With the Tiger

Published by ARCADIA, an imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd., in association with Press On.

ISBN: 978 1 921509 57 5

Available from all good bookshops or direct from the publisher at 7 Little Lothian Street North, North Melbourne, Vic 3051

tel: (+61) 03 9329 6963.  fax: (+61) 03 9329 5452

www.scholarly.info

Email: aspic@ozemail.com.au

Watch the 2010 Newsblog for reviews and coverage of this edition.

Published by HarperCollins India 2008

ISBN: 978-81-7223-717-2

http://harpercollins.co.in

How to buy With The Tiger

With The Tiger should be available in all good book shops in India.

HarperCollins India has an ordering service within India. Here is the link:

http://harpercollins.co.in

To order With The Tiger outside India, you could try Indiaplaza.com or firstandsecond.com. Here are the links:

http://www.indiaplaza.com

http://firstandsecond.com

With The Tiger is a contemporary re-writing of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. It is a social history of the 1980’s and 90’s, and a story of one Westerner’s search for meaning in India. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham, a novel published in 1942, is said to have begun the craze for ‘Spiritual India.’

REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS

“I wanted to follow Maugham closely but set it in a new time and place”

interview in Indian Express/Sunday Pioneer with Swati Pal 8 March 2009

“Maugham’s the word”

interview in The Asian Age with Nawaid Anjum

25 March 2009

“Fast forwarding Mr Maugham”

interview in Bangalore Mirror with Nishanth S Coontoor

7 April 2009

“Spiritual India and other stories”

interview in Sakaal Times with Biswadip Mitra

Monday, April 20th, 2009

REVIEWS

“Through foreign eyes” review in Deccan Herald 10 August 2008

“Walking along the Razor’s Edge … Again“ review in DNA 7 September 2008

“If It Ain’t Broke?“ review in The Statesman 4 January 2009

“Chasing Dreams“ The Tribune 17 August 2008

“Off the shelf” Sahara Times 2 August 2008

The Saddest Pleasure

Published by Imprint, 1989 - ISBN 0 7322 2537
Availability: out of print

A collection of short prose in three parts: travel diaries, stories, and a novella

“In The Saddest Pleasure, Inez Baranay continues her imaginative use of prose evident in her recent novel Between Careers. And what, you might ask, is the saddest pleasure? Why, travelling…”

Canberra Times, February 17, 1990

“[It] is like a tub of Neapolitan ice cream, three flavours and … [each] reader will find their favourite flavour. The first part is travel writing, the “saddest pleasure” of the title, and Baranay writes about it with intelligence, wit and an eye for rich detail. This style is impressionistic, snapshot, almost pushing into stream of consciousness at times, with intermingled memories, observations and some sharp social satire…. The second part of the book is “stories” … Baranay writes with intelligent insight about interaction, about self and sex … The Third part is ‘A Novella in Three Parts’. … The Saddest Pleasure [is] an alluring read, fragrant with Eastern experience, bitter edged with a relentless contemplated life.”

- Australian Bookseller and Publisher, October 1989

“Her prose is marked by a languid mastery of words and an idiom that might at first look careless until one realises that there is not a sentence there that does not work. This trait could be characteristic of someone born displaced, for whom the English language was a new and challenging vehicle.”

- Sydney Review, January 1990

“Inez Baranay’s The Saddest Pleasure .. is characterised by the same intelligence and freshness that marked her first book…. her prose is vivid, aphoristic, ideally suited to summing up her generation’s fantasies and follies - whether they concern finding the right hotel in India or living alone as a “new spinster” in Sydney. “You Don’t Whinge” takes a wry look at the cultural shifts in Australia that have made yesterday’s despised “reffos” today’s fashionable Europeans. It is one of the many pieces in The Saddest Pleasure which mark out Baranay as a talented and innovative writer.”

