Author Gore Vidal passes away

Gore Vidal - the great novelist, iconoclast, polemicist -  died on Tuesday at the age of 86 from pneumonia- related complications at his home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.

I was saying to somebody not long ago — and this can easily be misunderstood — "You know, I used to be a famous novelist and I'm not anymore." And they said, "Well, what do you mean? People who know about those things know who you are. And your novels are no worse than they ever were." And I said, "What I mean is, the category no longer exists. Famous novelist is a contradiction in terms."

Anna Starobinets interview

 A good writer can’t write “pure” horror, since real literature is always broader than a genre.

Lit news: Big authors charge hefty fees for preface/blurbs.

                                                        IS IT RIGHT?

It seems to be turning into a tidy side-business for award-winning and internationally known authors—some of them charge as much as Rs 8-10 lakh to write a two-page preface for a new book. Back-flap recommendations cost less but many of these are written by publicists, the credited author is just shown the final text.
via Outlook magazine

James Meek interview

“There are no rules in writing. I recently read A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul. He wrote that in his 20s. I think the truth is that there are some people who just live, they don’t get a job necessarily, but they have a particular ability to hear and to see and to feel and to use all their senses and to remember.... And then the final quality, which is to take the words and make them stick to everything they have experienced and even if they’ve been seeming to sit in one place and know nobody other than their family and their friends in their own little locale, they can write something stupendous. Having said that, we can’t all be Naipaul. Some people need more time, more life, more collisions with strangeness.”

Booker longlist 2012: Triumph of the New!

The 2012 longlist, just announced, has interesting features: it includes four debut novels, three small independent publishers and one previous winner(Hilary Mantel). 
Of the twelve writers, nine are British, one Indian, one South African and one Malayasian. The eldest on the list Michael Frayn is 78, and the youngest Ned Beaumen is 27. 
Curiously, the longlist has snubbed the old guard with Zadie Smith, Ian McWan and Martin Amis failing to make the cut.

According to Peter Stathard, Chair of judges, "goodness, madness and bewildering urban change are among the themes of this year's longlist."

Martin Amis interview

Vulture publishes a pretty long interview with Martin Amis, in whom I've grown  a little interest recently (Truth to tell, I've not yet read any of his novels yet). Despite my occasional boredom,  I read through the whole interview. I must admit Amis is well-read, intelligent and great to listen to. But in the end I could not discern if he is a real writer, and if I should add him on my reading list.


I’m not interested in making a diagnostic novel or a concern. I’m 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle—that’s what fiction is, and should be.

Literary classics as cash cow!

A British publisher is giving literary classics a steamy makeover

How Sartre and Camus viewed the United States

The  Opinionator has an interesting article on Sartre and Camus : their life and experiences in NewYork.
In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.

Toni Morrison interview

" Do you really think that your life is bigger, deeper, more profound because your life is on television? And they do. I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it’s harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It’s the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It’s usually junk. Either it’s junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.” 

Amitava Kumar on Indian writing in English

"Every week I receive notice of new titles brought out in English by Indian publishers — some with titles so trivial that it’d be embarrassing to repeat them here — and the question that arises is about the ambition of such art. Where’s the desire to touch on life’s sufferings and its meanest pleasures?

If I had money to bet, I’d put it on our vernacular literatures. On reading Morrison, I am reminded of Ismat Chughtai, whose portrayal of tragedy is marked by tender intimacy with life’s small consolations. Those familiar with other literatures — particularly from the South — would name many more contemporary voices. How different they must sound from our Chetan Bhagat wannabes — and, in fact, from Chetan Bhagat himself!"

Shalom Auslander interview

      Q: How did you become a writer?
    A: A lot of really bad shit happened to me when I was younger, and I can’t rap. Also, I don’t likepeople very much, and there aren’t many jobs whose description includesspending long hours alone in a dark room with the blinds drawn.

Alex Miller interview

“One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that if you get the setting right, and if you get the story right – the situation blowing up like a beautiful big storm cloud – characters arrive fully formed.  And you think, Yes, I’ll have that one, and that one; thanks, mate. It’s a wonder. And a great delight to see them. They come in out of the mists of nothing, with gestures already developed.”

Now, an English literary Journal from Bangladesh: Bengal Lights!

  "We plan in the future to expand on this initial groundwork and be a forum that can act at least as a region-wide network for writers. We are planning to have seminars and symposiums in the future, to set up a translation center – from Bengali to English – and a press with a limited imprint for outstanding works. We want everybody with us. Come publish, be with us, we Bangladeshis are also eager to sail on the big creative boat of literature."

Lit News: Garcia Marquez "suffering from dementia".

"He has problems with his memory. Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him,"

I had just dropped out of the faculty of law after six semesters devoted almost entirely to reading whatever I could get my hands on, and reciting from memory the unrepeatable poetry of Spanish Golden Age. I already had read, in translation, and in borrowed editions, all the books I needed to learn the novelist's craft, and had published six stories in newspaper supplements, winning the enthusiasm of my friends and the attention of a few critics. The following month I would turn twenty three, I had passed the age of military service and was a veteran of two bouts of gonorrhea and everyday I smoked, with no foreboding, sixty cigarettes made from the most barbaric tobacco. I divided my leisure between Baranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia's coast, living like a king on what I was paid for my daily commentaries in the newspaper El Heraldo, which amounted to almost less than nothing, and sleeping in the best company possible wherever I happened to be at night. As if the uncertainty of my aspirations and the chaos of my life were not enough, a group of inseparable friends and I were preparing to publish without funds a bold magazine that Alfanso Fuenmayor had been planning for the past three years. What more could anyone desire?
--From Garcia Marquez's memoir Living to Tell the Tale.

