U R Ananthamurthy on literary tradition | Youssef Ziedan interview | women 'under-reviewed' and 'under-valued' in literature?

U R Ananthamurthy on literary tradition
The big writers in our languages became big because of their readers. Tagore, Basheer, Karanth, Premchand are examples. They were acclaimed as great writers by readers and critics. Some of them took years to gain a place in the readers’ hearts. You don’t have to wait so long now. The publishers decide who is No 1! This is an insult to the literary tradition.  A literary tradition is built through writing, criticism and debate. The only answer to this insulting marketing strategy is to make our great writers known beyond our borders.

Youssef Ziedan interview

"All my books deal with questions. Questions are the source of knowledge and awareness.
We must ask profound and meaningful questions, about ourselves and about our existence. Fundamental questions." 

Women 'under-reviewed' and 'under-valued' in literature?
 “When we stop discussing issues of equality, we really will have come a long way.

Olga Slavnikova interview

Q: How does Russian magical realism differ from other sorts?

A: It has to do with a particular Russian reality. Here, the very worst things happen but there is always a place for miraculous salvation. A Latin American novel is mythological; Russian magical realism is mystical.

Taschen Benedikt on publishing

"Publishing is, as life, unpredictable and can be dangerous. I am an optimistic guy, like Voltaire’s Candide, kind of sleepwalking through business and life, bumping every once in a while into a genius who makes me rich, in my head, heart and financially. As a friend of mine put it: the plan is, there is no plan."

Sunil Gangopadhyay dies of massive heart attack

One of India's most eminent writers and a stalwart of Bengali literature, Sunil Gangopadhyay, died of a heart attack in the early hours of Tuesday at his residence in Kolkata. He was 78.

Puja literature: Duratar Janmabhumi/ Debesh Roy

Do you expect in a literary novel a low-down on World Bank, its past and present role in development of third-world countries? But this is exactly you get in Debesh Roy’s recent novel published in the autumn number of Aajkal.

Okay, the regular readers of this blog knows, during this puja time, every Bengali newspaper and periodical brings out its Puja issues, most of them tomes, comprising full-length novels, stories, memoir, poems, you name anything. Most of these are, needless to say, are shitheap. But if you trawl enough and in right places, you might come across a few gems here and there.

Debesh Roy is a world-class Bengali author. The octogenarian author, despite his odd allegiance to a degenerated leftist party, is wonderfully active and still evolving. Every year he comes up with a new innovative, almost original novel around this time. Too tempting for me.  In fact, I look forward to reading it every year.

The protagonist of this year’s novel Duratar Janmabhumi is a Harvard-educated economist, a Bangladeshi Muslim, now an American citizen. Zedda Matlab, Zet to his friends and colleagues, was an university teacher at first, then worked for the World Bank with its various development projects in Somalia, Indonesia and other third-world countries, and now makes a living by providing “economic intelligence” to institutions or bodies who work in various poor countries with  hidden political agendas.

The novel opens with Zet’s landing at Dacca airport with Alice, his live-in partner. He is returning to his country after thirty years, but on an espionage job: he is assigned to find out why the bridge over the Padma is lying stalled and unfinished. He wanted to do it under cover, but in his hurry he exposes himself, and hurts an old man who is shocked by Zet’s attitude with regard to the country in which he was born and raised.

Now, for Bengali novels or should I say for those of any languge, it’s a great theme.  And if you see an essay-type insertion on World Bank  in the middle of the novel, it is just apt and you have nothing to complain.

But what astounds me is the readabilty of the book. It is such an effortless and smooth read that you can’t simply put it down.

To conclude, Debesh Roy is continually pushing the boundary of  literature – Bengali literature in particular, and world literature in general -  with his inimitable narrative. My kudos to him.

161st anniversary of Moby Dick!

Thursday was the 161st anniversary of Moby Dick's release. Google  celebrates it with its latest Doodle.
Moby Dick, Melville's classic novel, was largely unread and unrecognized in his time, but later would be considered as one of the great American novels.
If you want to read the novel as e-book, here is the link for a free download.

