Nabarun Bhattacharya passes away at 66

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

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

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

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

Writing and Education

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

--E. M. Cioran 

Choi Jae-hoon interview

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

Neel Mukherjee on Man Booker Prize 2014 longlist

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

The 2014 Man Booker Prize longlist  

Remembering Hemingway on his 115th birthday

"Write drunk, edit sober"

How serious a writer is Karl Ove Knausgaard?

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

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

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

Zia Haider Rahman interview

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

José Manuel Prieto interview

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

Nadine Gordimer, 1991 Nobel laureate, passes away at 90

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

Happy 80th birthday to Wole Soyinka

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

Intizar Husain interview

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

Translating literature in India

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

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

Rebecca Makkai interview

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

via The Millions

World Cup of Literature: Second round (Brazil vs Chile)

What I’m trying to say is Chile over Brazil, 3-1. Buarque’s Budapest is a book to love. I feel as though it has been written for me, but By Night in Chile was written for the ages.To quote the last line in Bolaño’s book: “And then the storm of shit begins.”

George Orwell's house in Bihar (India) being renovated

Renovation work on legendary British author George Orwell's house in a Bihar town where he was born has begun, officials said Thursday.

The Truth about Publishing

As someone who worked at a literary agency for years, I already knew how random publication tended to be and how difficult it was to sell a book. Most books never sold and those that did rarely earned out their advances. The contract terms were absurdly tilted toward the publishers and authors didn’t have much say in presentation or marketing. Most authors never got agents, and it had little to do with quality. Usually, it was just luck. Still I continued to have some faith in the industry even as I left it, became a professional librarian, received a MFA, wrote and rewrote my works. And while I received initial interest from several agents, I never got one. Even the independent publishers rejected it. All their stated reasons were different.

Read an excerpt from Nabokov's screenplay LOLITA

Several people scramble for shelter, and the first big drops of rain strike the zinc of a lunchbox. As the poor lady in white runs toward the pavilion of a lookout, a blast of livid light fells her. Her graceful specter floats up above the black cliffs holding a parasol and blowing kisses to her husband and child who stand below, looking up, hand in hand.

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Greatest Indian novels

This is claimed to be a list of the greatest Indian novels ever written. It actually comprises only books written in English or translations of works in Hindi and other regional languages.

Have a look anyway.

2014 Pen/Pinter Prize goes to Salman Rushdie

“This prize is English PEN’s way of thanking Salman Rushdie not just for his books and his many years of speaking out for freedom of expression, but also for his countless private acts of kindness.  When he sees writers unjustly vilified, prosecuted, or forced into exile, he takes a personal interest. I think he would be the first to say that it was Harold Pinter who set the example in this regard: the engaged writer never sleeps.”

"My Struggle" is a non-fiction novel

 It isn´t fiction, though, it´s non-fiction, but it isn't a documentary or a memoir either: it's a non fiction novel.

Why you should read it?

What's climate fiction or cli-fi? | World Cup of Literature first round

Cli-fi
..it signals novels that explore the most likely future awaiting us. And that – the sense of reality, that some have called “social realism” – is what makes it so different from science fiction.

World Cup of Literature - First Round
Japan 1 – 0 Colombia

Murakami's "Yesterday" is a disappointment

The Haruki Murakami story "Yesterday" in the current New Yorker disappoints me. It feels like it has been been churned out to meet the deadline. All Murakami stuff was there, but they are jaded and repetitive and  lacking in the magic that makes a Murakmi story distinctive and different from other writers. 

Soccer and literature: Angel Di Maria is like Kafka

The first time I saw Ángel Di María play soccer, I thought, That's my man. One reason was the name, so loaded with culture and history and yet so otherworldly that it's like a novel in itself. Another reason was his country, Argentina, which ever since I watched the World Cup on television in 1978 when I was nine has represented for me the land of myth, the republic of dreams, which naturally only intensified when Borges entered my life, and Maradona, of course, the greatest magician of them all. A third reason I took note of Di María, who plays professionally for Real Madrid, was his striking resemblance to Franz Kafka. It is fantastic, isn't it, Kafka out there on the wing in La Liga?
- Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

2014 World Cup of Literature: 32 titles. 24 judges

Why don't you taste it alongside the real World Cup?