- The Herald December 29, 1989

Neem Dreams

Published by Rupa (Delhi) 2003

ISBN 81-291-0217-X

Republished by Booksurge (USA) 2006

ISBN I-4196-4712-1

Buy new edition USA

“Baranay has risen above her feminine voice and foreigner perspective to strike a neutral unbiased language as far as basic values and issues are concerned. She uncannily conjures splashes of Indian reactions, attitudes or relationships with as much authenticity as she does the American, Australian and British ethos. What makes the novel endearing is the high voltage resonance of the poignant tales of the protagonists woven around the theme of globalisation, leaving a sea wave effect on the readers long after they have finished the read.”

-Padmini Devarajan. The Hindu

Read the whole review here

“Despite the neo-hippy vibe of its title Neem Dreams is not your average culture cuisine, the how I got the shits in Shilpi kind of novel about white people who find themselves leper-hugging in India before they return to their monotonous life-sentences in Manchester or Melbourne, immersed in mortgage and middle-managerhood. Woven around four characters and a neem tree, this is a novel about globalisation, corporate rapacity, environmental annihilation and political villainy.

The novel’s four central characters Pandora, Meenakshi, Andy and Jade (Australian, Indian, British and Australian-American) come together as a result of capricious twists of fate: an article in a magazine, a chance encounter at a cafe and finally, a community project in a village centered on a factory producing neem products. Neem was the village dispensary, known to ancient civilizations whose refinement was undreamt of by a still barbarous, distant Europe slowly evolving towards its imperialist technologies. The neem project promised to give each of the four what they had been looking for : Meenakshi needed something worthwhile, something more than her marriage to sustain here: Pandora longed to be an instrument of justice and vengeance: Andy needed a miracle cure: and Jade wanted to source skin-care products for an exclusive New York store. It is a grassroots project, it is socially conscious, it is morally responsible, but, of course, something dark lurks beneath. The tree stands as an antithesis to all that is wrong with humanity. To top it all, a number of multi-national companies are now looking to patent it.

Never just scratching the surface, the novel digs deep, both psychologically and socially, evoking the varied realities of all four characters. Machiavellian machinery of contemporary Indian politics and the brewing communal conflicts are in the background. A lot happens in this book. It is as much a tirade against MNCs and First World myopia as it is against Hindutva, sexism and Indian masculinity .

There is outrage in every page, enough to ignite the passion of the droopiest of cynics, and a palpable sense of mourning for lost traditions and ancient wisdoms. It is fiercely philosophical, written in paragraphs of poetic prose, but really, the reason you keep reading is because the book is about life, journeys and that intoxicating affinity of spirit we sometimes find in total strangers. A book totally worth exploring for the wanderers in search of an authentic moment.”

-Tara Sahgal, India Today September 1, 2003

“There are many good reasons why I would wholeheartedly recommend Inez Baranay’s latest novel Neem Dreams to anyone. Here are some of them:

Though more of a fringe writer, Inez Baranay is Australian and Australian literature in English is here to stay. It has come of age in patterns similar to Indian writing in English. … Its location in India is not your usual outsider’s perspective on India. Rather it strikes a chord in the completely familiar way both natural landscapes and those of the human mind are painted in verbal pictures. It is easy for example to identify with Prashant and Meenakshi’s anxiety at the time of the Ayodhya dispute (while they were students in America)

We can no longer assume our attitude is obvious, reasonable, widely shared. Can you believe what’s happening? Political leaders with the loudest voices are echoed by resonating chants of crowds of increasing, maniacal magnitude, proclaiming that India is only Bharat, only Hindustan. A secular, tolerant, democratic India, that is the vision we have been born to inherit. Our pious Hindu ancestors would be appalled at the suggestion that any one Indian tradition was more indigenous than any other. Yet it is in their name that the so-called Hindu nationalists exhort the domination, the elimination, of others. Hinduize politics and militarize Hinduism: the old slogan is revived and now within the context of an increasingly apparent organizational complex embracing the phenomenon of mass communalism. Prashant begins to speak of returning not only to India but to his rural home.