Hilary Mantel's advice to young writers

"Cultivate confidence, have no shame in being bullish about your ideas and your abilities". 

Hilary Mantel wins Man Booker Prize, a second time

The whittling has finished. The judges of this year's ManBooker Prize started with a daunting 145 novels and have winnowed, sifted,culled, and in some cases hurled, until there was only one left: Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies.

If you're a writer outside the mainstream...

So if you’re a writer outside the mainstream, if you come from communities that are invisible or maligned, you have to break a lot of yokes before you can even begin to find your voice as an artist. You have to break a lot of prohibitions, a lot of received imprimaturs. But that’s OK. The breaking of yokes will stand you in good stead as an artist and as a citizen. By reclaiming your own world against the Silence you reclaim it for others who will follow in your stead. About as close an artist comes to the Lord’s work.

Reading: Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

Let  me confess it: I had no interest in Jeet Thayil, the author of Narcopolis, until recently. In fact, I took him for  yet another of  Indian novelists who are now swarming over the literary scene like bugs on dirty, smelly beds.

But Thayil is  not really one of them. He’s different and if you read him, you can easily distinguish him from the herd. He is a stand- out with his own voice. He’s sophisticated, cosmopolitan, knowledgeable and has great tastes for art and other classy things, his penchant for opium notwithstanding.

Narcopolis is about a seedy world where you see a line-up of characters, from different regions and religions of the planet, involved as consumers or sellers or intermediaries, in the business of opium in the not too distant past in Bombay. The opium den is a melting pot, and showcases a life which is in many ways a mirror of the larger world outside. Thayil chronicles and evokes the world in all its fine details in a fascinating way.

 This is a novel about real people, based on the writer’s raw life-experiences, authentic, rich with innuendos and insights, but full of empathy for its characters. Sometimes it reads like a memoir, but it’s actually a  novel done in a different mode.

I’m stunned by Thayil’s prose which is precise, lucid, fluent, lyrical, abrasive, even bawdy. The text is always right for its context.

So, here is a novel for you if you love reading for purposes other than just entertainment. 

AM Homes interview

'I write in order to make people think about their lives and the larger world.'

Excerpt from Mo Yan's forthcoming novel Sandalwood Death

Meiniang's Lewd Talk

The sun rose, a bright red ball (the eastern sky a flaming pall), from Qingdao a German contingent looms. (Red hair, green eyes.) To build a rail line they defiled our ancestral tombs. (The people are up in arms!) My dieh led the resistance against the invaders, who responded with cannon booms. (A deafening noise.) Enemies met, anger boiled red in their eyes. Swords chopped, axes hewed, spears jabbed. The bloody battle lasted all day, leaving corpses and deathly fumes. (I was scared witless!) In the end, my dieh was taken to South Prison, where my gongdieh's sandalwood death sealed his doom. (My dieh, who gave me life!)

—Maoqiang Sandalwood Death. A mournful aria

 Read on..

Mo Yan wins the Nobel Prize in literature 2012

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

"My characters are all very native Chinese, and my language is also imprinted with Chinese characteristics. I think that's why I've got international readership." via 

The author, whose pen name Mo Yan means "don't speak", is regarded by critics as being too close to the Communist Party (some of his books were banned. though). His book titles include "Big Breasts and Wide Hips"  and "The Republic of Wine".

Nobel Prize for Literature : who do you want to win it this year ?

The Nobel Prize Committee has already decided on  the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature., but you've no way of knowing the name. You have to wait till Thursday, Oct 11, for their announcement..

Who do you want to win the Nobel for literature this year? Murakami, Trover, Mo Yan, Roth?

Normally, I don't root for anybody on such occasions. I have great respect for the Nobel judges: not only they have great tastes for literature, but they keep track of every worthy author of whatever language from every nook and cranny of the world. I even find myself in agreement with their world-view. They have always looked for the real writer in the herd. Just think of Elfriede Jelinek, the largely unknown and neglected writer in her own country, who we would not have chance to read without her being awarded the Nobel Prize.

I like them for their dislike for popular authors.

I like them for their preference for obscure authors.