Javier Cercas interview

“The past is a dimension of the present. I don’t write historical novels, but novels about this bigger present that contains the past.”

via

Writing about real people

The novelist and the dramatist can reach where the historian and the biographer very rarely do

Javier Marias on realistic/real novelists

The so-called realistic novelist, who, when he writes, remains firmly installed in the real world, has confused his role with that of the historian or journalist or documentary-maker. The real novelist does not reflect reality, but unreality, if we take that to mean not the unlikely or the fantastical, but simply what could have happened and did not, the very contrary of actual facts and events and incidents, the very contrary of “what is happening now.” What is “merely” possible continues to be possible, eternally possible in any age and any place, which is why we still read Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, whom one can live with for a while and believe in absolutely, rather than discounting them as impossible or passé or old hat.
via

A writing Geek: Top Indian Blog

You may like to hear it: A Writing Geek has been listed in the Directory of Top Indian Blogs 2013-14.

Actually, I didn't know about it. Haddock, an amazing photographer, congratulated me this morning while commenting on my last post.

No big deal for me. Temperamentally, I care little about these things. But it's a hot and humid day, and there's nothing to feel good about. Then you hear it. You feel a bit up for a fraction of a second. 

 I blog for the sheer pleasure of it without any audience/business interest in mind. I blog since I can't do without it. I tried not to blog for some time but I failed.

My thanks to editors of Directory of TIB who have considered AWG fit for their list.

How Ruskin Bond celebrated his 80th birthday

For me, every day is a new awakening. On my 80th, I greeted the early morning sun, watered my plants, wrote a page or two, salu­ted the world from my window, and treated myself to two eggs instead of the usual one!

Internet and Good Writing

Q: Does the internet help or hurt good writing? 

A: I think the question is whether good writing helps or hurts the Internet. Good writing doesn't need help and can't be hurt.

- from an interview with  Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris review

Reading: The Illicit Happiness Of Other People/ Manu Joseph

The Illicit Happiness Of Other People is Manu Joseph’s second novel, but I read him for the first time.

 I picked up the book mainly for its wonderful title. Besides, I wanted to find out what and how Manu Joseph (who I know as a journalist, but recently got awarded for his fiction) actually writes.

It is about Unni Chacko, the weird cartoonist, who killed himself at the age of seventeen. But why did he do this? The novel revolves around this mystery  as Ousep, Unni’s father, a journalist, conducts his long, crazy and relentless search and taps all possible sources to find out the cause of his son’s suicide.

Towards the end of the novel everything falls in places, and the reader knows about the cause, which is not very uncommon, but convincing.

Manu Joseph is a wonderful writer, and I must admit he fascinates me with his prose, intelligence  and sensibilities. He never bores. Like any of today’s writers, he has his research part in this novel, but he incorporates it aptly with an effort though.

In an otherwise well- constructed narrative, the only thing that jars is the abysmal poverty of Chakao family. How come the family would be living in so poor condition while its man is a chief reporter with UNI, his drinking habit notwithstanding?

Chimamanda Adichie interview

"It is now my life; it’s my livelihood. It is also the most important thing that I do. It is a thing that makes me happy. The truth is that I’m very grateful that my writing done well. I am very grateful for the many of the things I have had. Many of them are blessings, but that is not why I write. See, if I hadn’t won all these awards, I’ll still be writing. It was actually the writing that gives me fulfillment. If it doesn’t do well, oh luck! If it does, well I’m grateful."

Literary fiction marginalised in Russia!

In our times of market economy, pulp fiction has won over literary fiction in Russia, quite simply pushing it to the margins. If Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky tried offering their novels to commercial publishers today, they would have a hard time getting them published—they’d probably be rejected on grounds that their novels are too long and dense, too verbose, slow-moving, and serious. Many writers of literary fiction are heading for the middle market, turning out novels by numbers. In the early 1990s, they were still embarrassed to write under their own names and used pseudonyms. But now it’s even become fashionable among the intellectual elite to acknowledge pop culture and work within popular genres.

