The Concept of Badly Written Good Story, Courtesy Etgar Keret

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile. It looks beautiful, but soulless. So I warn them that, often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say. Sometimes you have, like, New Yorkerstories—there’s a couple, they’re on a cruise, he’s becoming senile, he doesn’t want to acknowledge it, when the woman mentions it to him, he becomes really angry, but in the end he admits it and they sit on the deck, she closes her eyes. And you say, “It’s so well-written, but who gives a fuck?” For certain, the guy who wrote it doesn’t give a fuck. It’s not something that has to do with his life; it’s just something well-written and illuminating, and writing is not about that. The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about.

Has James Wood changed?

"I don’t think I’ve changed. I am as sincerely interested in novels that fail as I am in novels that succeed. I just want to work them out. It’s a pleasure for me actually."

Zia Haider wins James Tait Black Prize for his debut novel

Congrats, Zia Haider.


I'm so glad Zia Haider wins the James Tait 

Black Prize for his novel "In the Light of 

What I Know."



It was such an immersive reading 

experience that  I wrote about it. 







It's really a classy novel dealing with a whole 

range of issues, old and new, and

locating the 

personal in the political

Mia Couto:A Writer in Oral Society

“I’m a white guy and an African; the son of Europeans and Mozambicans; a scientist living in a very religious world; a writer in an oral society. These are apparently contradictory worlds that I like to unite because they’re part of me. When I think of a character, it’s a black person; 99% of Mozambicans are black … I want to tell stories in the borderlines, and which cross frontiers.”

Arundhati Roy on being called a writer-activist

To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it’s not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job. It’s a peculiar thing, until writers were embraced by the market, that’s what writers did—they wrote against the grain, they patrolled the borders, they framed the debates about how society should think. They were dangerous people. Now we’re told we must attend festivals and get on to bestseller lists and, if possible, try to be good-looking.

Amitav Kumar on Philip Roth

"I like Roth for his monumental dumbness. His lack of understanding of the mystery that is his life—this also explains why he sometimes seems to be writing the same book again and again—is interesting because it is paired with a particularly male, even arrogant, set of certainties. The struggle for understanding is examined with great frankness. Roth generates enormous energy in American Pastoral by putting beside the voluble, expressive sharing of rage, and sorrow, and befuddled despair, an impressive array of precise observations."

Being a writer isn't a trade....

I am becoming increasingly convinced that being a writer isn’t a trade. It is an activity of sorts – one that is largely forced on you, that is connected with the specificities of your body and mind. Someone – I think it was T.S. Eliot – said that literary works are written not to create emotional feelings, but to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And, hell, what kind of a trade is getting rid of emotional feelings?
--Vladimir Sorokin

Recommended reading: Akhil Sharma-Aleksander Hemon conversation

Akhil Sharma and Aleksandar Hemon Discuss Poverty, Happiness, and Publishing

It was published in June 15 Fiction issue of Vice, but I missed it. An intimate exchange of ideas between two authors who seem to have many things in common. 

Jonathan Franzen on why he chose to title his recent novel PURITY

I don’t know why I chose to put that title on the book and I kept wishing I could come up with a better one because there is something vaguely icky about purity. It shouldn’t be that way, it should be: “Purity, what could be more lovely than that?” But just the letters P-U-R, there’s something about them that doesn’t—it’s like I consider it an act of courage to say the name of my novel is Purity. I couldn’t have done it a year ago, I merely referred to it as the book.

Google doodle for Latifa al-Zayyat

 Layla in "Open Door" by Egyptian novelist and activist al-Zayyat who died in 1996

Literature in the age of globalisation

 The existence of an international literary community forces authors to think about whether they are writing primarily for a national or an international audience. Even if they are not consciously aware of this process, it is nevertheless at work. In Pamuk's case, I have spoken to people close to him who say that in the early days there was much discussion of how he might win a major international prize. This is hardly a crime. But it definitely conditions the way a writer works.

Knausagaard-mania continues

The sixth volume of My Struggle is already out in original, though in translation four volumes have been published so far. But Knausagaard-mania that started in 2009  still continues unabated.

Nell Zink on literary fiction

 Literary fiction is not a lucrative genre, and artistically valuable fiction is a small subset of literary fiction and it’s just a loss leder. You know? For most of its practitioners, they work hard so they can do this in their spare time, and the benefits they get are purely social, most of the time. They don’t even get a fellowship. Maybe some of them have jobs teaching. Mostly what they get is the regard of their peers.

via

Who needs difficult fiction?

