Daddy dearest: A Father’s Day reading list
Written by: Sharmishta Jha is a literary agent and freelance journalist based in New Delhi, India. Her work has been published in Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The New Indian Express among other national dailies. You can follow her on Instagram and view her writing here.
About the lead image: The oil painting is ‘Father and Son’ and was made by Chinese painter Xie Dongming in 2010.
Over to Sharmishta…
For generations, pop culture has had low expectations of fathers. While mothers and motherhood have inspired so many writers, fathers are often missing from literature. This father’s day, we look at literature that has been shaped by the presence or absence of fathers.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy: McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book provides a moving portrait of a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Following the suicide of the mother, a father and son duo try to survive in a world ravaged by an apocalyptic fire and cannibalism. In contrast against a bleak world, the relationship between the father and the son represents love and goodness. This book imagines a terrifying future in which there is no hope save for the father and son and they have nothing to protect themselves against the horrors of a post-apocalyptic world except a pistol. And they have each other.
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar: Set against the terror of Gaddafi’s rule in Libya, ‘The Return’ is a memoir about family, love, and loss. This memoir tells the tale of Hisham Matar’s determined efforts to find his father who was a prominent opponent of the Gaddafi regime, and later went missing in Libya in 1990. Matar writes an absorbing account of the socio-political events that ultimately led to the fall of Gaddafi’s regime.
A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux: As the French writer Annie Ernaux’s success prompted her social mobility, it also led to the alienation of her working-class father. A Man’s Place tells the story of the life of the writer’s father and the shame that haunted his life. Ernaux examines the differences between the lived experiences of her father’s working-class life and her own middle-class existence. The reader reads as Ernaux’s father descends into old age. Though there is considerable distance between them, her father admires the woman Ernaux becomes.
My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar: ‘My Beloved Life’ is an extraordinary account of an ordinary man, Jadu, and his relationship with his daughter, Jugnu. Kumar tells the story of a nation through Jadu’s life who dies during the covid pandemic in India while his daughter Jugnu mourns miles away in Atlanta, USA. Jugnu feels helpless as she cannot find the space to grieve. Jugnu is asked to write an obituary for her father and she recalls his gentle ways, his love and trust in her. She feels adrift without her father who was her biggest cheerleader in her life. He had been generous in his praise and support for his daughter. Kumar addresses the collective fear of people who were trapped in their homes during the pandemic, miles away from their ageing parents.
Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘Autumn’ is a collection of brief meditations that archive the beauty of this world, all written for Knausgaard's daughter. The book takes the form of a letter to the author’s unborn daughter. This book urges the reader to pay closer attention to the little details of life, for that is where the beauty lies. This, according to the author, makes life worth living. Knausgaard writes in the book's introduction—”You know that phrase, ‘I wish I could give you the world?’” That is what Knausgard attempts to do with this book.
Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces by Michael Chabon: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Michael Chabon, writes about his relationship with his father, in ‘Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces’. This also includes snippets from his own experience as a father of four children. Chabon tries to capture glimpses of little moments in ordinary life with his father in this extraordinary collection of essays. The author avoids the use of overly sentimental tone as he also writes about the quiet ways a father can impart hurt to a child. On the other hand, he unpacks the mysteries and magic of fatherhood with breathtaking prose.
Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer: ‘Stranger to History’ chronicles Taseer’s journey as he tries to trace his paternal identity. Born to a Pakistani father and a Sikh mother, Taseer was raised mostly in Delhi. In order to understand his Islamic roots better and thereby understand his father, Taseer travels from the secular Istanbul to an extremely religious Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. This book tells as much about the evolving nature of religion as it does about Taseer’s estranged father.