Bizarre, the success of Fifty Shades of Grey!

"It is a terrible turning back of the clock for a book like this to have such enormous success. It is as if women are now trying to apologise for the success they have had in a man's world. It is a sort of response to the modern age, but a very primitive response."
-- Estela Welldon, forensic psychotherapist 

Shimmer Chinodya interview

“I perpetually seek a harmonious fusion of theme and style. I’d hate to write a single boring paragraph. I believe a good book should exalt the heart and mind of the reader and not punish him/her and that lazy, boring writers should be dragged out to the market place and flogged in public!’’   

John Banville interview

"I spend two, three to five years writing a book. I know its failings. I know the few areas in which it's succeeded. The only person who can't read this book is me because I bring to it all the history, all the dead cats and slime and that Tuesday afternoon when you said 'Fuck it', and you let the paragraph go." 

Joshua Henkin Interview

The Millions has a great interview with Joshua Henkin, the novelist.


Someone once said that there are only two kinds of stories, Stranger Comes to Town and Person Goes on a Trip — which is really just one kind of story, since Stranger Comes to Town is simply Person Goes on a Trip from a different point of view. I don’t find this particularly perturbing. Yes, every story has been told, but it’s the way of telling — the how — that makes every writer unique, and if you have a distinct voice, if there’s emotional truth to your characters, if you use language in service of this voice and these characters, then your book will be distinct. 

2012 German Peace Prize for Chinese dissident writer

 Chinese  dissident writer Liao Yiwu, who fled China for Germany in 2011, has been awarded  the 2012 German Peace Prize.

Elias Khoury interview

“I don’t know how the events in the Arab world will affect my writing. Maybe I will not write about them but they will affect my style. So things are much more complicated, but I think that writing literature is something much more serious than writing about current events ... It is a very deep thing which is a dialogue with your time and a dialogue with the dead."

Last recorded words of Jorge Luis Borges

I never reread what I publish. Awful to think students are examined on what I write. But what can I do about it? Reading is felicity, and I hate the thought it should be forced on anyone.

more

Mario Vargas Llosa interview/2

The Guardian has an interesting interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel-prize winning author.
The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs. The first year was very difficult. I could barely write." 


Mario Vargas Llosa interview/1

Roberto Bolano an antidote to creative writing school product?

His premature death also may have had something to do with the excitement around his work, but not that much. He’s a writer who invented a commanding, distinctive style, in the largest sense of the word—a way of organizing experience as well as words—which is a pretty rare achievement. That spoke to many readers, for a number of reasons—I’ve heard, for example, that he is an antidote to the North American model of the professional novelist groomed by creative writing schools. There might be something symptomatic about his success, but I think that the main reason for it is that he is a fascinating singularity.

Of Arab writers and books

In the Fascinated by the Arab World, Prof Roger Allen has an interesting take on Arab writers and literature, and recommends some great books.

Over the decades I met Mahfouz many times; my favorite time was when I went to his Tuesday night session with his friends (including other novelists–Jamal al-Ghitani and Yusuf al-Qa`id, the poet, `Abd al-rahman al-Abnudi, and others) on a houseboat moored on the Giza side of the River Nile (I’m attaching a photograph of one of those occasions, the last time I saw him before his death). Whenever I came, he always reminded me that I had sent him a copy of GOD’S WORLD in 1973 and it had reached him on his birthday!  Above all, he had a terrific sense of humor, and was always ready with “one-liners”…

Ruth Franklin on book criticism

"Not all books are worth reading; some are dull, some are poorly written, and others can actually have a pernicious effect on our culture. It’s the task of the critic to champion books that deserve to be championed, and to take a stand against those that have the power to harm. And anyone who doesn’t believe that books have the power to harm is not taking them seriously enough."

Celebrating 50th anniversary of a novel!

Bestsellers come and go, and readers are never really bothered. But this novel has been on the bestseller list for fifty years, and still enthralls the readers. Through translations, this Bengali novel has now even generated interest in Europe and elsewhere.

The novel is Chowringhee by well-known Bengali author Sankar. It's about an opulent Kolkata hotel, the melting pot of varied and interesting characters.

Deys' Publishing, the publisher of this book since 1970, celebrated on June 9 the fiftieth anniversary of its appearance, in association with Penguin India, which has recently published the English translation of the novel.

"A few Bengali authors have achieved this feat," says the septugenarian author on this occasion, " but today it's special because the book and the author both are present."

The novel is now in its 111th edition in Bengali.

In a recent interview, the author hopes his book would retain its position for at least five years after his death. "That would be the final test for the book," he says.

Why is Gunter Grass so controversial?