Raja Alem interview

"My novels are deeply rooted in the spirit of my hometown Mecca, an unexplored world. I draw upon the city's myths, history and philosophy, and all that in a language that has to be deciphered like Sufi texts. It's almost impossible to translate. So I need an adventurous publisher and a very knowledgeable translator who can make my worlds and my style accessible to a German-speaking audience."

Ukranian Pen Club's call for support for Ukranian writers

During the less than four years of its rule, Viktor Yanukovych's regime has brought the country and its society to the utter limit of tensions. Even worse, it has boxed itself into a situation without an exit, where it must hold on to power by any means necessary. Failing which, it would have to face criminal justice in its full severity. The scale of what has been stolen and usurped, of the human avarice involved, is beyond imagination.

read on..

Social media pressure on book readers?

 "There is so much of social media pressure on book readers, and the fear of being judged by the kind of book one is reading." 

How to tell the truth in literature

Salon has an interesting excerpt from "Why I Read: The Serious Pleasures of Books" by Wendy Lesser

To tell the truth in literature, each era, perhaps even each new writer, requires a new set of authorial skills with which to rivet the reader’s attention. We are so good at lying to ourselves, at lapsing into passive acceptance, that mere transparency of meaning is insufficient. To absorb new and difficult truths, we need the jolt offered by a fresh style. Yet what is startling at first eventually hardens into either a mannerism or a tradition. Even Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” if read too early and too often (in a classroom setting, say), can come to seem a mere example of Satire. So every writer—every good writer, every writer who really has something to say—must figure out for herself a new form in which to say it. The figuring need not be conscious, and the innovation need not be dramatic or obvious; we can be affected by style without necessarily perceiving the sources of the effects. But if we do perceive them, they cannot detract from our sense of the writer’s seriousness (a seriousness that, in the case of an innovator like Mark Twain, may partake of a great deal of humor). The structural and stylistic eccentricities must seem—and be— essential, not merely ornamental.

Anita Desai Interview

"I’ve often written about people who don’t go along with the mainstream, who go against the current, who live outside of the current, or are stranded whilst everyone else just flows along. I think I’m drawn to such characters. Even in the last three novellas that I wrote, that same type of character surfaces again and again. I’m interested in people who live in a kind of exile; it may not be political exile, but in some sense it’s exile from the rest of society. It may have something to do with my upbringing and my parents. My mother, having been German, lived most of her life in India and never felt able to return to Germany. After the war, we would sometimes suggest, “Why don’t you go back and visit your country? See who is still alive, who survived.” It would bring her to tears, and she’d say, “Don’t make me do that.” To have lost your country, your family, your society, so wholly, must have been a devastating experience. Somehow she survived it. My father was, in a sense, in exile too. He was from East Bengal, which then became East Pakistan. So his family lost their land and everything else they had there. Then he came to Bangladesh, which was another loss, another change. He didn’t feel at home there either and lived in North India, which was a foreign country to him. They were outsiders, and while there’s no reason why I should be that too—I was born there—I was brought up with the same sense of being an outsider. I certainly absorbed it from them."

Does literary misery follow poor economy?

 A NYT study says that the emotional mood of literature reflects the mood of the economy over the previous 10 years.

What's your take?

Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson interview

I don’t like literature that pretends realism is possible and luckily there is so much writing that is going on today that challenges the concept of realism and brings into play different elements. These could be mythical elements or strands of thought that survive outside the culture or society that we’re living in. So it’s not that I don’t like contemporary fiction, I think great things are happening in the novel today, but they are only happening for people who have realized that it’s not possible to photocopy reality onto the page. It’s always a reconstruction and into a reconstruction you always bring an element of a very ancient thought, the storyteller’s mind. 

Philip Roth turns into a monument!