I am among the readers who thought modernism, along with other richly challenging literary periods, had staying power. Now I’m not so sure.

Man Booker Prize longlist 2015 announced

Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced today: thirteen titles  by thirteen authors from across the globe, the Prize now being open to any nationality. But the list seems heavily dominated by US which has five representations among the thirteen. 

The list is also skewed in favour of female authors - seven out of thirteen.

Then there are some big omissions: Pat Barker, Salman Rushdie Jonathon Franzen and Kazuo Ishiguro. 

The list comprises just three Britons. Which must shock the long-time observers of the Booker Prize. 

Of course, there is a paradigm shift in compilation of the list. Americans are all set to take over, and change the game. My guess is that the Man Booker Prize is going to an American novelist this year.

The good old Booker Prize, with all its glory, seems to be over.

Of the eleven books, I've  read only one title: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon Jones (Jamaica). 

Marlon Jones represents Jamaica, but actually lives in NewYork.

A new take on David Foster Wallace's death on celluloid

Wallace's death had double prestige, first as a literary suicide, in the tradition of Hemingway and Woolf, and then as a rock 'n' roll suicide, in the tradition of Kurt Cobain.

Recommended reading: Not Writing/ Anne Boyer

When I am not writing I am not writing a novel called 1994 about a young woman in an office park in a provincial town who has a job cutting and pasting time. I am not writing a novel called Nero about the world’s richest art star in space. I am not writing a book called Kansas City Spleen. I am not writing a sequel to Kansas City Spleen called Bitch’s Maldoror. I am not writing a book of political philosophy called Questions for Poets. I am not writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not writing a memoir about poetry or love. I am not writing a memoir about poverty, debt collection, or bankruptcy. I am not writing about family court. I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners and not writing a memoir about prohibitions of memoirs.

Salman Rudhdie on writers and satirists

I think writers and satirists worldwide have become too apologetic for poking fun at Islam.

E L Doctorow passes away at 84

 E.L. Doctorow, one of America's most accomplished novelists of recent decades who was best known for his historical fiction, died Tuesday at the age of 84

"Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad."

--Excerpt from a Paris Review interview (1986)

What weight means to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Weight was when I first came to New York, and I didn’t have a job. My wife was the breadwinner in our household, which is fine. But I couldn’t even contribute. Weight is having a one-year-old kid and having no idea how you are going to contribute to the household. Weight is writing for years, where you are paid ten cents a word and you write three articles that year that you worked your ass off to do, and that’s all the income you bring in. Weight is all those years when you bring in 1,000 or 2,000 dollars a year. That’s weight. I never thought I would get here. I had no expectation of this. This is icing. [Laughs] It’s not even the cake; it’s icing. And you can’t write for that.


via

Would people enjoy Harper Lee's new novel " Go Set A Watchman"?

Go Set A Watchman, the hotly anticipated novel by Harper Lee, is on sale now. According to BBC, the initial print run in USA is 2 millions and it would be released in 70 countries simultaneously. Of course a big moment in publishing.

But I'm not excited. In fact, reading the reviews and the first chapter of Watchman, I get less enthused to read the book.  Who would want to see Atticus, such a fine and rational being in Mockingbird to change suddenly into a bigot in Watchman?

These are worst times for the black in USA as they experience more and more violence and hatred from the white. I'm afraid in the new charged atmosphere the book's content could be a thing for glee for bigots, unintentionally though. May be it was the reason why the novel which was actually written before the Mockingbird was rejected by Lee's editor fifty five years ago.

Times have only changed for the worse now.

The publishing of the book may have a historic value, but I think it's not going to be welcome by many. Worse still, you can't re-read Mockingbird with same love and enthusiasm now.

Language is an irrelevance!

For a long time now, especially since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I’ve despised literature for its impotence to change the world for the better, its inability to dissuade or enlighten the people who do harm. Sometimes I think that language as a whole is an irrelevance, that all the true motivations are non-verbal. (I was writing about this as far back as 1996, in a story called The Tunnel of Love). But language is all we have. And although The Book of Strange New Things expresses that despondency and frustration about communication, it’s a kind of love song to intimacy and good intentions as well. And good humour. At one point, Peter laments to Bea that he would need to have the skills of a novelist to describe to her what he’s seeing and experiencing. The reader can relish that, because you’re experiencing everything in technicolour and sensurround via my prose, while Bea has to make do with Peter’s absurdly crappy letters. The gulf is terrifying but also funny.