Günter Grass is in a very unusual position. It's a position which people would like to take away from him, but can't. You can't take away his company car. You can't deny him a bonus. You can't kick him out of office. He's a self-made man. Now people always say that he should give the Nobel Prize back, since that's the only thing he could do. Or renounce his PEN membership. Grass is a rare example of a fully independent and yet prominent man. And he only has himself to thank for that - he doesn't need to act with regards to others. That's why he provokes controversy.

Ray Bradbury quote

"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years... I read everything in the library. I read everything. I took out 10 books a week so I had a couple of hundred books a year I read, on literature, poetry, plays, and I read all the great short stories, hundreds of them. I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. That library educated me, not the college."

Dave Eggers interview

I guess a book needs the time it needs. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that. You have to wait for the fruit to fall from the tree.

Are dead writers remote from us?

 In a recent study, a team of mathematicians from Dartmouth and Wisconsin says that dead writers have no influence on contemporary fiction. Isabel Kaplan, the novelist, analyses the study and offers her viewpoint.

In the world of contemporary literature, the classics are not suffering from an "anxiety of impotence" (to use the paper's terminology) -- but, when it comes to understanding contemporary literature, perhaps this team of mathematicians is.

Literary revolution from below?

"We expect literary revolutions to come from above, from the literary end of the spectrum — the difficult, the avant-garde, the high-end, the densely written. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Instead we’re getting a revolution from below, coming up from the supermarket aisles. Genre fiction is the technology that will disrupt the literary novel as we know it".

Shalom Auslander reviews "The Eternal Philistine"

"If satire, as they say in the theater, is what closes on Saturday night, humor in literature is what gets belittled by reviewers, ignored by the award committees, goes out of print and is never spoken about again. Comedy bravely stands up, speaks the harsh truth, attempts to show things the way they are, to teach us to see and laugh at our own shortcomings and failures. For that it is dismissed. The fate of humor in literature, one could say, is utterly tragic, but then one would be saying something funny, and one would be ignored."

Shin Kyung-sook interview

For me, writing is a path connecting this world to the irreconcilable or forbid­den, and to the oppressed and weak. 

Is it even possible to tailor a book for someone? In whatever circum­stance, I only write a story that I want to write, and I do it in my own style. One of the reasons I chose to become a writer was my desire to be free, without any constraints imposed on me. Now, when I write, I feel infinitely free. I relish this freedom, which I have only recently attained.

Publishing culture is diseased!

"Publishers have such a strong sense of entitlement that they feel perfectly justified in breaking the law to keep things how they are. They abuse their power. Worse, they think their power is deserved, that they alone can deliver rich literary culture to the unwashed masses because their insights are so keen and their judgement is ubiquitous."

Last Carlos Fuentes interview

Of course, it's my assumption: the PW interview, published on May 15 (the same day Fuentes died), is the last  published interview of the great novelist and it relates to his new novel VLAD. It has some interesting observations.

You’re a writer or a filmmaker; literature is the antithesis of making films.

Lit News: Carlos Fuentes dies

"Fuentes leaves behind a large body of work, an eloquent testimony of political issues and cultural realities of our time. Not only are friends but many readers are going to deeply miss him."


Read here an excerpt from Inez  by Carlos Fuentes

Immanuel Mifsud interview

"...we are all concerned with image, not with content."

Orhan Pamuk interview /1

I like when politics is there in my books, just below the surface, something we are aware of, but that does not force itself upon us. Of course, in Turkey, one cannot leave out this aspect.

Originality is dangerous: Salman Rushdie

“Great art, original art, is never created in a safe middle ground. Originality is dangerous, as it is at the edge."

How to write a novel like Orhan Pamuk

I began thinking of this novel in the mid-1990s, when I said to myself, I'll buy a house and imagine a family living there and then chronicle their stories, their daily lives from the kitchen to the street, what they do or say and how they live. So I thought I would collect the objects of their ordinary lives and weave these into my story — place them in the hands of the family. I wrote the novel as I bought the objects and I also wanted to write about the making of the museum as part of the novel. I don't know why I did this. But as always, a djinn entered me and I followed my inner footsteps.”

Alain Mabanckou interview

Everyone has a choice to do or not to do, and we are still struggling between our cultures and what we are doing in fact  So my books are always like that, struggling between the fact that an individual is trying to carry the weight of the world, he's trying to stand still, he's trying to move forward, but he needs to make a lot of choices in order to fulfill his mission."

"The Art of Fielding": just another annual pick?

You cannot be too critical of the literary establishment’s annual picks without being thought an antiquarian, but wouldn’t it be much nastier, much harder on contemporary fiction in general, to say that this stuff really was some of the best writing published in 2011?

Literature thrives on risk

Patrick French, well-known historian and writer, has an interesting (kitschy, though) article called Writings On India (and the Foreign Hand on the Keyboard) in today's Hindustan Times.

If you only work in a pointillist way, you lose any interest towards ambition and risk - and literature lives upon, depend upon risk.

Ann Patchett on reading fiction

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Lit News: No Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year!

One of the surprises from Monday's Pulitzer Prize announcements was the lack of an award in the fiction category. It's the first time since 1977 that the Pulitzer board hasn't given an award for fiction writing.

J K Rowling writes an adult novel!

