"Writing about King Thibaw was one of the most difficult things I have
done in fiction. There are sources for Thibaw but very little has
actually been written about him. When I was writing the opening sections
of The Glass Palace, I was completely stuck for a long time. I have a rule when I am stuck—I read the Russians because, somehow, Russian literature has the answers. In this particular case, it was
Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914. It may not be one of his great
novels but there’s a long section on what happens in the head of Tsar
Alexander on the cusp of the Russian Revolution. Reading that became
very empowering for me; I felt if Solzhenitsyn can do this with the
Tsar, I can do it with King Thibaw."
**
"The
Shadow Lines
had no hype when it came out, I wasn’t even in India. Ravi, who I miss so much,
believed in it and it had a succes d’estime but over time it found an audience.
My next book, In An Antique Land, was non-fiction and it sank without a
trace. There go four years of my life, I thought, but today, it’s the most read
of my books. There are translations in Arabic and Hebrew. There was no single
turning point; books accrue a readership over time."
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