Writing routines of Famous Writers

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

Mikhail Shishkin interview

The everyday language in Russia has been changing very quickly in the last years as the everyday life has. But what sounds fresh today will stink rotten tomorrow. As a writer you must make a choice: try to catch up with the slang or create your own language that will be fresh and alive always, even after you pass. My “exile” helped me to realize that I should make the right choice. I think my experience living outside Russia somehow makes my books more readily accessible to non-Russians. Several Russian generations in the 20th century spent their lifetime in jail. They developed their own way of thinking and speaking. The leakproof prison reality gave birth to a very special subculture. And Western readers cannot identify themselves with Russian exotica. It is time not to rummage in exotic Russian problems but rather writing about the “human being” to bring Russia back to the world. Russian literature is worth it.

Nobel Prize to Mo Yan a catastrophe? | Anna Sun on Mo Yan's language

 Nobel Prize to Mo Yan a catastrophe!
Herta Mueller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, says the choice to give this year’s award to Mo Yan is a “catastrophe” that never should have happened, and accuses the Chinese writer of praising the Asian country’s tough censorship laws.
Anna Sun on Mo Yan's language
 Open any page, and one is treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane, appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value.

Being a writer in a democratic society

"The idea that there are no constraints on writers [in democratic society] is a mistake. There are constraints even in the US and I myself experienced those constraints around 9/11 and 2001. We experienced literary censorship.

The real threat to freedom of expression in our times doesn’t really come from the government. In most parts of the world now it comes from non-state actors like extremist groups or other various kinds. In India, various kinds of identity groups object to someone saying this or that."

Irina Bogatyreva interview

" Every text demands its own time. If an event, a place, a person grabs me and wants to be written about, but for some reason still cannot be expressed, it just hasn’t found its time. It’s not yet ripe. Only gradually will it blossom, tucked away in my soul, and then it takes its form and words. And then I can write about it."

Literary Review bad sex award 2012

The 20th annual award for the most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a literary novel - no pornographic or expressly erotic literature -   will take place on Tuesday 4 December 2012. .

Follow the interesting tweets at Literary Review's tweeter account.

Mo Yan according to Howard Goldblatt

 Howard Goldblatt is Mo Tan's translator for last twenty years, and has translated nine books—seven novels, a collection of stories, and a short memoir.
The core of Mo Yan’s work is the act and nature of narration. He is a master of fable and fantasy, multiple narrations, and stylistic switchings. “POW!” is a fine example of all these.

Mario Vargas Llosa discusses culture with Gilles Lipovetsky

" I believe Proust is important for everyone; although some might not know how to read, what Proust said is of benefit to them, too, despite their not being in a position to read him. He created a type of sensibility vis-à-vis certain things that made individuals capable of being affected by it more sensitive to the situation of more impoverished people. And he made them aware that there were certain human rights. This type of sensibility is the result of culture. When culture isn't behind this sensibility, it is extraordinarily debilitated. This explains why, despite Europe having lived through the atrocious experience of the Holocaust, not only has antisemitism not disappeared but it is periodically reborn. It explains why xenophobia, which is a universal failing, breaks out again, not in primitive, uncultured societies but in extremely cultured societies and in precisely those parts of them that Proust, Eliot or Joyce's Ulysses never reach."

Alasdair Gray interview | Orhan Pamuk on his daily writing routine

"All big jobs know better than their artists how long they will need to be properly finished."

I don’t look at emails, internet or newspapers before 1pm. I wake at 7am, eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I’ve achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower, and work on my next sentence until 1pm. After I’ve done emails and so on I write again from 3pm until 8pm; then I socialise.

Lit News: Mikhail Shiskin's Maidenhair is now available in English

Good news for lit lovers: Mikhail Shiskin’s 2005 novel Maidenhair,  is now available in English translation.  “This is the kind of book they give the Nobel Prize for,” a literary critic once said about this book.

“Maidenhair” is not light reading. The interlocking narratives fuse and fragment in this literary masterpiece, whose ambitious goal encompasses the recreation of language in order to express truths about love and death, loss and happiness. One idea that weaves its way into each of the stories is that “whoever can be happy right now, should,” that pain and joy are connected: “True enjoyment of life can only be felt if you’veknown suffering.”

Roth's advice to a young writer

You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.

Vladimir Makanin wins European Prize for literature

 Born in 1937 in Orsk. Studied math at Moscow State University and filmmaking at a Moscow film school;  a former math teacher with love of chess, Makanin lives in Moscow.

Makanin used chess pieces as a metaphor for writing, saying that white is for topics he knows fairly well and black is for little-known topics that he likens to a “dark forest” that requires him to “slowly get in touch with the topic” and avoid quick decisions.

“My characters aren’t autobiographical and  they don’t have definite real-life prototypes, though I take bits from my own life and from my neighbors.”

Chika Unigwe interview

Q: Prostitution, loneliness and  human trafficking are issues in Diaspora narratives. How much of these issues form the aesthetic strands of On the Black Sisters Street?