I thought J.K. Rowling had retired for ever from her writing. Far from it..She now comes back with an adult novel. What hubris! But no doubt her book would sell by the bucketful, given the gargantuan marketing that goes with Rowling products (books).
I suspect in years to come people will make a link between our plump, comfortable, infantilising society and the popularity of Potter.

The challenge of translating 1Q84 together

 JR:1Q84 was so damn long. Sheer stamina was what I needed, above all. I was so grateful when Phil decided to translate the last volume. The editor spent months going through in extreme detail to give it consistency, and there wasn't a huge gap in style because we both kept close to the original.

JPG: Any two translators, like any two writers, are going to have a different style, and it's hard to go beyond that. But the editor did a great job to have the final translation read smoothly.

Market(share) for literature

 Literature takes up 10 percent of the entire Chinese book market, while it is 40 percent in the United States and 35-40 percent in Europe. 

Rereading as therapy

Rereading is therapy, despite the accompanying dash of guilt, and I find it strange that not everybody does it. Why wouldn't you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I return to beer, or blankets or best friends.

Alexander Ilichevsky interview

 “I am currently finishing a novel… about why morality collapsed in Russia and how it has shaped my country as it is today. But in fact, it is a tragic kind of ‘love story’”.

Anne Tyler interview

"I don't have intellectual curiosity, I have curiosity about people." 

Lit news: Mario Vargas Llosa donates his 30,000 books

Nobel Laureate  Mario Vargas Llosa  donates the 30,000 books of his personal library to his hometown of Arequipa.

Salman Rushdie's India Today Conclave speech

"This word, freedom. It's a beautiful sounding word, isn't it? Who would be against freedom? It's a word everyone would automatically be "for", one would think. A free society is one in which a thousand flowers bloom, in which a thousand and one voices speak. And what a simple and grand idea that seems. It's like that copper goddess standing in the harbour, enlightening the world. 

But in our time, many essential freedoms are in danger of defeat and not only in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Here in India also, a combination of religious fanaticism, political opportunism and, I have to say, public apathy is damaging that freedom upon which all other freedoms depend: the freedom of expression." 

Ian McEwan on originality

In literature, everyone is first. We do not need to ask who was first to write Don Quixote. Better, in fact, to consider the possibility of being the second – Pierre Menard, who in Borges's famous story independently reconceives, centuries after Cervantes, the entire novel, down to the last word. The worst novelist in the world can at least be assured that he will be the first to write his terrible novel. And mercifully, the last. And yet, to be first, to originate, to be original is key to the quality of a work of literature. However minimally, it must advance – in subject matter, in means of expression – our understanding of ourselves, of ourselves in the world.

Elif Shafak interview

"Extremist ideologies all around the world are telling us that you have to make a choice, but it’s important to recognise that people can have multiple attachments"

Ivan Klima interview

I'm just finishing a book of many very short stories. Now it's 100 pages, and it's more or less finished. Twenty short stories all written in the past two years. What is specific about them is that they are very short, sometimes only half a page or one or two pages. I'm trying to be very strict and brief. Some are very short meditations or very quick observations of something and nothing more. It's something new in my writing.

Programming & Writing

“You’re talking to defined interfaces, not making up a whole world. With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn’t express, not really. It’s a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That’s what’s hard about it.”

Read an E-Book Week starts today!

"Read an E-book" week kicks in today.  Being an ardent indie, I offer my novel Shadowland (Coupon code RE 100) for free during this period ( March 4 -10) to those interested, especially to readers of  literary fiction.

Thanks for your reading. I'll appreciate any feedback from you.

Shalom Auslander on Franz Kafka

"Everything Kafka wrote began as a joke, that Franz, in his wisdom, took very seriously, taking it, in the words of Milan Kundera, into the "dark depths of the joke". Singing mice, talking apes, men who turn into bugs, cops who arrest you for no reason. This was Kafka's hilarious idea: life itself is a joke, and a joke we have no choice but to take seriously. That, however, doesn't mean it isn't funny."

What can writers do in times of crisis?

 At a panel discussion hosted by the Southeast Europe Association and the Traduki-Network in Munich last weekend,  popular Greek author and "Faust" translator  Petros Markaris , Hungarian author György Dalos and Albanian author Lindita Arapi have their take on writers' stance in times of crisis.
Only two attitudes survive till the end of the battle: "leftist cynicism" and "rightist hypocrisy." Hate leaves little room for constructive criticism and is only exacerbated by political divisions.

Teju Kole interview

"The biggest source of novels is other novels. But, occasionally, I will doff my cap to the other stuff I assume my reader has read. In Open City there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in Dubliners. That is because a novel is also a literary conversation."

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán interview

"The main character is based on a real serial killer who was an undocumented alien.  "[Interviewers] sometimes will ask you about your moral responsibility as a writer; 'you should create positive, uplifting images of Latinos or Hispanics.' That's not the way I see it. Part of the responsibility to tell the whole story is to show the negative side as well."

A tribute to Adonis

A major tribute at the Mosaic Rooms ( 03 February to 30 March) to the great Syrian poet Adonis, including an exhibition of stunning drawings and a series of literary events. 