I like them for their radicalism.

I've always been intrigued by their choice.

They have always recommended, by way of their selection, a worthy author to add to my reading list.

Whoever they select, I know, it will never be  J.K. Rowling or E.L James or any bestseller hack.

George Saunders interview/1

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

           George Saunders interview/2

BBC international short story award for Miroslav Penkov

Bulgarian author Miroslav Penkov has won the £15,000 BBC International Short Story Award for his story East of the West.

Penkov has, in his blog, an interesting interview he did with himself when he was largely unknown, and there was no one to ask him questions.

Reading Literature

Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.

Should literature be political?

And so,why do we ask this question again, at this time? Should literature be political? Maybe we sense the need for a kind of reflective activism whose coherence only literature may render with some believable conviction. Maybe we yearn for renewal.

Have you read The Tunnel?

Conversational Reading is  group reading William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (“It will be years before we know what to make of it.”) on its website from September 30 through November 3.  It is a great initiative to invest time and effort on a dark, complex and hugely underrated but worthy novel.  Go participate in the big read. and decipher its context, meaning and relevance if you love William H Gass or literature.

Dinaw Mengestu on his “Genius” Grant

"It felt like the best place to hear about the award. I was there with a couple of friends who have a small publishing house  in Nairobi, and we were talking about ways to encourage the growth of indigenous publishing inside of Africa...and what we can do to grow the small houses that they are already a part of. [The fellowship] definitely feels like it’s going to be attached to that. It means I can spend more time in Africa to see how I can help that process."

Lit News: Novelist Junot Diaz Gets $500,000 MacArthur Grant

White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet..  

Ruskin Bond about his writing desk

As I write, a small spider runs across my desk, scrambles over a pile of manuscripts, and rapidly climbs the wall. This is a good sign. Running down the wall is not so good; it means an earthquake is about to happen. I have a large desk, but there isn’t much room left on it for writing. Stacks of neglected correspondence, notebooks, tattered newspaper clippings, page proofs, tax papers, royalty statements, rolls of sellotape, all jostle for space, leaving me just one small corner of the desk for my writing pad.

But it’s strategically placed, this old desk of mine. It is only one small step from my bed. And that means, whenever I feel drowsy (which is fairly often), I have only to glide over to the comfort of a double mattress and enjoy half-an-hour’s oblivion.

more

A real writer in the herd

"A writer is a solitary creature, engaged in his solitary, imaginary, private business. It makes no difference where he lives–in Ekaterinburg, Moscow, or New York. When writers flock together for some common goal I begin to have doubts:is there a real writer in the herd?"

Kristín Ómarsdóttir Interview

I enjoy all literature, from every time, style, and age. .... I’m against the reality, the designed reality. I am against the structure of our world, which seems to be raised by violence.

Salwa Bakr Interview

"I write about women who are rarely seen by others. My characters are women who remain unobtrusive and for whom no one has any use."

Readability and Great Art

"If we make the main criteria good page-turning stories – if we prioritise unargued opinion over criticism – then I think literature will be harmed. Someone has to stand up for the role and the art of the critic, otherwise it will just be drowned – overwhelmed. And literature will be worse off."

Nuruddin Farah interview

"The country died inside me, and I carried it, for a long time, like a woman with a dead baby. It became the neurosis from which I write."

Deborah Levy interview

I am more interested in repression than depression. 

Related
Deborah Levy on mainstream literary publishing

Salman Rushdie on current status of "The Satanic Verses"

"One of the things I’m pleased about now is that people are reading it like a book at last. Reading it like a novel, after all these years. After almost a quarter of a century, it’s finally being allowed to be a novel. And then it has the ordinary life of a novel.  Some people love it, some people are bored by it, some people like it a bit. All of that, which is all fine. People are finally having a literary response to it." 

Pankaj Mishra reviews Joseph Anton

No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's second novel SILENT HOUSE

Read an excerpt  from Orhan Pamuk’s second novel,Silent House, first published in 1983 and now available in English for the first time

Jeet Thayil on Narcopolis

And there is certainly a storyline in Narcopolis, though the line digresses in the manner of a nineteenth century Russian novel. In that way it is absolutely conventional. It’s only unconventional when you think of it in a purely Indian context. It is a novel that makes sense in terms of structure only when you get well into Book Three. It is a challenging book: it expects the reader to put in some work. Which, in today’s context, is a risky thing to do, but there you have it.