Adam Kirsch has an interesting article on Philip Roth, the great American novelist, in The Republic.

A writer who, in the first part of his career, seemed defined by transgression—against Jewish self-esteem, against sexual decency, against the conventions of fiction—has been transformed, over the last fifteen years, into an official American classic. The fate that Zuckerman mocked has befallen his creator: Roth, the rebellious son, the fleshliest of writers, is turning into a monument before our eyes.

Tournament of Books is back

The legacy media virtually ignores literature. Not too long ago, daily newspapers considered it an important part of their public trust to review books as part of their arts coverage. With a few exceptions—and let us note some of the truly excellent criticism and features provided by the The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune Printer’s Row Journal—that is no longer the case. Commercial magazines rarely print fiction, or discuss it. For years, Oprah carried the torch in front of the television masses, and her devotion was noble and sincere, but even Oprah is doing something else now.

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Do you need a theory to write your next novel?

"Do I need a theory to write my next novel? I only know that literary theories do not upset me. At the end of the day, my journey through theory left a mark that time has not altered. The experimental novels of my generation in the Seventies, for example, are now widely reviled. Nevertheless I think they have left us with a residual theoretical knowledge that can do us no harm, and which it might have been important not to forget and which, in any case, luckily for us, has survived into the present and which, owing to the reflective varnish they add to our writing, prevents us from straying too far from the problems of the contemporary novel. ‘Everything,’ Marguerite Duras wrote, ‘belongs to literature.’ Let us take charge of some old theories, which might end up being very useful to us in the present. Let us make them ours, make them belong to us; let us not renounce them. Modern creators who flee from theory will find in this stance their first Achilles’ heel."

Meja Mwangi interview

Just as a baker bakes because he is a baker, and a farmer farms because he is a farmer, a thief steals because he is a thief, and a writer writes because he is a writer.

Writers call for democracy in digital age

International Bill of Digital Rights

Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property: it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else: the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.

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Alice Munro's Nobel Prize Lecture

"Stories are so important in the world, and I want to make up some of these stories. I want to keep on doing this. In a way, it didn't have anything to do with other people. I didn't need to tell anybody, and it wasn't until much later that I realized that the stories, that it would be interesting if one got to a larger audience."

Joseph McElroy interview

"For me there are no individual beginnings for a novel—several points of departure, impulses, subjects scattered out there, that I let myself be at sea with or in orbit around or they in orbit half out of reach around me and gradually the subjects gather their relations."

On New Yorker Fiction

"New Yorker fiction mostly cleaves to the traditional questions of bourgeois psychological narrative, questions of personal and domestic relationships: affairs and betrayals, the troubles of children or ageing. All legitimate subjects, but always within the same constraints – power structures, politics and history are, all too often, conspicuously absent.  As a consequence, their recent science fiction issue was an unmitigated disaster, showing that they know little about genre and so have a restricted vision of literature as a whole."

What it is like to be a writer in war-torn Syria

“I cannot say more in these difficult moments,” Khaled wrote in his letter to writers and journalists across the world, “but I hope you will take action in solidarity with my people, through whatever means you deem appropriate. I know that writing stands helpless and naked in front of the Russian guns, tanks and missiles bombing cities and civilians, but I have no wish for your silence to be an accomplice of the killings as well.”–Khaled Khalifa, Damascus

Vikram Chandra interview

Usually, when I am on a break, I listen to music, read. This time, I had this idea of writing something about computer coding and the anthropology of programming; marrying it with Indian literary theory."

So why is dystopian fiction so fascinating?

"...it’s entirely possible that dystopian fiction reflect the fears of the times—and given today’s world of state-sponsored surveillance, religious fundamentalism, economic disparity, and overpopulation (I’m just flicking through the headlines, here), perhaps it’s not surprising this was a popular theme.

So in some ways, dystopias aren’t too much of an imaginative stretch. If you’re trying to predict the future, your best bet would have to be on things going wrong. You could even argue we’re living in a dystopia right now. Maybe we’re always living in a dystopia, or at least degrees of dystopia—the failure of a past’s promising, even utopian, vision—which is why they seem endlessly relevant, in all their scope and variety. We’re simply steeling ourselves for the shape of things to come."