       ---Michel Faber 

If you want to write, read more: Namwali Serpell

I think if you want to write short stories, the best thing to do is to read more. I say this to all my students, to anybody who wants to write: If you want to write, read more. And there’s so many amazing short stories that you can read; you can listen to short stories on the tube, or on the train, or on the bus. And I think if you read stories by Amos Tutuola or Franz Kafka or Gogol or Alice Munro you get this kind of remarkable range of the possibilities of what you can do with the short story, so that when you sit down to write your own you have a real sense of freedom, I think. You think, “All of these amazing things have been done. Borges did this, Calvino did that, I can do something really interesting and experimental as well.

via

Related

Read the Caine Prize winning story, "The Sack".

Read the Caine Prize winning story "The Sack"

The Sack by Namwali Serpell

It's an exquisite piece of art. You may have to read it a second time if you can't appreciate it at first attempt.

Recommended reading:Susan Sontag Revisited Symposium Lecture

Susan Sontag Revisited Symposium Lecture by Steve Wasserman

Plagiarism: The Curious Case of Shin Kyung-sook

“If you know the original work and add humor, it’s parody; If you want people to know the original piece, it’s homage; If you want to hide the original work, then it’s plagiarism.”

Recommended reading: Jonathon Safran Foer is Blind, Deaf and Dumb

Jonathon Safran Foer is Blind, Deaf and Dumb

The Story behind the Story

We’re living in the reality show version of reality, is why—and we’ve been living in it for a while now. The story behind the story has become the only tale to tell. It’s about transparency, and disabuse: the democratization of the hero, or the hero’s devaluation into celebrity, this seemingly American sense that there’s a system in place, an equal opportunity system by which anyone can claim the world’s attention. Art is now concerned with figuring that out—with laying bare or appearing to lay bare the processes by which the people we read about or watch or listen to become “themselves,” so that we can have what they have too—everyone gets a turn, in this strange collaboration between insatiability and fairness.

- Joshua Cohen

Nabokov in America

Excerpt from "Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lalita" by Robert Roper via

To be in America that summer was most excellent luck. The Nabokovs had been through the historical wringer; they were Zelig-like figures of 20th-century catastrophe, dispossessed of their native Russia by the Bolsheviks, hair’s-breadth escapees of the Nazis, “little” people with murderous evil breathing down their necks. Had they been in Russia, they might have been starving to death or dying of cholera during the Siege of Leningrad, the most calamitous siege in world history; had they remained in France, Véra Nabokov, who was Jewish, and her young son, Dmitri, would likely have been on their way to Drancy, the French internment camp that directly fed Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Sponsored fiction

Before novelist Haruki Murakami became an international literary giant, he was a brand writer for apparel company Onward Kashuyama. But he wasn’t just cranking out traditional ad copy—he was writing branded fiction.

Read on ..

The Joy of Throwing Out

What makes us writers is as much what we throw out as what we keep.

Lit News: "Golden Age" for Chinese internet literature

Over the past 10 years, Chinese Internet literature has grown. With ever more such novels adapted to film and television drama web-writers have finally reached their "golden age". Some even earn more than 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) annually.

What 50 years of writing taught Anne Roiphe

In today’s world where publishers are counting pennies and blockbustersonly pay for more blockbusters and young writers bang and bang on closed doorsI doubt that I would be published at all. And so I am thankful that I came of age when it was possible to write a book that some people liked, that was read a bit, even though the publisher never took me to the Four Seasons for lunch or flew me in a private plane to a distant resort.

Recommended reading: "Let us talk about genre"

 "Let us talk about genre": Neil  Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation

Ursula K. Le Guin on Amazon model of publishing

As a book dealer and publisher, Amazon wants no competitors, admits no responsibilities, and takes no risks.

Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing.  No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction.Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

 

Literary Truth

 Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.
--Elena Ferrante

Literature shows old problems of human beings: Horacio Castellanos Moya

When you read and you look along history, there are some features of human beings that have always been there. It’s like torture, violence, this passion for killing that now you see everywhere. Why did human beings become so fucking crazy? Of course you can give explanations about why there is killing in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Mexico. You can mention a lot of countries and say, “Why? Why this need to kill?” There is a pleasure [to killing] of course, otherwise you don’t do it. I think that literature, in a sense, shows these kinds of old problems of human beings in a very precise society. So I show these kinds of issues of violence, of paranoia, of torture, of trying to survive in the very precise society that was the Central American society of the 80's and 90's. 

Edurado Mendoza wins 2015 International Franz Kafka Prize

Edurado Mendoza wins 2015 International Franz Kafka Prize

Can Xue on Can Xue

China has more than a few Can Xue fans, but overall, Can Xue's era still hasn't arrived, because her works are too ahead of the curve, and don't conform to commonplace, habitual aesthetics. 

Nabokov's Lolita Now

New Republic has an interesting article on Nabokov's LOLITA

Lolita occupies a curious cultural space in all of this. On the one hand, the endless cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years (from Stanley Kubrick to Lana Del Rey) has turned Lolita into the archetype of the alluring child, the very definition of a “precociously seductive girl.” On the other, the novel itself constitutes a vicious satire of a culture that fetishizes young girls—a culture that openly celebrates, in songs like “When You Were Sweet Sixteen,” “Sixteen Candles,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen,” the exact instant that a girl crosses the threshold into legal fuckability—while simultaneously loathing pedophilia as an absolute moral evil on par with genocide. Crucial to Nabokov’s satire is the fact that Humbert gets precisely what he wants: Some of the most spine-tingling moments in Lolita come from the casual manner in which Humbert reminds us that he is sleeping with his step-daughter: 

Recommended reading: When the viewer vanishes/ Leena Krohn

It is my belief that we do not live in reality, but in meta-reality. The first virtual world, the simulated Pretend-land is inherent in us.

Arab Novel

"Novels have traditionally been related to something urban, to the city, or to the telling of a person’s individual story. This is new to Arab literature. That’s because the development of cities and an individual, modern style of life is new to the Arab world.

"What made “The Italian” special is that I have lived two transitions in my life [Ben Ali coming to power in 1987, and then the 2011 revolution.] So this book goes through two eras in Tunisia.

You can’t compare it to Russian or American literature, because the Arab novel is still something new that came with the modernization of Arab civilization. And it’s a civilization that’s becoming more open to universal and human values.

My novel shows the Arab community what led to the Arab Spring and the Tunisian revolution, what created this momentum that led to the boiling point that have birth to it, and to “The Italian” after. That was my goal as a Tunisian writer."

--Shukri Mabkhout, Arab Booker Prize winner

Jonathon Coe on Milan Kundera's current novel

"I can’t help feeling that if anything will undermine Kundera’s long-term reputation, it will not be any absence of “felt life” in his novels, or the fact that his art was developed in a political context that may one day (sooner than we think) be forgotten: it will be his overwhelming androcentrism. I avoid the word “misogyny” because I don’t think that he hates women, or is consistently hostile to them, but he does seem to see the world from an exclusively male viewpoint, and this does limit what might otherwise have been his limitless achievements as a novelist and essayist. Fortunately, The Festival of Insignificance is less disfigured by this tendency than almost anything else he has written; and so, although it may not be a substantial addition to his oeuvre, it might still be a good point of re-entry for those who have been turned off, in the past, by the problematic sexual politics which send ripples of disquiet through even his finest books."

---

Laszlo Krasznahoraki wins the 2015 Man Booker International Prize

Laszlo Krasznahorkai  is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful. The Melancholy of Resistance,Satantango and Seiobo There Below are magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. Krasznahorkai, who writes in Hungarian, has been superbly served by his translators, George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet.

Related: Laszlo Krasznahoraki interview 

Reading: A Brief History Of Seven Killings/ Marlon James

I  read about  the novel when the Rooster was going on. I’ve never read Marlon James before, but discussions on the book by Rooster’s judges and readers piqued my interest.

A Brief History Of seven Killings is literary fiction in the guise of a thriller without much of a plot and all of its characters busy doing something sinister, hideous and even ghastly. The setting is Jamaica mostly, but you get also a bit  of US as the  characters change their base.

The novel is full of violence, Jamaican style, from gangsters’ street -fighting to killing to rape to police atrocities.  The country is portrayed as one without even a semblance of law and order anywhere. There’s no sane person or voice anywhere in the novel. All you find is a morbid and dreary literary landscape.