The writer does not use India as an exotic backdrop. The novel focuses on four characters, Andy, Pandora, Meenakshi and Jade. In the brief time that their lives are intertwined in India, their past is also unraveled. Simple enough but as the story progresses one has only to sense Pandora’s frustration and rage at the non- happening growth of the project; or Andy’s repulsion in the Benares scene, to understand that the author in no way adheres to the stereotype of India as the land that helps to ease pain.

In Pandora’s complete harmony with Meenakshi, her almost omniscient glance into Meenakshi’s mind and heart; in Andy’s affinity with Jolly; the author illustrates, in her characteristic no-fuss-about manner, the old adage that people of the same family need not always be under the same roof-that cultural barriers and national boundaries, not withstanding Kipling’s poetically expressed beliefs on this subject, do not prevent the meeting of minds.

The novel educates. It touches on an issue - the patenting of neem products - that few, even among the educated elite are conversant with.

It reminds us that Australians are sensitive to their ‘Otherness’ in a manner akin to the ‘Oriental’.

The narrative technique adopted by the author is engrossing. It is centripetal in that the four protagonists who occupy the same territorial zone for a while are each preoccupied with his/her own private emotional baggage of the past and of a different locale. The intricate enmeshing of each character’s psyche with his/her interaction with each other prevents the narrative from flagging. And the device of the central symbol, the Neem Tree, that threads the characters is unusual yet some how appropriate.

The language is liquid, it flows. It is poetic in parts, self-reflexive at most times and the idiomatic English spoken by some of the Indian characters does not read as some sort of gimmicky parody: the author is careful to delineate the different ‘Englishes’ spoken in India based on class, community and nature of education.

Perhaps the closure that the author chooses to give to the novel could engender dissatisfaction. But it could also be read positively. Whatever it evokes, it is certainly startling. It makes one think. And thinking is surely an excellent reason for reading a novel. So, Read It.”

-Swati Pal, The Sunday Pioneer September 14, 2003

“There is no one India or, you can’t know all of India. It refuses to be fixed in a theme.”

- Inez Baranay

Read the interview in ‘The Hindu’ here

Errors in first Edition

The Edge of Bali

Published by A&R Imprint, 1992
ISBN 0 207 168997
Availability: re-issued in 1997 by ETT Imprint publishers (Sydney)
(Distributed by Tower Books, Australia)

“Inez Baranay’s The Edge of Bali is made up of three related short stories about three unrelated tourists - Nelson, Marla and Tyler… All three are searching, all unsure of whether they should really be in Bali or where they’ll go next: three examples of the mass of lemming-like lost souls who flock to the third world to look for meaning, religion, spirit, beauty - all the things that amid our wealth and technology of the modern world, we have lost. …This is a book of full of contemporary dilemmas, clearly and keenly expressed by Baranay’s’ characters. … The book is really about the phenomenon of tourism. … The questions raised by the book are fascinating and often unanswerable.”

- Australian Book Review, October 1992

“Nelson, a post-punk [Sydney] girl has returned to Kuta in the hope of reuniting with her Balinese boyfriend but finding their love was not really of the ‘true’ variety gets stuck into some desperate partying… Marla, a successful business woman goes to Bali well read in its culture: she distrusts “false ideologies: colonialism, orientalism, and tourism” but finds tranquillity and a handsome Balinese lover. Tyler, and American searching for a lost friend, is strangely mesmerised, perhaps poisoned by various Balinese magics, to find himself involved in tourist anti-tourist movement. …Baranay writes evocatively of the Bali landscape, raising serious questions within vivid description. New myths jostle with the old.

- The Sydney Morning Herald

RASCAL RAIN: a Year in Papua New Guinea

Published by Imprint in 1994
ISNB 0 207 18371 6

Availability: re-issued by ETT Imprint in 1997 and distributed by Tower Books (Australia)

“As a member of Australian Volunteers Abroad, Inez Baranay was sent to Papua New Guinea’s most depressing place - the chaotic, violent province of Enga. Within months she went from sipping cappuccino in inner-city Sydney to a culture where brides are bought, rape is commonplace, and women aren’t allowed near men’s food because it’s thought it will make the men weak. Her experiences have resulted in a highly readable account of a world left behind by the 6 o’clock news. ”