Read Litro#130: Dystopia.

George Orwell and Fydor Dostoyevsky among Burma's highest literary award winners

Nearly eight decades after George Orwell’s “Burmese Days” first hit bookshelves, the book has won the highest literary award in the country where it is set: Burma.

Doris Lessing passes away at 94

 Doris Lessing, the 2007 Nobel Laureate, passed away on Sunday at her home in London at the age of 94.

“the epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Gerald Murnane interview

When you start to put down words your own personality becomes fractured. You’re never quite sure what part of you the words are coming from. It’s a fairly trite statement, but you begin to question the reliability of memory or even experience itself. What emerges from the writing is something that could never have been predicted. This is the magic, that writing is unpredictable. It leads to discovery, and that is a word that is overused and has a sort of twee sound, and it’s not a word I feel comfortable with. But you learn from writing things you couldn’t possibly learn by any other means.

NSA Surveillance drives US Writers to self-censor: PEN Survey

Freedom of expression is under threat and, as a result, freedom of information is imperiled as well. Fully 85% of writers responding to PEN’s survey are worried about government surveillance of Americans, and 73% of writers have never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today. PEN has long argued that surveillance poses risks to creativity and free expression. The results of this survey—the beginning of a broader investigation into the harms of surveillance—substantiate PEN’s concerns: writers are not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result.

Read the full report here

No fresh ideas or philosophies in Europe: Gao Xingjian

"I'm more concerned about Europe, the crisis that it is in, which is not just financial but intellectual. There are no longer any fresh ideas and philosophies."

Related
Gao Xingjian interview

The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013 shortlist

The Hindu Prize for Best Fiction 2013 shortlist

The Illicit Happiness of Other People — Manu Joseph

Foreign — Sonora Jha

Roll of Honour — Amandeep Sandhu

Vanity Bagh — Anees Salim

Another Man's Wife and Other Stories — Manjul Bajaj

Amin Maalouf is "disoriented"!

The only domain in which I find myself deeply fascinated is the scientific field. When I see the evolution in informatics, in medicine, I think we are living in an extraordinary period. But when I see the relationships between human beings, the questions of identity, the relations between different cultures, the evolution of the political world and of democracy, all this makes me feel sorry – not only in the region, but in the whole world. I am really worried and very disillusioned about a lot of things.

The way publishing is these days...

The way publishing is these days, for a lot of mid-list and a lot of starting writers the prize is everything. It’s not some kind of cherry on the top, it’s essential to getting noticed, to getting readers. 

Mircea Cărtărescu interview

I think that every writer should do something completely out of the box in his or her life. I wanted to write a very big book—over one thousand pages—but I didn’t know what shape it would take. I just felt it was time for me to write such a book. When I started to write I had nothing in my mind except the word orbitor, which in English means ‘blinding.’ Orbitor is a special word in Romanian, it signifies both a dazzling light and a mystical light, and I wanted to do something mystical, something without any similarity to any other book in the world. At the same time, orbitor is a very beautiful word, it is a sort of palindrome, a round word, like a serpent biting its tale. Anyway, I started to write by hand in notebooks. I knew nothing about this book—I had no plot, no characters, no ideas. I just used my childhood memories. I went on inventing freely like this until the middle of the book. I never rewrote anything. What you see before you is the first draft. I regret now that I didn’t bring the manuscript with me to show people. It’s hard to believe. But it’s just how I work. I don’t research and I don’t rewrite anything.

On this day, 1913, Albert Camus was born in French Algeria

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"Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me."

New literary culture in America

“We have the idea in America that a book should have likeable characters and make us feel good by the end. This is a new and idiotic idea and erases 2,500 years of literary culture. Tragedy is about exposing our badness, laying it bare. Europeans are much more receptive to this.”