A: Whatever theme I pursue in my works, I strive to write pleasurable prose. I see that as one of the most fundamental obligations of a writer: to write prose which is beautiful, that entertains the reader.  Tolstoy in Anna Karenina writes of Anna’s suicide in such delicious prose that the darkness does not completely overwhelm one.  On Black Sisters Streets’ themes of loneliness and prostitution are not the lightest of themes, but I hope the prose makes the themes much more digestable to the readers.

Amos Oz interview

I wish there will come a time when people read my works - my stories and my novels - without inserting… the question, 'Is Israel good or bad? Has Israel the right to exist or should it die?' I wish that such a time will come. In fact, for me, the fulfillment of the Zionist dream will occur when Israel is removed once and for all from the front pages and news pages and instead occupies the literary supplements, the musical supplements, the gardening supplements. That would be the day."

I did the best what I could do with what I had: Philip Roth

“I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was rather successful. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said: ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ This is exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.

“And after that, I decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more. I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life.”

Painting and Literature

"I am a happier person when I paint, but I feel that I am engaged more deeply with the world when I write. Yes, painting and literature are “sister arts” .." 
-- Orhan Pamuk

Read an excerpt from 419 by Will Ferguson

A car, falling through darkness.

End over end, one shuddering thud following another. Fountains of glass showering outward and then -- a vacuum of silence collapsing back in.

The vehicle came to rest on its back, at the bottom of an embankment below the bridge and propped up against a splintered stand of poplar trees. You could see the path it had taken through the snow, leaving a churned trail of mulch and wet leaves in its wake.

Read on..

Why attack V S Naipaul in that shrill fashion, Mr Girish Karnad?

 “My question is to organizers who keep giving him lifetime award as though what he has to say about a large section of the Indian population, about a whole rich period of Indian history which was our glory, does n’t matter."

I'm somewhat baffled by Girish Karnad lashing out at Naipaul in this way. He echoes what William Dalrymple accused Naipaul of, a few years ago. Nothing new or ingenious. I knew Karnad as a good playwright and  actor (despite his acting in some silly movies), but never imagined he was also capable of staging such a high drama on a platform not really meant for his histrionic talents.

One should understand that V S Naipul's strength, as a writer, lies not in his non-fiction, but in his fiction. Read his novels, and you would know why he's a great writer who deserves a lifetime award. He might be openly biased, even vociferous at times in his non-fiction - how many of us are rational? - but he's not really anti-Muslim as some of us conceive. Just consider, a trivial point though,  he has been living with Nadira, a Muslim lady from Pakistan, for quite a long time. 

Why attack a veteran writer, and an octogenarian at that, in that shrill and uncivilized manner, Mr Karnad?

( Updated on 10/11/12: Here is a well thought-out response of Anil Dharker, the festival director of Tata literature Live, to Girish Karnad's diatribe:

Your other assumption of Naipaul being anti-Muslim is debatable to say the least. He's married to a Muslim, and has been for the last 17 years. His wife's two children from her previous marriage are being brought up as Muslims, all of which would be unlikely if he he were against the religion as you claim to be. In spite of that it is quite possible that Naipaul's view of history may not be as rounded as it should be in that he ignores Hindu -Muslim collaborations of that era which resulted in great art, music and architecture. But many historians - or those who write about history - use a particular focus to their approach to history. Marxists historians are a case in point. Whether they should, or shouldn't, is a good subject for debate.

Source: Anil Dharker's post-ed "A matter of debate" in The Hindustan Times dated Nov 10, 2012) 

Creative writing is boom industry, but ..

"It interests me that creative writing is the boom industry right at the time when publishing is tanking. A new generation will have to work out how to make a living from the maddest thing anyone can do – sit down to write."

V S Naipaul at Tata Literature Live | Nilanjana Roy on Indian writing in English| Junot Diaz's multi -culti cred

V S Naipaul at Tata Literature Live

“I wrote that 50 years ago. It has a life and a figure of its own — it’s there and you have to accept it. He explained that A Million Mutinies was an exploration of India’s modernities in anti-clockwise chronological order.”

 Nilanjana Roy on Indian writing in English

"...much of this writing is made for the moment, or is mindlessly derivative, or in urgent need of editing and a grammar check. You hear of editors who’re working on over 20-30 books a year—how do you expect them to do a good job? What is remarkable, though, is the number of young writers who work to higher standards than the industry currently demands, and who feel no pressure to write a certain kind of big India novel—they’ve found their own themes and voices." 

Junot Daiz’s muti-culti cred

In showering Mr Díaz with prize after prize, literary jurors seem to be saying the post-war GMN isn’t dead yet. Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?

Will Ferguson wins 2012 Giller Prize

“I didn’t set out to tell a dark story. The story itself turned into that.”

"Will Ferguson's 419 points in the direction of something entirely new: the Global Novel. It is a novel emotionally and physically at home in the poverty of Lagos and in the day-to-day of North America. It tells us the ways in which we are now bound together and reminds us of the things that will always keep us apart. It brings us the news of the world far beyond the sad, hungry faces we see on CNN and CBC and far beyond the spreadsheets of our pension plans. Ferguson is a true travel writer, his eye attuned to the last horrible detail. He is also a master at dialogue and suspense. It is tempting to put 419 in some easy genre category, but that would only serve to deny its accomplishment and its genius."

 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."