- Cleo, April 1994

“Rascal Rain…is a valuable sociological document on the appalling, continuing mistreatment of women; a graphic look at the beauty and splendour of the country and, amid the savagery, a story of warm and developing relationships with blacks and whites alike and a burgeoning love story for the author. … Baranay was sent to Enga to help in expanding the social, environmental and, particularly, the literacy programmes of the Enga Womens’ Council. … There is much joy in this fast-moving book. … Rascal Rain… is eminently readable and of particular interest to those interested in womens’ movements, New Guinea, native culture and travel. A good read. ”

- The Courier-Mail May 28, 1994

“Works such as Rascal Rain are often labelled with the cultural imperialism tag, critics quick to point out the basic bias of the Euro-centric view of tribal cultures. Baranay for her part dismisses these notions, offering the alternate view that male bias and violence is a pervasive influence on the Engan tradition which is only amplified by the clash of cultures. Why does tradition imply changelessness in a world in constant flux, she asks? And why is an evolutionary model the only one used to distinguish cultural change? Are cultures only going to develop along present lines - in other words like us?

- Townsville Bulletin August 6, 1994

“Baranay sees with a novelist’s perceptions. Her strengths are descriptions of people, places and events; her eye and her nose for the beautiful and disgusting, her ear for speech and her ability to set scenes, draw characters and have them come powerfully and unforgettably to life. … A worrying and thralling book. ”

- Canberra Times, June 9 1994

Three Sydney Novels - An omnibus

ISBN 0975094890

Published by Three Sydney Novels Project, 2004

To buy send an email via Contact page

Sydney in the 1950s, 70s and 90s is the setting for three of my earlier novels. Pagan, Between Careers, and Sheila Power long now out of print and currently republished in a single omnibus volume.

From Three Sydney Novels:

Sydney 1950s

Pagan

“A narrative tour de force.”

- EDITIONS

“Pagan is brilliantly written. As well as being very readable, it offers a highly intelligent analysis of the themes of Australia’s 20th century cultural history set around a story that was to grab the imagination - and the tabloids - of the country … Baranay has a great sense of character, an acute mind which ranges through art, music, philosophy, politics and literature, and a profound and insightful comprehension of the dynamics of human behaviour. She also has a savage and urbane wit and a rare ability to evoke human tragedy in the most understated of ways.”

- THE ADVERTISER

“Pagan works on several levels simultaneously. It chronicles a society in transition, contains a moving evocation of young love, and tries to unravel the circumstances of the Goossens scandal of reputed orgies and pornographic photographs. The novel also deals with the feminist tradition of Wicca - witchcraft - and the highs and lows that individual lives can encompass.”

- THE SUNDAY HERALD

Sydney 1970s

Between Careers

“Stylish, provocative and wonderfully different.”

- THE AGE

“Set in Sydney in the late seventies, Inez Baranay’s witty, satirical first novel takes us into the life of a classy call girl…..Wittily, humorously, Between Careers takes a close look at the moral values of both the ancient profession and of more conventional ways of living….. The prose is spare and sparkling…”

- THE CANBERRA TIMES

“Wit, style, pain, cruelty - Australia’s Jean Rhys.”

- FRANK MOORHOUSE

“Like good sex Between Careers gets better and better….”

- THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Sydney 1990s

Sheila Power

“At last, an Australian novel with a cast of characters as richly overdrawn and brassy as any of the fabulous monsters in an Aaron Spelling TV series. A rattling good read that defies that defies pigeon-holing into any one genre.. …Sheila Power is a block-buster of a novel, a satirical thriller filled with lashings of racy sex between moments of transcendental spirituality and shopping.”

- SYDNEY STAR OBSERVER

“[A] mix of poignant comedy and eccentric social commentary Inez Baranay’s cult novel Sheila Power.”