Despite this, it is an interesting rather than harrowing read. One reason might be that the novel is driven by different voices – first person accounts of all of its characters, though the voices sound more or less alike and barely distinguishable.

The characters are an interesting mix:  gangster, drug lord, CIA man, diplomat, journalist, celebrity, call- girl, even someone who got killed.  As you get to read their account, Jamaica emerges with some of its angst, deprivation and nuance. And though it’s more filmy than literary,  I found it worth my time.

Recommended Reading: On Not Being Besozed

In truth, by 2015, we were already living the future and nothing was left. While democracy was enfeebled, corporations' power had exploded, with, on the one hand the collapse of belief in the idea of politics and, on the other, an idea of living so narrowly economic, and a technology capable of a brutality and terror no one then could imagine in that time before the Apple collars. A cult of advanced gadgetry obscured for almost all the losses of what was called privacy but was more precisely not just the possibility of freedom, but its necessity.

-from Richard Flanagan's paper at  2015 PEN World Voices Festival

Haruki Murakami on myths and his stories

“Myths are humans’ collective subconscious taking on a form. The stories I write represent my subconscious. But if I follow my own subconscious to the very bottom, it ends up overlapping with the collective subconscious. Myths and one’s own stories are not the same thing, but there are a lot of parts where the movements overlap.”

Why is Toni Morrison angry all the time?

 I'm angry all the time. Almost all the time, which is why I write books. That's where I control things, that's where I think freely about things, without regard to the fashion or whatever else is going on, or who's planning to kill whom and whether we should all have guns or nobody should have guns. All these things prey on you, and I got a little disturbed years ago with some business, political, cultural, I don't know what, but I was very depressed. It was awful, so right wing, the country. And I found myself not working, not writing, and my friend Peter Sellars [the opera director] calls me up usually every Christmas, and this time he called me and said, "Merry Christmas, how are you?" And I said, "I feel awful, I really can't write," and went on, complaining, and he started shouting, "No, no, no!" He said, "Toni, this is when artists go to work! Not when things are wonderful and calm. This is the time!" And I suddenly stopped whining, and I thought about writers in prison, in camps, in the gulag, a history of people who under the world's worst circumstances, write. This was about 20 years ago, but I now understand it better because it works for me. I can think through my novels, I can react, I can invent, I can create, I can be free. It's my space and I'm in control.

Translating Karl Ove Knausgaard..

I try to make the text flow the best I can, particularly where the sentences are long and involved. I want the feel of English but the intensity of Karl Ove, so I insist on the punctuation of the Norwegian. Too many semicolons and colons—which copy editors would instinctively feel need to be there—interrupt the flow and make the text feel too organized. I don’t like to stray too far from the Norwegian, but I want the English to feel natural, particularly the dialogues. Finding that line is what keeps translators awake at night. I’m not sure anyone can give you instructions about what to do. You develop with experience. According to the book you are translating.

         -- Don Bartlett

2014 Cervantes Prize for Juan Goytisolo

"But the true work of art is not in a hurry: it can slumber for decades, like La Regenta [the 19th-century masterpiece by Leopoldo Alas Clarín] or even forcenturies, like [16th-century novel] La lozana andaluza. The fact that I’m being praised by the literary establishment makes me question myself; being a persona non gratais comforting to me and my work.”

--from Juan Goytisolo's acceptance speech

1

Subject matter in Fiction

" I sometimes declare that the subject matter of my writing is what matters to me most. Is it surprising that what matters to me most today is little different from what mattered most fifty years ago? I have no time for those writers of fiction who find their subject matter in the news headlines; who turn the so-called issues of the day into fiction."
--Gerald Murnane

Salman Rushdie on Gunter Grass

"As he delightedly swung and twirled and dipped, I understood that this was who he was: the great dancer of German literature, dancing across history’s horrors toward literature’s beauty, surviving evil because of his personal grace, and his comedian’s sense of the ridiculous as well."

Understanding Novels....

Understanding novels requires wisdom, which it takes decades of living to acquire.

The Rooster Prize 2015 goes to Emily St. John Mandel

The Rooster Prize goes to Emily St. John Mandel


The Tournament of Books ended today. I'm a big fan of the Tournament and have been following it ever since I knew about it. I love to read the verdicts - with explanations to boot - by great judges, and the "match commentary" by its terrific commentators who are great literary tasters ( I'm already a Kevin fan and like John, Laura and Elliot as well). I also like to read the readers'comments.  It is the talk of the art, which you don't get to hear often in many places now.

