Nabarun Bhattacharya passes away at 66

It's difficult to describe Nabarun Bhattacharya as a writer. He was kind of loose cannon, but firmly anti-establishment and wrote his poetry and fiction out of his conviction. A hard-core Marxist, with an in-depth knowledge of leftist movements and literature, he brought in a fresh wind of change in Bengali literature. He was original, intense, thoughtful, even provocative but never staid, dull or without a sense of humour.

Initially, I had problem with his odd-ball characters: most are lawless creatures, almost lumpens, some subversive, even schizophrenic. They use slang freely.But they were his sticks to beat his demons with.  His demons were capitalism, consumerist culture or powers-that-be. He had profound knowledge of the Kolkata sub-culture, which I think, he was  obsessive about and fond of, in a way.

I spent the better part of this summer reading his complete collection of novels. I read Kangal Malsat for the first time. Who can forget the fyataroos, the people who can fly and stay suspended in the air for a while, and wreak havoc with the administrative structure? It was awesome as a novel. I laughed out quite a lot while reading the novel. In the guise of a fantasy, it depicted the contour of our establishment in a brilliant way.

I don't know of any other living writer, not only in Bengali literature, but in world literature as well, who is so forthright, profound and talented.

Writing and Education

A writer mustn't know things in depth. If he speaks of something, he shouldn't know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament. He should not be objective. One can go into depth with a subject, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing. For a writer the university is death.

--E. M. Cioran 

Choi Jae-hoon interview

Religion is a gym for the soul, comfort for humans who don’t have anything else to turn to. 

Neel Mukherjee on Man Booker Prize 2014 longlist

I've not yet read Neel Mukherjee who is on longlist this year.  His novel The Lives of Others is about a Naxalite and covers the late sixties of West Bengal. As a Bengali living in Kolkata, who has had a taste of the turbulent period, I find it amazing that Naxalism, which once attracted the youths of Bengal en masse, can be the subject of a novel in these times by a writer who lives in London. More amazing is the fact that the novel dealing with such a subject has captured the attention of Booker judges. Whether it would win is, of course,  a different matter. 

The 2014 Man Booker Prize longlist  

Remembering Hemingway on his 115th birthday

"Write drunk, edit sober"

How serious a writer is Karl Ove Knausgaard?

Oh, I could cut off my head with the bitterness and shame that I have allowed myself to be lured, not just once but time after time. If I have learned one thing over these years that seems to be immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with mediocrity, it is the following:

Don't believe you are anybody.
Don't fucking believe you are somebody.
Because you are not. You're just a smug, mediocre little shit.
Do not believe you are anything special. Do not believe that you're worth anything, because you aren't. You're just a little shit.
So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then, at least, you'll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work, and know that you're not worth a shit.
This, more or less, was what I had learned.
This was the sum of all my experience.
This was the only worthwhile thought I'd ever had.

Above is an excerpt from Karl Ove Knausgaard's MY STRUGGLE BOOK 2, which I've been reading over the past week: a novel, indeed, of high quality, apparently a simple and unpretentious narrative, with thoughts and insights, lived-out feelings and experiences, actions and analyses, touching the essence and truth of human life as it should be lived. I have not only loved the book. The reading experience is going to stay with me, and I feel it will have a long-term impact on my life as well as on my writing.

Zia Haider Rahman interview

Writing is indeed essential to me. And I am working on the next book. But the two questions are not inherently related. I have been writing for a long time but not for publication. I’m sure there are many, many people who do the same. The rewards of writing are in the process and not the product—not just for me but for others I have met.

José Manuel Prieto interview

I can't conceive of writing a novel for which I wouldn't develop a narrative device conceived specifically to tell the story I have up my sleeve. There's no doubt, it's an extreme strategy, but it is what I always do. I'm astounded by those writers who borrow another's form and then fit more or less what they want to say within it. Whatever it is I want to tell is inextricably linked to how I tell it. The thing that I call a narrative device is as much a part of the narration as the story itself, and, consequently, it is also a personal creation—I see it as something that I have to create, to look for.

Nadine Gordimer, 1991 Nobel laureate, passes away at 90

“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.”

Happy 80th birthday to Wole Soyinka

Nigerian Wole Soyinka - the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature - is turning 80. A recurring theme in his work is opposition to dictatorship and to the use of force, in his homeland and elsewhere.

Intizar Husain interview

"The first Partition was in the Mahabharata, and then it was me when I was exiled. Only the Pandavas and I knew the pain of leaving one’s land. The Mahabharata is such a powerful narrative of that pain.”

Translating literature in India

 Madhavankutty Pillai  has an interesting article News from Babel in the Open Magazine.

There are a very small number of translators in India. You can’t make a profession out of it yet. It doesn’t pay enough. Most writers can’t make a living out of writing, translators come even lower down the pecking order.

Rebecca Makkai interview

I wrote a short story once called “Gate House,” which consisted of some of the plot of the 1999 story. And it didn’t work as a short story at all; it was terrible. But when I revisited it, years later, I suddenly thought of turning it into a novel, and that’s when I started to consider what I would have to do to move backwards in time. At that point the whole thing was coming to me as I went about my day, as I was brushing my teeth – I would have these ideas of the way the plot would be layered. Soon I realized it would be stupid to start writing without seriously outlining, so that was the next thing I did. I ended up with a sixty-page outline. I had calendars, I had timelines, I had historical events. And of course it changed a ton as I was actually writing it. I knew I wanted to write it in reverse chronological order, as it appears in the book, but I had to outline first. Because I couldn’t write 1955 until I knew what happened in 1929.

via The Millions