- THE AGE

Listen to a recording of an interview about Three Sydney Novels here

Between Careers

Published 1989 by Collins ISBN 0-7322-2522-1

Re-issued in the omnibus Three Sydney Novels (2004)

“Set in Sydney in the late seventies, Inez Baranay’s witty, satirical first novel takes us into the life of a classy call girl whose work entails servicing well-heeled business men who ply her with champagne, dinner parties and, often as not, their life stories…the name of the game is illusion and illusion is the theme of the novel…..Wittily, humorously, Between Careers takes a close look at the moral values of both the ancient profession and of more conventional ways of living….. The prose is spare and sparkling…”

-Marian Eldridge, The Canberra Times, June 24, 1989

“Like good sex Between Careers gets better and better….”

- The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday July 1, 1989

“Between Careers looks at how sex functions in contemporary society - how it is bought and sold and conceptualised. It belongs to that elusive genre, intelligent erotica … Baranay’s prose is precise, clear and tends towards the epigrammatic. … The narrative moves quickly and bristles with sharp social observations. …The result is stylish, provocative and wonderfully different.”

- The Age

“Wit, style, pain, cruelty - Australia’s Jean Rhys.”

- Frank Moorhouse

Pagan

Published by Collins Imprint in 1990

ISBN 0 0207 16681 1

Re-issued in the omnibus Three Sydney Novels

“Pagan is brilliantly written. As well as being very readable, it offers a highly intelligent analysis of the themes of Australia’s 20th century cultural history set around a story that was to grab the imagination - and the tabloids - of the country in the way Azaria Chamberlain was to do more than 20 years later. … Baranay is one of the most talented writers to emerge for some time. She has a great sense of character, an acute mind which ranges through art, music, philosophy, politics and literature, and a profound and insightful comprehension of the dynamics of human behaviour. She also has a savage and urbane wit and a rare ability to evoke human tragedy in the most understated of ways.”

- The Advertiser, June 10, 1990

“Baranay skilfully brings the full weight of historical perspective to her account of the 1950s antipodean happenings. … The real strength of Pagan, however, lies in its structural complexity. The novel is a narrative tour de force. Baranay uses techniques which exist at the outer limits of discontinuity, offering a multitude of narrative viewpoints and voices. The risk of this approach, of course, is that not all the narrative personae will be credible, but Baranay doesn’t falter. Even when using the unusual second person singular to present Eveleen Warden’s early years, the narrative remains arresting and convincing…. Her open, inclusive style challenges the narrow, authoritarian attitudes of the society she portrays…”

- Editions, (Sydney) March/April 1991

“On the simplest level Pagan fictionally re-creates the life of Rosaleen Norton, the ‘Witch of the Cross’, who attracted the attention of the media during the 1950s… the narrative focuses on a series of events related to Norton’s involvement with Sir Eugene Goossens, one time conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, events which rocked Australian cultural circles and resulted in his arrest … The scandal and conjecture surrounding [this] arrest provides much of the interest for the novel…. But Pagan works on a number of different levels as well. It’s concerned with exposing the parochial and puritanical nature of Australian society and the evil associated not so much with Evvi’s witchcraft but with the narrow-mindedness of the Australian public and the vindictiveness directed towards anything different or remotely threatening: reffos, European cafes, ‘poofters’ in white socks, artists, musicians and witches. … Pagan is also about the creative instinct and the fine balance between the intellect and the imagination, the conflict between the desire to surrender completely to natural harmonies and the power of the intellect to discipline the mind. Music is referred to in similar terms as Evvi’s mystical trances. … It works well as a fictional recreation of a fascinating life and…challenges many of our preconceptions about ourselves.”

- Australian Book Review

“Pagan works on several levels simultaneously. It chronicles a society in transition, contains a moving evocation of young love, and tries to unravel the circumstances of the Goossens scandal of reputed orgies and pornographic photographs. the novel also deals with the feminist tradition of Wicca - witchcraft - and the highs and lows that individual live can encompass.”