But I must confess you one thing: I've not read a single title that featured in the tournament. I'm not really bothered about it. As I follow the judges, commentators and the great readers every day, I get an idea of what every book is about. And I decide which one to buy and read. Truth to tell, I'm a bit suspicious about the current American fiction. Often it reads more like synthetic than organic. What's the point of reading a novel if it can't offer a feeling of something real?

Some months ago, I had the experience of reading the last year's Rooster-winning novel (you know it). Though well-mapped, it read so artificial, absurd and cinematic. Is it literature?

So, am I going to read Station Eleven? Hell, no.  Post-apocalyptic novels don't work for me.

I would rather buy and read A Brief history of Seven killings by Marlon James.

Tom McCarthy on Hergé’s Tintin books

I’ve probably learnt more from them about narrative technique (doubling, splitting, leading false trails etc.) than from any other writer. He was a genius: There’s an incredibly sophisticated set of concerns and subtexts being played out in those books: family secrets passing down generations, anxieties about inheritance and illegitimacy, musings on counterfeit and inauthenticity (be it in the field of currency or blood or art), on technology and politics – the whole 20th century is there. And – best of all – a seven-year-old can read them with as much passion as a 45-year-old.

I want my sentence to be for me...

I want my sentence to be for me, mine, and not simply a sentence responding to the comment of another. 

Being a Writer of Proper literature

“Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don’t even want to run, but, once running, can’t help but not want to lose. There’s lots of anxiety about your position in that race. Hence my decision to forget the race and simply write, regardless. Even regardless of whether or not I’m published and have readers – that the desire to write (not to out-write others) is all that matters, to keep integrity, to enjoy it.”
--Samantha Harvey

Writing is about.....

Writing is about taking risks, about being in uncertain territory and I still am there.

Running Projects for Eight/Nine novels at the same time

"At any one point I have running projects for eight or nine novels I want to write, and I keep notes on them for many, many years. In that sense the subject matter, the intricate quotes, my ideas that I keep writing all the time, the seriousness of my projects defends me from the vanities of fame and success."

Fantasy Tropes in Serious Literature!

"... it feels like I've stepped into a larger, ongoing debate about the role of fantasy tropes in what you might call "serious literature."  It reminds me to some extent of what was happening with sci-fi a couple decades ago. Since then, sci-fi has come much more into the mainstream and no one thinks twice about dystopian settings. But I can sense a frustration among certain writers who feel they haven't been allowed to use fantastical elements like dragons and things, and that there's a community of writers and readers out there who feel marginalized."
--Kazuo Ishiguro 

Recommended Reading: After Amy Tan: An Asian American Literature Roundtable

After Amy Tan: An Asian American Literature Roundtable

Norman Manea on his first English-translated book, "Captives"

It’s probably a very big mistake. Well, maybe not a mistake, but a risk. I was very hesitant to republish it. I’ve had this connection to New Directions for more than twenty years, and they wanted to publish the book, but I said, “It’s not for America. It’s an obscure book, a complicated book, a coded book".

Elena Ferrante's idea of a book minus the author in person

" Once I knew that the completed book would make its journey without being accompanied by my physical person, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, definite individual that is me would ever appear beside the volume—as if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it illuminated for me an aspect of writing that was obvious, but which I had never thought of. I felt as though I had released the words from myself."

via

Zadie Smith's "non-memory"

"I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened—and I like it that way. I feel when I am very old and my brain “goes” it won’t feel so very different from the life I live now, in this miasma of non-memory, which, though it infuriates my nearest and dearest, must suit me somehow, as I can’t seem, even by acts of will, to change it."

Ha Il-ji Quote

"As you age, it is not easy to keep your senses in tune with the times. Readers don’t want to read old-fashioned, fogeyish stories.”

Jonathan Franzen on Jennifer Weiner

 "She is asking for a respect that not just male reviewers, but female reviewers, don’t think her work merits. To me it seems she’s freeloading on the legitimate problem of gender bias in the canon, and over the years in the major review organs, to promote herself, basically.  And that seems like a dubious project that is ideally suited to social media, where you don’t actually have to argue, you just tweet. Where is her long essay about this, where she really makes a case? She has no case. So she tweets."