Fiction and non-fiction

I tend not to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction. It's one of my bugaboos. Nearly everything we do is imagined anyway. Memory is a sort of imagination.
-- Colum McCann

Mia Couto wins The "American Nobel Prize"

António Emílio Leite Couto (Mia Couto) has just been announced as the 2014 Neustadt Prize Laureate. He is the first writer from Mozambique ever to be nominated or awarded the $50,000 prize.

Congrats, Couto!

"I find myself constantly inventing different reasons for my activity as a writer. Perhaps there is no real explanation because writing escapes that rationality. I think I need to feel that I am part of something that can't be contained in what we normally call reality. I write to escape from this invisible form of slavery, this submission to what we call reason and reality."

Hasan Azizul Haque interview

"I’ve said it many times that at least six or seven of those who have contributed to what is Bangla literature today are worthy of winning the Nobel prize in literature. And if you take the entire Bangla as a whole, the east as well as the west, then another six or seven should be added to the list. It is our misfortune that Manik Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay were not awarded this prize. Lack of good translation is the reason behind this."

"Nobody is interested in translating Bangla literature. Only half of Pother Panchali was translated, then no one simply cared to do so. Putul Nacher Itikotha was also translated but it too failed to attract any attention from the outside world. To speak to you frankly, I myself haven’t seen it. I firmly believe that it is essential for our literature to be recognized worldwide because it has all the potentials that a national literature should have. I also believe that Bangla is not only one of the main languages of the world, it is also one of the best. But, unfortunately, since we could not establish colonies all over the world to make people from other countries dependent on us, nobody cares about our literature"

Puja Literature 2013: More genre and less literary fiction

Julekha, the princess, sees a young handsome guy in her dream. She is besotted. She sees him again in her dream a second time, and feels lusty. When she sees him in her third dream, she gets impatient of meeting and mating him.

Curiously, this is the premise of Debesh Roy’s novel this year. Way too disappointing for me. Is it a premise to build up a story on at this age? Love story, however brilliantly told, has something tedious about it. But I continued, looking for the leit motif of the novelist who I consider to be one of the great novelists of our time.

Debesh digs in history, mythology and religious scriptures to pad up his story. You find the old Arab world coming alive with his unique narrative, and get some fresh insights into how matrimony worked  around in the ancient times.  But in the end it does not resonate. I had to skip many passages for its loud sentimentality. There’s an ecstasy scene of mass sex incorporated in the novel – written with panache and style – but it felt crass and redundant.

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Tried to read a novel by a new author. Just a few pages on, I found myself yawning.

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But I read through KALJATRI by Krishnendu Mukhopadhyay (Desh). It was about four friends – alumni of an Engineering college – settled in different metros with different degrees of success -   who renew their contact based on a spam e-mail focusing the concept of time travel experiment undertaken by yet another friend now settled in US. They meet in a reunion in Kolkata, engage in a huge boozing session in an  under-construction highrise building  in Rajarhat and pour out their feelings and experiences. All very readable except that the whole thing sounds juvenile, contrived and banal. Of course, it's genre writing, not any literary novel. Bengali literature, it seems, is increasingly shifting to genre these days.

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The best Puja fiction that I read this year is a long short story (Amazon would call it a novella) called KUSHILAB by Swapnamay Chakrabarty. It’s about a playwright who has has lived, experienced and suffered West Bengal through its different political, social and cultural phases uptill now.  Swapnamay weaves his story line in detaled and nuanced prose. It reverberated so much so that I sat stunned and brooding for a while afte I finished the story. The interesting thing about his writing is his masterly asides that expose our phony Bengali intellectuals and wags who you regularly see on the telly. My kudos.

P.S If you have read anything original, authentic or fascinating amongst the puja fare, please tell us in the comment section.

Writing fiction for livelihood

"I've now tasted both extremes of the literary lifestyle: scrimping obscurity and your basic day in the sun. I’ve had novels sink like stones; I’ve had best-sellers. Yet with the exception of a few select luminaries whose reputations are assured, in this business you’re only as good as your last book. My livelihood started out shaky; it is still shaky."

