Anarcho-Hindu

by Curtis White, D.N. Stuefloten (Photographs)

What if Western revolution and Eastern reincarnation were discovered to be the same thing? What if the Hindu classic The Mahabharata and Hugo's Les Miserables were in fact the same book? And what would it feel like if one person were able to experience this epic east/west continuance in one life? This delightfully eccentric novel orbits about the character of one "Siva," a woman who is perhaps a Hindi divinity, probably merely a Midwestern housewife, but also very possibly a porn-queen. Her web of tales takes her bewildered husband and the reader on a mythic and philosophic storytelling trek from ancient India, to the Paris Commune, to the St. Louis Hegelians, and finally to a neighborhood very like yours. Curtis White's Anarcho-Hindu is an unabashedly learned investigation of these recondite matters. Like The Bhagavad-Gita, the epic tale of cousin aligned against cousin in monstrous self-destruction, Anarcho-Hindu is a book about people willingly conspiring in their own defeat. Against this self-inflicted human suffering, this novel proposes the gestures of self-understanding and play that can liberate us both politically and personally. The heroes of the book are the ghostly spirits of Marx and Krishna, together for the first time, engaged in the inspired play called Refusal.

113 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 1995

Reviews

[c · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reads like watered-down Pynchon with the sort of 'much-ado-about-nothing' attitude of Donald Antrim.

There's the much-needed grounding of events and characters in the third part and coda, but even this feels not very emotionally honest, and there's very little character development as the novel progresses, although I guess that's not what a novel like this is about.

The pictures were a nice touch but I didn't feel like they added anything to the experience or story.

A goof that probably shouldn't have been published.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A suburban couple who are also an author and his wife who elide into the goddess Shiva and her paramour Arjuna, only Shiva may also possibly be a mid-West prostitute. Yeah, it's that kind of book. But it's short and punchy enough to work in the main. Anarcho-Hindu indeed (only it's more Communist than Anarchist, see below).

Sweeping between the domestic ill-fate of the suburban, through to the divine status, by way of revolutionary politics I think the book is 3 things: how to avoid the humdrum scale of human life (or at least how to aspire to escape it); an inquiry into faith; a consideration of the possibility for revolutionary change. Sadly for those adherents, both religious faith and revolutionaries are portrayed here as complicit in their own failures. They are too vulnerable to those who lie and too exposed to those who wield true power. If they credit the lie of faith as true, they doom themselves, because those with a better grip on reality, ie the pedlars of lies, will exploit them. The revolutionaries need more than belief in the morality of their cause, they need guns. Oh and you can't escape domestic purgatory, even if you are its lowest rank of prostitute and hobo. For this is the deadened reality we the human race have established for ourselves.

Nicola Barker wrote a book investigating faith The Cauliflower, White renders a much more satisfying version of such an inquiry in about half as many pages.