Amitav Ghosh on book festival tamasha

" Public life in India is now a whirling continuum that seamlessly unites cricket, politics and Bollywood. Each domain leaks into the other and the major figures are all closely linked. It is no coincidence that many of these elements are also much in evidence at book festivals. The intention evidently is to make the book world another link in the tightly joined whirligig of Cripollywood. It is easy to see the attractions of this, especially for writers who are striving to bring their work to public notice. But there is a price to pay: we need to remind ourselves that Bollywood movies are routinely re-edited to accommodate protests of various kinds. Recent incidents in Jaipur and in Kolkata, where Taslima Nasreen was also prevented from participating in a festival, suggest that Indian publishing will have to adapt its practices to those of the film industry if it is to pitch its tent beside the three-ring circus of the tamasha culture."

Tom Stoppard on writing

"Writing mostly boils down to what will be the next line. If a play works out well, the author should be feeling lucky rather than clever."

Susan Bernofsky interview

" Every sentence takes you on a little journey somewhere, and the question is where that journey is going and in what order are we hitting the landmarks."

Shame! A Jaipur rerun in Kolkata Book Fair!

The ongoing Kolkata Book Fair witnessed Taslima Nasreen getting the same treatment from the State as Salman Rushdie in Jaipur Lit Fest. The organisers of the book fair - claimed to be the largest in Asia - promptly cancelled the scheduled launch of Taslima's autobiography 'Nirbasan"(Exiled) as some fundamentalist groups protested against its release. According to the local media, there was a verbal directive to the organisers from Kolkata police.

But Kolkata being Kolkata, the lovers of literature assembled in large numbers before the office of the organisers, and brought out a procession, with Taslima's book in their hands, shouting protest against their decision. And before the police could take any effective action, the publisher of the book, People's Book Society, had the book launched by Nabarun Bhattacharya, the eminent writer. Sujata Bhadra, well-known human rights activist and other intellectuals were present on the occasion.

Personally I see it as the triumph of literature and free expression over vote-bank politics, but I'm really concerned that the bigots are increasingly invading our cultural space with support from the State.

. 

Jonathan Franzen on technology

"“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it." 

Peter Carey interview

''The real anguish is just making the thing and then, after that, well, it's awful to be criticised and it's awful to be not liked, it's awful to be any of those things. Basically, the writer of fiction is the person who comes in every day and puts his head up his bum and goes to work.''

Salman Rushdie interview, post-Jaipur Lit Fest

NDTV's Barkha Dutt has a long and interesting interview with Salman Rushdie soon after the "black farce" in just-concluded Jaipur Literatur Festival.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously. If you don't that is not great for me but that's the only way to make it. The only way to make it is to make it with the fullness of your personal vision.

What is a lit Fest?

"It’s a private party and even though the line says “Everyone’s Invited”, they retain the right to decide who “Everyone” is. Or anyone. All that money, all that effort, all that energy, organisation, coordination, travelling, planning, operational logistics, talking and debating, sassing and faffing, boozing and schmoozing, it’s not about books at all. It’s about riding on the goodwill and glamour generated by books and literature, great writing and great authors, taking all that classy chic intellectual pride and amortising it into sponsor-sized chunks of social currency."

Rushdie a coward: Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, who is sometimes called female Salman Rushdie, now slams Rushdie for cancelling his Jaipur literary Fest.

"Cancelling his India trip is his latest cowardly act," she says.

It may be recalled here that Taslima's books have been banned in her own native country Bangladesh as well as in India for the same reason as that of Rushdie for hurting religious sentiments of the Muslims, and she has been on exile for a long, long time.

Is Taslima braver than Rushdie, one wonders. But why does she call him a coward?

As we now understand, Rushdie was fooled into believing that he was under threats from the mafia. The fact was, it was a ploy to keep him away from the fest. The cancellation of the visit does not necessarily make him a coward.

Rushdie cancels visit: "a stain on India's international reputation"

"very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to "eliminate" me. Will do video link instead. Damn"
SalmanRushdie Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie dropped from Jaipur Lit Fest?

Salman Rushdie is an unwanted writer right now in India. The Rajasthan Government does not want him to attend the Jaipur Lit Fest (20 -24 January, 2012). Nor do the powers-that-be in Delhi. Do the organizers of the fest want him? Perhaps not, at this moment. So the unstoppable Rushdie has no other option but to skip the fest.

The government says that Rushdie's visit may cause a law and order problem. But if you dig  it a little, there is a series of things that lead to this decision. First, the head of a Muslim group protests against Rushdie joining the fest. Then a Congress leader in Delhi echoes him more or less along the same line. Now it is the turn of the state government to pick up the thread and go ahead with the request to the organizers that Rushdie be persuaded to stay away from the festival. And what do you expect from the organizers? They would go with their jamboree anyway - with or without Rushdie.

But how Rushdie could be a law and order problem? He's a serious writer and thinker. You may not like him for your primitive instincts or lack of intellectual capacities, but how can a government bar him from attending  a lit fest? India is where Rushdie was born, and he has visited India a number of times. And we all know he has always promoted pluralism.

So, what do you read in this Rushdie visit ban decision? First, the Government has scant regard for  writers or artists.Remember how it behaved with Taslima Nasreen or Makbul Fida Hossain in the past?