- The Sunday Herald June 3, 1990

Sheila Power

“At last, an Australian novel with a cast of characters as richly overdrawn and brassy as any of the fabulous monsters in an Aaron Spelling TV series. An entertainment is a good description for this rattling good read that defies pigeon holing into any one genre. Our heroine is Sheila Power, a very rich film producer and all-round prominent social identity, who is about to start work on what will be the crowning achievement of her spectacular career. She has obtained the rights to a best-selling novel, one of those cult classics that has captured the country’s imagination…. The stylised satire and mystery are only part of the plot. Sheila’s also undergoing past-life therapy. Each session she relives a sexual experience from one of her many pasts. Baranay lets rip in these episodes with some of the best-written purple prose I’ve read in ages. When added to Sheila’s busy sex life in her current incarnation, it makes a novel dripping with erotic activity. …Sheila Power is a block-buster of a novel, a satirical thriller filled with lashings of racy sex between moments of transcendental spirituality and shopping.”

- Sydney Star Observer November 20, 1997

“Sheila Power…is both a continuation of and a break with Baranay’s writings. … She’s always been difficult to categorise. When she is defined, it’s with labels that can work both for and against her … Sheila is a character we’d all like to be in our dreams. Ruthless and unstoppable, a kind of fantasy woman.”

- Courier-Mail, September 27, 1997

Published by Allen & Unwin (Sydney) 1997

ISBN 1 86448 515 9

Re-issued in the omnibus Three Sydney Novels (2004)

Sun Square Moon: writings on yoga and writing

Buy in USA

To buy send an email via Contact page

Buy in India

Limited Edition Available:
Made with a sari cloth cover, gold-embossed, hand-stitched, hand-pasted and hand-bound, published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata
Email profsky@cal.vsnl.net.in for purchase info or Buy here

Other editions:
Published by sun square moon, 2005
ISBN 0-9758-220-0-4X
Republished by Booksurge (USA) 2006
ISBN 1-866-308-6235

From the introduction:

“The writer needs a body to perform writing. The body is a text upon which yoga writes. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture, performance, fashion, personality. The body is the self, the self is an illusion, the personality is one of its illusions. The writer creates a body of work, writings written by a person whose idea of a cohesive self is demonstrably illusory, whose conscious mind plays only a small part in what she herself does.

As I began to write about the process of writing - observing my own methods and approaches, the influences on my practice, the origins and history of writing a novel, the ways these matters can be written of, I would find myself thinking of all this while doing yoga. Well, strictly speaking, yoga requires the total absorption of mind in the pose, so I should say I was thinking of all this while attempting to do yoga.

Writing and yoga emerge as related practices. Yoga, a text written on herself, has a discipline that a writer might employ to inquire into writing practice, a language that a writer might employ to inquire into the writing of texts written by herself.

The differences and the congruities of yoga and writing can be located in a territory where practice, body and self meet. That is the theme of this collection of writings.”

Squared to a relentless Sun

“Inez Baranay was born of Hungarian gypsies in Naples and brought up in Australia. The gypsies left India a thousand years ago and have forgotten everything, their language and their origin. But you can see everything in their music and their dance. It is all there. Inez is a writer. She is a yogini. She has lived with primitive tribes in New Guinea. She has traveled the world telling her stories and her story here, in sun square moon, her natal horoscope, is about her art and her yoga, it is about awareness, about creativity, and about her journey through those worlds.

It’s a story with a disarming honesty. She does not even avoid sex, dreams, drugs, retail therapy and money. Sex power money is the potent mantra of the age even for the health food goody goody yogis. She has indulged. But the theme of the book is practice, body and self.

She is not brain dead. She scotches the rumour that yoga produces an empty head and a flaccid sex life. She brings her awareness from yoga to writing and takes it the other way as well. Ultimately there are no differences. Only fools could insist there were. Writing has been with us for 300 years; yoga for 3000. But her book is not quite about writing as such, it is about art, the art of insight, and that has been around longer.

“We are what our bodies are” - but then there are points of view. She documents these and lays out the fascism of a fixed point of view. She has not spoken of demons. She abandoned them on the way from India a thousand years ago.

And here she is with her moon squared to a relentless sun. This is one of the few books on yoga that is not trivia.”

Norman Sjoman
Author of Yoga Touchstone and The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace -from Black Lotus Books