – the bizarre custom identified by anthropologists wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. At one level, Solo is an exploration of "failure", and contains the suggestion that it takes a lot of failure to make some signal success. It is an interesting thought, and also a curious advertisement for Dasgupta’s next book.

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I like it when Rai mentions about potlatch: the custom wherein status is demonstrated by the magnitude of what one can squander and waste. Reminds me of the excesses of the Wall Street, and of modern lifestyle itself. The more you waste, the more you squander, the more successful you are and vice versa. If that is Dasgupta's key theme in this novel then I must say it is extremely insightful and relevant to our times.