Related
Jeet Thayil interview

Deborah Levy on mainstream literary publishing

It’s quite sad to see how decent people involved in mainstream literary publishing have become toadies to the perceived tastes of the ‘market’. This is all due for a change and everyone knows it. The international Occupy movement has so astutely chimed with popular disgust at an exhausted and failing corporate culture. If I let ‘the market’ write my books for me and tell me what I think and how you think and what we are like, what kind of conversation would I be having with my readers? What kind of conversation would they be having with me?

Jeet Thayil Interview

"I knew Narcopolis would not find its readers immediately. I expected an adverse reaction in India, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as adverse as it has been.  There’s a new prosperity and a new jingoism here that doesn’t account for dissenting views. The rich have become richer and the middle class has expanded, but the poor, who outnumber everybody else, have stayed poor. This is something the middle class prefers not to think about. And they certainly don’t want it written about in a book that might be read by people in other countries.Outlook magazine said: “Sleaze sells India like nothing else can. So Narcopolistries.” A newspaper called DNA said it was “one of the worst novels written in the English language anywhere.” And Tehelka said the book was “like waiting for a really long goods-train to trundle by.” Interestingly, the bad reviews were only in India, even the Pakistanis have been more generous."

Tan Twan Eng interview

How have you lived with the terror of your homeland's history -- World War II through the "Emergency" that finally ended in 1960 -- that you recreated in your books? Both books must have taken years to write, which means you must have had to endure long years of inhabiting the historically accurate world you had to conjure forth on the page?

I've always been interested in that period of our past, so I had been reading up and collecting materials on it for years. When I wrote The Gift of Rain, I had all the details I needed in my head and it was a just matter of crafting the story. There comes a point when the writer has to forget his research and just, simply, tell the tale.
   Writing The Garden of Evening Mists, on the other hand, required more extensive research. The settings and the time period were different from Gift's, and I was never much of a gardening man, so it took a lot of work to learn how to create a Japanese garden. But the more research I did, the more fascinated I became with it and the more I appreciated it; I realized that the principles of gardening could be applied to life, too.

   Dealing with the horrors of the Japanese Occupation and the violence of the Malayan Emergency was at times emotionally draining, but it's the writer's responsibility to feel, and then to convey those emotions to the readers, otherwise the writing will come across as lifeless.

Via  Bookslut

Zadie Smith interview

To me writing is deeply irrational, idiosyncratic, because its medium – language – has so much ambiguity built into it. That argument that Alice and Humpty Dumpty have about the instability of meaning that’s the epigraph of a million graduate dissertations… Language is the absurd bit of writing that can’t be entirely suppressed or controlled by journalistic ideas like ‘state of thenation’ novels. Maybe the phrase, if it’s used at all, is best used satirically, as Amis used it.

Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis on 2012 Man Booker shortlist!

I'm glad Jeet Thayil's first novel Narcopolis has made the cut. It is set around a Bombay opium den in the 1970s and '80s, with a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs.

Jeet is basically a poet, songwriter and guitarist. He lives in New Delhi.

Critics have likened Narcopolis to William Burroughs's Junky and Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 

A guide to others on shortlist.

Read an excerpt from Salman Rushdie's new book Joseph Anton

The New Yorker has published a long excerpt from Salman Rushdie's new book called Joseph Anton. 

He thought of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations, but all of them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not. He wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years. Joseph Anton.

Zadie Smith on writing a novel

Whenever I write a novel I’m reminded of the essential hubris of criticism. When I write criticism I’m in such a protected position: here are my arguments, here are my blessed opinions, here is my textual evidence, here my rhetorical flourish. One feels very pleased Whenever I write a novel I’m reminded of the essential hubris of criticism. with oneself. Fiction has none of these defences. You are just a fool with a keyboard. It’s much harder. More frightening. At the same time, I work really hard on my novels, so when I return to reviewing I expect the novels I read to really have something going on. Not perfection, because I know that’s impossible and not really even desirable – but some kind of genuine urgency. Some risk has to have been taken. Something in the book has to be genuinely fresh: perspective, language, form, ideas, something.