Secondly,  those in power can bend over to just do anything to appease the minority community - in the interest of keeping its vote-bank intact and unchallenged, literature/art be damned. And now is really election time in five states in India.

And lastly, can we say that  its secularism is a fakery (to borrow a word from Rushdie) of the highest order?

I would like to see what Rushdie tweets on this.

Pakistan's English-language novelists

 Stephanie Nolen has an interesting article on Pakistan's English-language novelists in The Globe and Mail. 

A hunger for access to that reality has, in the past few years, created an opening for Pakistan’s English-language novelists: Intense Western interest in the country has vaulted the work of a handful of Pakistani writers on to prize lists and foreign bookstore shelves. “There’s a collision of talent and interesting times – something is really happening there in terms of writing,” said John Freeman, editor of the British literary magazine Granta. The issue focusing on Pakistani writers was the bestseller of the past three years. 

New, phenomenal interest in Albert Camus!

This phenomenal revival of interest in his work is pregnant with a significance that deserves scrutiny for it can reveal a thing or two about the world we live in today. Clearly, the present generation in France acknowledges Camus as a contemporary. It regards his literary and philosophical output to be of topical relevance to its insecurities. Here, they say in substance, is a man who saw through the conceits of the reigning ideologies of the day, the delusions of religion, the tyranny of dogma, the arrogance of power and the dubious complicities of intellectuals with those who invoked reasons of state to plunder, loot and murder.

László Krasznahorkai interview

Q: Many people have the impression that your books are hard to readand to understand. That’s a myth, but don’t you think you’ve got some bad PR?

László Krasznahorkai: You know, the problem is that anything that’s the least bit serious gets bad PR. Kafka got bad PR, and so does the Bible. The Old Testament is a pretty hard text to read; anyone who finds my writing difficult must have trouble with the Bible, too. Our consumer culture aims at putting your mind to sleep, and you’re not even aware of it. It costs a lot of money to keep this singular procedure going, and there’s an insane global operation in place for that very purpose. This state of lost awareness creates the illusion of stability in a constantly changing world, suggesting at least a hypothetical security that doesn’t exist. I see the role of the tabloid press somewhat differently. I can’t just shrug it off and say to hell with it. The tabloid press is there for a serious reason, and that reason is both tragic and delicate.

Mikhail Shishkin interview

 If you say to yourself: “I will write for such-and-such areadership,” you immediately stop being a writer and become a servant.

Indian publishing to boom in 2012?

"The new thing I have discovered is that Indian writers and readers are no longer taking their cues from the West. They are making their own decisions about what is relevant to them and concentrating on what they enjoy writing or reading."

Tehelka's "Original Fictions :4"

Tehelka, though a news weekly, loves literature ( may be because Tarun Tejpal, its editor, is a literary writer himself) and every year devotes an issue to original fictions by Indian writers writing in English and other languages on a theme pre-determined by the weekly.

This year the theme is romance.

I started casually flipping through "The Foreigner" by Amitava Kumar, and was instantly hooked. Great style, odd but interesting characters, funky dialogue, and perfect story-telling. I had a sense of a well-crafted piece as I was done with the story.

I'm sorry I can't say the same things about any other story. Our Nabarun Bhattacharya, writer of that great short novel Herbert, under-delivered. He seems like a misfit in this group.

Then there were stories which were excerpts of soon-to-be published first novels by their writers. They read like crap. Not original in any way.

Finally, the editor of this issue should have been more careful in selecting the stories. After all, romance has not really disappeared from the surface of our world, and it can still touch our chord if the writer can work it the right way.

Dag Solstad interview

" I may not be the Norwegian writer with the most numerous female readers, but I have the best."

Writing as a career

" If you want a career that makes sense, don’t work as a writer."

V.S Naipaul interview

"But if you’re a writer, you do the one book, then you have to go on to do the second, and then the third… It never ends. At the age of nearly 80, I am still tormented by this need to go on a little bit more... So perhaps a lot of the discoveries about the nature of writing came to me from this need to go on."

Teju Cole in A Public Space

"At this fractured moment, our American agora appears to be dominated by noisemakers. Political debates are “won” by those who shout loudest, op-eds are written on little more than conjecture, and popularity counts more than anything else. The more thoughtful and reflective spaces are being silenced. And yet a self-preserving and self-nurturing instinct tells us that the essential work of interpretation is best found in a culture’s quieter spaces. We need reports in fiction, nonfiction, and photography that are engagé without being ephemeral and are steeped in a proper thoughtfulness."

Another e-book: a plug for myself

I have another e-book out, this time at Amazon.com. It's a novella called Delhi Riddle. It is about an artist who encounters a strange physical relationship between a man and a woman, both married separately, while in Delhi during a group show, and is so deeply moved that he tries to capture it on his canvas.

Of course, it's literary fiction: not the dull, stodgy kind, but an easy, fast-paced narrative. In it, though, I have handled such things as love, sex, art, urban life in post-globalisation India.

The book's cover is done by my artist-friend Basudev Ghosh.

Please read the book if you feel interested, and give me feedback, if you have time.