Haruki Murakami has a new story in The New Yorker

Samsa in Love: this is the title of the story. 

Samsa?  Yes. the Gregory Samsa of Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" fame, who woke up to find himself transformed into a cockroach or some such thing. But here in Murakami's story, we find someone who "woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa." Read the story for free online and enjoy what Murakami did with this new Samsa to weave a world that has a semblance of Kafka's world - but in a Murakami way.

What I like about the story is how masterly Murakami exposes the terrifying repressive forces operating in Prague around the time by not writing about it directly. I also feel overwhelmed by the touch of humanity flowing through the entire text.

It's a wonderful story.

Don't miss it..

What's a serious novel?

Read the first five pages. Count clichés. If you find one, the buzzer goes off: it’s not a serious novel. A serious novelist notices clichés and eliminates them. The serious novelist doesn’t write “quiet as a mouse” or paint the world in clichéd moral terms. You could almost just substitute the adjective “cliché-free” for “serious.”
- Jonathan Franzen in the Scratch interview

Writing for Amazon: Good News and a rumour

 Sub-categories in Literary/ Historical Fiction
 Amazon has done wonders for genre fiction. Many self-published authors of romance and thriller genre ( yes, erotica also, but it is in trouble now) have been making a decent living out of their published works. One reason behind this is Amazon's policy of dividing these genres in many sub-categories, and preparing Top 100 list, Hot New Releases list, Popularity list, Top Rated list.etc which help a lot of writers getting noticed and reaching out to their targeted readers.

Literary/ historical fiction titles were so long not treated this way. Now the Amazon has adopted  the same policy of dividing this group in different sub-categories. If you're an aficionado of , say, literary fiction, you can categorize your book under a more specific and narrowed-down list . Good news for writers of literary fiction/ historical fiction, who are not doing well in Indie publishing sales wise.

Amazon algorithm
 According to an article "The tech behemoth decides how many copies of a book it will purchase for its own warehouses based on presale orders. That in turn influences “discoverability,” i.e., how much the title is thrown in front of shoppers on the site."

Could it be true? 

Eleanor Catton Interview

“There’s an advantage in being a country with a relatively short literary history. There’s a sense that there’s more change to come than there is change behind us, more revolutions to come than we have behind us – and that’s pretty exciting."
via

Yasmina Khadra interview

"I'm an uncomfortable writer, someone who disturbs people, who doesn't fit into the picture, but I can't help it. Some people have problems dealing with my atypical career path as a writer. Expectations? I don't have any. I do the things that are dear to my heart, and kindred spirits are welcome to join me. If my life in Paris has taught me one thing, then it's this: no crocodile has ever been tamed by someone drying its tears."

Read first forty five pages from The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Man-Booker winning novel

MERCURY IN SAGITTARIUS

In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed; Walter Moody conceals his most recent memory; and Thomas Balfour begins to tell a story.

The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met. From the variety of their comportment and dress – frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill – they might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway – deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.

Read on...

Eleanor Catton wins the Man Booker Prize 2013

Eleanor Catton has become the youngest writer to win the Man Booker Prize, with the longest novel to triumph in the award.

Alice Munro inteview

Q: And of course everybody is talking about the fact that you announced earlier this year that you were going to stop writing, and saying “Maybe this will encourage her to start again”.

A: [Laughs] Well you know I've been doing it for so many years. I've been writing and publishing, I think, since I was about twenty - just now and then I would get something published you know - but that's a long time to be working and I thought maybe it's time to take it easy. But this may change my mind. [Laughter]

via

Read this Alice Munro story this weekend

When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

more..
via The New Yorker

2013 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Alice Munro

"Master of contemporary short story', Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.
Munro was the third on my shortlist.

2013 Nobel Prize for Literature : my shortlist

1. A dark horse
2. Svetlana Alexievich
3.Alice Munro
4.Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Reading literary fiction improves social skills: Study

Reading literary fiction enhances a set of skills and thought processes fundamental to complex social relationships—and functional societies