Another Pankaj Mishra interview

I think the days in which I would imagine a writer working in a vacuum, isolated from all political currents, producing [work] for a small minority of sophisticated readers, those days never really existed first of all, and those days are more and more remote now. I guess it’s very easy to dramatise this as ‘writers as activists’. But it’s much simpler than that. You are in this world, you have certain experiences of the world, you have to be truthful about those experiences. And when those experiences are misrepresented in public, then you have to speak up. Otherwise, you do injustice to yourself, your experiences, your writing.

What the hell?

 I was a well established feminist writer, if he did not spare me, then whom did he spare? 

Taslima is someone who craves to be the centre of attention at all times. She thrives on creating controversy. Lately she has been feeling neglected. She has been desperately trying to return to India to stay, but has failed. No one seems to be talking about her anymore. So she wanted to bring the focus back on herself by any means. And something sensational like this was sure to do that.

Salman Rushdie has a new book

“I’ll get killed if I talk about it now. Commandos will come through the door.”

Lit News: Syed Mustafa Siraj passes away

Syed Mustafa Siraj, the eminent Bengali writer, passed away today at 10 am in a private nursing home in Kolkata. He was 82, and died of old age.

 I essentially explore man’s relationship with nature and try to demonstrate that whereas trees, rivers, rainfall, etc. live out their own course without obstructing any natural or human cycle, man tries to direct the course of nature by building dams across rivers or curb the freedom of his fellow beings in sundry ways

Understanding Murakami

What is it that makes a Murakami novel or short story so compelling? Why does he use various signs and symbols to enrich his plots? What is his take on colonialism, capitalism and all that? The Quarterly Conversation dissects all of these things, and more,  in its current issue through a bunch of essays under the caption  MURAKAMI ROUNDTABLE. Recommended for all literary enthusiasts.

Signs and symbols are essential to a Murakami novel. Sometimes Murakami gives us an explanation that’s meant to be a sign: a scientist explains that certain events have changed a character’s neural pathways, and that’s why she’s a new person. Sometimes Murakami gives us a symbol: the narrator of Hard-Boiled Wonderland says that his explanation is just something he made up for convenience’s sake. Occasionally, Murakami makes it very clear that something is to be a sign or a symbol, but far more often he leaves it vague. The essence of a Murakami novel is his exploitation of our uncertainty as to whether a story is a sign or a symbol.

Ian McEwan interview

As you become older you know you only have 20 or 30 summers left, if you’re lucky, and you want the project,the human project, to continue, whereas in my 20s I was quite interested in it failing. It  didn’t trouble me emotionally.

Herta Müller on writing

Eat everything you play with. That could be a definition for writing. Who knows: I have to eat everything I write, and what I don’t write devours me. Even though I eat it, it doesn’t disappear. And even though it consumes me, I don’t disappear. The same thing always happens during writing, when words want to be something else in order to be accurate, when objects become independent and verbal images steal what doesn’t belong to them. Perhaps it’s precisely during writing, when words become something else in order to be accurate, that what’s operating is always the same snow and always the same uncle.

Ron Rash interview

 Novels are so horrible to write. It takes me three years. Very often I’d rather stick pencils in my eyes. But when you finish them, it’s wonderful. Right now I can’t even think about writing one.

E.L James in Nobel list!

Ladbrokes has put E.L James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, on its list of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012, though with heavy odds (1/500)

Hilarious!

Or is it a calculated move to dumb down the Nobel Prize?

Howard Jacobson on literary festivals

Literary festivals go on being zestfully attended. New events in London such as Book Slam, the Literary Salon at Shoreditch and 5 x 15 are attracting rhapsodic younger crowds to what are virtually literary nightclubs.  Great fun they are to read at, too. And, in the meantime, just about every living English novelist you have ever heard of has a new book out. Is this what decline looks like?