Umberto Eco interview

"Literature is a perverse game because it’s too easy to say that the teller pretends that Little Red Riding Hood or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina is a fiction. Step by step, I want you to lose your critical control and start crying about the fate of Anna Karenina. But then I know that once you finish reading the book, you come back to reality and at the second reading you don’t cry any longer but simply appreciate the way in which I obliged you to cry the first time. That is the perverse literary game. Simonini is more cruel. He wants you to believe. He doesn’t want to show his inner strategy. The writer desires that you discover my strategy. Simonini, no. Every forger wants to be taken seriously."

Indian Litfests: "Buy my book."

In today's Hindustan Times, Farrukh Dhondy has an interesting - and brutally honest - take on Indian literary festivals that are so common now-a-days( sorry, no link is available).

The central idea that emerged, at least in my mind, was that the lack of critical response and debate, the total absence of criteria of what is good, bad, necessary, imitative, blatantly stolen, fresh, redeeming, skilful, pioneering etc will give us a consumer industry in books but no 'culture' of literature.

Dhondi further writes:

The Colonel Sanders and the Ronald McDonalds of the Indian literary scene can be seen at all all the litfests peddling their goods and there is no one, literally no one, to discuss, raise the questions or debate the nourishment or debilitating obesity therein.

Anita Desai interview

The guardian.co.uk gets writer Kiran Desai to interview her mother Anita Desai, the well-known writer.

KD Your books often refer to a mix of languages. You quote Iqbal and Byron in Clear Light of Day. In Custody is about Hindi and Urdu. You quote a lot of literature in all your novels, mingle it with every geography.

AD Yes, I always give myself away! Well, Urdu was what we heard spoken in Delhi, and it was spoken very beautifully in those days. Then there were the books we bought for ourselves. My father would read Byron and occasionally he would burst out and recite snatches of what he remembered from his schooldays, Byron, Swinburne, Browning, the same scraps over and over again. Oddly enough, he never brought Bengali music into the house, which was such a pity. But perhaps because he came from a political family – he had a soft spot for communism – he loved Russian music. I remember hearing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" played and played on our gramophone, thinking it so oppressive and dreary. Oma brought back a piano with her, had whole albums of Beethoven and Brahms, Schubert lieder and also her German library, beautifully embossed leather books in the old German script. When my father died and she left Delhi, she gave her books to the library of Delhi University, which had a German department.

Publishing today: editor is a banker now!

"There was a time at the Frankfurt Book Fair when we would rush back to our hotel rooms in the evening to read manuscripts. Now, it all works with a two-page outline. A publisher reads two pages and writes a $100,000 (around Rs.50 lakh) cheque. It’s about investments. The editor has become a banker."

Anne Enright interview

"Recently people have been starting to say that it’s all about sales, that the companies behind it are very proud of the sales of the books, and nobody’s talking about the books. There’s quite big PR machine behind it, and we know how PR machines are. The writer is a kind of incidental figure in the middle of this global PR exercise. Presumably writers dream of having such a thing happen but actually what we dream of is the fantasy of suddenly breaking free from your critics, which is not actually what happens. You’re freed from a certain amount of financial tension, but if you weighed money too much in the balance you’d never become a writer in the first place. When you get into it, it’s for whatever kind of reward is there. Though I am very interested in what money does to people, because I’ve had money and I haven’t. The years from 1993 to 2007 were pretty thin. I’m interested in how stressful it is not to have money, but also how, if you do have money, you cannot imagine what it is not to have it".

Hanan al-Shaykh interview

“In the West they need to label you to understand what you do. I tell [Westerners] that all those tags have become a real burden to me. I also tell them not to pigeonhole everybody. This is racism.”

1Q84: Four reviewers

• "And when, after 900 pages of crepuscular sex scenes alternated with sentimental thoughts about adolescent sexuality, the novel turns out to be a shaggy dog story, it no longer seems a guilty pleasure but instead a tremendous waste of the reader’s time."

• "1Q84 is the only of Murakami’s translated works that’s ever struck me as overwritten. There’s a lot of internal monologue that simply revisits events and dialogue that have already transpired, that attempts to explain subtext or analyze weird happenings that we’re better off left to engage with on our own. Yet it would be wrong to assume that this ambitious novel’s flaws emerge from what might be deemed as padding or a lack of focus on the narrative core; the more 1Q84 strays from its ostensible plot the better it gets."

• "You tend to forget the books the moment you finish them, and this is no less true after an immense production like "1Q84." It floats in a globalized ether. His literary forebears also peered into the abyss of lost identity, but they stood on the hard ground of venerable tradition. Mr. Murakami's books are wrapped in a cocoon—or an air chrysalis—of cultural amnesia. It's one last paradox: They are themselves too empty to say anything meaningful about emptiness.

• Murakami really does stand alone, as much a "foreign element" as his heroes: a sport, an outlier, sui generis, inimitable, if often imitated. Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the "postmodern" lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse as the metaphysical speculations of an Ivan Karamazov meet the death-defying adventures of a Harry Potter.

Haruki Murakami on George Orwell

“I guess we have a common feeling against the system. George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer. . . . I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.”

Man Booker Prize 2011 for Julian Barnes

"Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading."