Boualem Sansal interview

"To look for your history and your identity is also to look for others’ history and identity. You live in a country, an epoch, with people. You cannot know yourself away from this environment. When you get ahead in your research, you discover that your individual history is nothing, only a rustle in general history.  The feeling of belonging to a people, of having an identity, is born from it."

Mathematics and literature

...calculus helped me to cherish the work of Tolstoy. A few pages of Tolstoy might well help learners fall in love with calculus.

How should a novelist approach his/her novel?

With ingenuity. With humility. With a hammer. With energy. With erudition. With naivety. Traditionally, anarchically, adventurously, brokenly, wholly, any adverb you want, but always only with an eye to what the story asks, because that's more than enough. The story will dictate its style. (And you won't need adverbs anyway. Lose them in the edit.)

          -Ali Smith in The Edinburgh writers' conference,

V.S. Naipaul turns 80

“To be a serious writer is not to do what you have done before… I shouldn’t just stay at home and pretend to be writing novels. I should move and travel and explore my world — and let the form take its own natural course.” 

Pankaj Mishra interview

I am now a very different person and writer than I was when I published The Romantics, and the novel I write now would have to reflect that, or it will bore me to tears, not to mention the reader.

J.R.R Tolkien today

"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has gone too far for me. Such commercialisation has reduced the esthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: turning my head away."

- Christopher Tolkien, writer's son

Reading: ALEEK MANUSH by Syed Mustafa Siraj (Bengali novel)

I have heard of this novel long since, but only recently had the chance to read it through. Gripping from the very first line, original and serious, it is a great read. I have enjoyed every page of the novel.

Based in Murshidabad, a backward and Muslim-dominated district of the then undivided Bengal – it offers  a vivid and real portrait of the Muslim cummunity of the time, divided by different religious cults and their leaders, and their multitude of suckers against the backdrop of independence struggle that was then brewing across Bengal. But I read into it a heart-wrenching love story between two pristine souls who by a streak of fate were never united.

Safi, the protagonist, was a rebel, and though born of an orthodox family – his father was a “pir”( a saint) -  left the family in school-going age, lived in different places, came in contact with different  learned men, and studied different religious texts,  literature and western philosophy to finally morph into an atheist.  He was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau and strongly believed that the state is a torture machine, the officers in the administration are complicit, and the police and the military are the state-owned hooligans.

Safi got to be a mythical hero in his own right. In course of his life, Safi murdered some notorious men and lived like a sage, attracting a huge following from both Hindu and Muslim communities. Finally, when he was going to kill his hypocrite father, someone called in the police and got him booked. He was subsequently tried and hanged. Massive crowds attended his cremation.

I’m not sure why the author calls him an “ALEEK”(unreal) man. He’s very much a flesh and blood creature, and even adorable despite his anarchist strait. His tumultuous life, so palpable without his dream womanRuku,  resonates long after I was done with the book.

 Translators, please take note: it’s a great literary novel that deserves your attention.

If you like ALEEK MANUSH, you may also like SHADOWLAND.

Chinua Achebe interview

Artists from the developing world do no one a favor by blindly copying Western styles and forms. And let me be clear, because I am often misunderstood: I am not decreeing how a writer should write. I am not suggesting that artists should not or cannot be influenced by other artists from different parts of the world. That is welcome. I am suggesting that an artist should be true to who and what they are and should aspire to produce the best art that they can …that is when the magic in art is released. What I am calling for is an environment where freedom of creative expression is not only possible but protected… where an artist from any part of the worldcanacquire and develop their unique voice and then express themselves on the Great Cultural Stagein full ear shot of the world!

Will Self interview

"I don't really write for readers.I think that's the defining characteristic of being serious as a writer. I mean, I've said in the past I write for myself. That's probably some kind of insane egotism but I actually think that's the only way to proceed – to write what you think you have to write. I write desperately trying to keep myself amused or engaged in what I'm doing and in the world. And if people like it, great, and if they don't like it, well, that's that – what can you do? You can't go round and hold a gun to their head."

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."