Salman Rushdie on Intellectuals

"Intellectuals are not saints, and can sometimes be very stupid indeed. In the United States, it is very difficult for intellectuals to have an impact on society, whereas in Europe it is more possible. I never knew Foucault. I met Jacques Derrida several times and he had a level of personal vanity which distorted the way he expressed himself. When you look at events, things look chaotic and shapeless, but there is a strong human need for form and shape. What intellectuals can offer amid the shapelessness of the everyday is a sense of 'how to look,' so that you can begin to discern shape and form. They can be fools, but they are about finding meaning and about understanding the world you live in."

Murakami madness!

Release of 1Q84 being barely a week away, you already see a kind of Murakami madness all around. Frankly, I'm also caught in it.

My translator-friend, V. Ramaswamy, himself a Murakami fan, sends me a link to a recent Murakami interview.

By sheer coincidence, though, I'm now reading Kafka on the Shore. I feel addicted to a novel - after a long time. It's a real page-turner,and no cheap material in spite of lots of sex. In fact, I'm having a great time with Kafka, Nakata, Colonel Sanders, Oshima and Hoshino. These characters, not the plot, drive the novel. They are not very real but not unreal either. Hegel, Rousseau, Beethoven, Mozart all pop up during your reading journey, and they help you glean insights about the characters and the life you live. Add to it the dollops of humour that Nakata provides through his naivete and "not being bright'. Murakami is not only a seasoned pro, he is also a writer of huge intellectual capacities.

I also read an old Haruki Murakami interview published in the Paris Review to know about the novelist and his art of fiction.

Michael Ondaatje interview

"What is very strange is that  I write a fiction like In the Skin of a Lion  or The English Patient , you can pour more of yourself into them because they are fictional. It is very strange."

Chinua Achebe on literature and ethnicity

"The creative enterprise is a magical space onto itself - the mind in mutual collaboration with the world and its elements to produce something of aesthetic value. Creative writers are like painters, using words to paint a literary tapestry. I think that words have a magic, that human situations- one's environment, culture, ‘ethnicity' as we have spent time re-discovering - can be unburdened to join other factors wordsmiths use to create literary magic - that extra dimension that the writer can conjure up by placing ideas about the human condition side by side on paper.

I suppose that cultural contexts is another name for what we have so far been calling the factors of ethnicity. Quite clearly these factors do shape literature. The cultural context within which a writer finds him/herself is relevant in so far as it brings something of literary value - contributes to the world story - and does not claim superiority over, deny, obscure or jaundice, even oppress other perspectives or stories. But having said that let me now admit that there are other factors and not least among them is the genius and free-will of the author."

What I write is politics: Arundhati Roy

"What I write is politics. Traditionally this is what writers have done. So to separate commentary from writing, from politics, minimises politics, minimises writing, and minimises commentary. This has historically been the role of writers. I could surely go and wear a khadi sari and sit in the forest and become a martyr but that’s not what I plan to do. I have no problem being who I am, writing what I have because I am not playing for sainthood here. I am not playing for popularity. I am not asking to be hailed as a leader of the masses. I am a writer who has a particular set of views and I use whatever skills I have, I deploy whatever skills I have, whatever means I have to write about them, not always on my own behalf but from the heart of the resistance."

Chad Harbach: a writer to watch out for!

If you consider it in material terms, the last big writer was J. K. Rowling. She has lived her full course with glory and all, but she is dud now. So who would be the next big writer? The long search seems to have come to an end. And the new winner is a a young man in her early thirties: Chad Harbach, born and raised in Racine, Wisconosin, a founder- editor of n+1 magazine.

His 500 -page book is being released this week. A whopping advance( $665000), rave reviews even before the publication, excerpts in a popular magazine, authors like Franzen showering praise on the debut author, and the usual hypes that the publishing business embellish their blue-eyed boys with. The mammoth publicity machine is already at work, touting him as the rare hitter of contemporary fiction.

As ever, I have my doubts. Note the title of the book is "The Art of Fielding". Sounds atrocious as a fiction title. No play of imagination. Then it's about baseball. I don't want to mean that there can't be a good literary(?) novel about baseball. But it's somewhat repulsive for me.

Nevertheless, I find Chad a bit intriguing too. He seems kind of awkward, polite, candid, and even authentic in this interview. May be he's a real writer.

Before I sold this book I was kind of pretending I had money by spending so much time by working on N+1 and writing when I didn't have any money at all. I was kind of just barely...well, I was actually in a pretty dire financial situation. The point is I was devoting an awful lot of time to the magazine and I didn't actually have the luxury to do that.

I should have been working at a job that paid me money because I did not have any money. So after I sold the book, it wasn't hard to think about how I am going to spend my free time when I'm not working because I had this book to edit and I already had all this work I was doing for the magazine which I don't get paid for but have been doing anyway. But now I can do it without being kind of anxious the whole time. So it has changed my life in that I'm less persistently anxious.

Ben Okri interview

"The fundamental freedom is the freedom to be exactly what we're capable of being, and as a writer that's a very huge problem because every writer comes into the world with a geographical label on them. My ambition is to be a true, living, clear-seeing writer, and it's the most difficult freedom, as first you've got all your own internalised negativities, your mind, to get over. On top of that you've got the rest of the world saying you should write in the way your tradition has laid down. The challenge is constantly trying to escape straitjackets and see clearly without any labels."