Salman Rushdie after Midnight's Children

 "Mr. Rushdie’s works after Midnight’s Children lack literary merit."
--Bhalchandra Nemade, Jnanpith award-winning Marathi writer

Kolkata Book Fair, 2015

Milan Mela where Kolkata Book Fair is now held these days, is about two hours' drive from where I live, and this is the major reason why I've stopped visiting the fair now. But I went to the fair this year. But it was more business than as a book lover. Gangchil, an independent publisher with some repute, was bringing out a book - a memoir - by one of my relatives, and I was somehow involved with the project by way of editing it, writing its blurb, and even choosing its title. Adhir Biswas, the publisher, who I've known since long, generously approved all I did. He launched the book in the book fair, and naturally invited me to visit his stall.

The book is called Jhineda, Shyambazar ebong Chhappanna Bachhar / Chhaya De.

I spent about an hour in Gangchil, browsing myriad titles Adhir had published over the years. Though a fiction-writer himself, he publishes mainly non-fiction, even by new, unknown authors. I was mortified to hear from him that Bengali fiction doesn't sell at all. Interestingly, however, he has published four volumes of short stories, novels, essays by Subimal Misra, the cult writer of Bengali literature. Does he sell? Yes, Adhir said, we have had even second editions of some of these volumes.

While browsing, I came across a hefty little mag called Bagher Bachcha which devotes all of its pages on Subimal Misra: an excellent compilation of Misra's own work, interviews, reviews, essays by writers, academicians and intellectuals - among them V. Ramaswamy(Misra's English translator) and Janam Mukherjee, the historian, with whom I've discussed Misra on many occasions.

Sadly, there's a page in the mag where there's a hand-written message from Subimal Misra : I'm physically unwell. It's not possible for me to write anything new.

Reading: A Science Fiction Novel

I thought I would just read the book and not write about it. It's science fiction or at least that was my impression when I started reading it. Rarely I read science fiction. Blame my attitude, I have a habit of frowning on any writing that is not realistic. Cormac McCarthy once said in an interview that anything that does not deal realistically with life or death of human beings is not real writing. More or less, I've got the same view as far as literature is concerned.

But the book was compelling. A mesmerizing writing style and a wonderful display of imagination. It was about some nerds, all employees of a shady corporation, in a planet far far away from our earth - devoting their talent and energy to build a human habitation designed - of course for profit - exclusively for those who have been tired of the world which is now the festering scumhole.

A fresh idea. And there is a vivid portrait of the planet's contours, its climate, and its somewhat strange inhabitants.

The protagonist is a pastor who is apparently brought in to infuse the new habitation with religion (Christianity, of course). Truth to tell, being anti-religion, I didn't initially like the pastor much, but he's an honest, serious guy and has intense feel for the planet's little guys.

But half the narrative is that of our familiar earth where the pastor's wife lives a precarious life, going through violence, lawlessness and a lot of natural calamities. This comes in the form of e-mails written by her. Very realistic, though grim.

The pastor, at one point, gets tired of this new place, and gets crazy to return to the world, to unite with his wife.

What's the point of the book? Could not crack. May be one should not look for any message out of such books.

I didn't like the end of the book, but I must say I enjoyed the book.

The Book: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.

Toying with Ideas

“You just try to water these things like plants and see which one gets the most light and flourishes.”

Ashok Srinivasan wins the Hindu prize 2014 for "Book of Common Signs"

It is true that I began writing at the age of 14 or so; and I am now 72. It is not that I deliberately courted obscurity; it is perhaps the result of a combination of shyness and inhibition and the fact that I am very, very slow, as a writer. Some of my stories have been published and are in the public domain; they have appeared in magazines, annuals and anthologies in India, England and Australia.

Mark Z. Danielewski on Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon does have a great ear. You can feel symphonic passages; whether or not you’ve managed to grasp an understanding of the section, you sense a resolution or a pointed lack of resolution. He’s a very sophisticated musical writer.

Jerusalem Prize for Ismail Kadare

"Kadare is an ironic storyteller who brilliantly writes about the implicit and indirect. He writes about collective guilt. Although his writing and characters are mostly local, the meaning and importance are undoubtedly universal.”

Recommended reading: A conversation about Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth

A Conversation About Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth

Rodrigo Rey Rosa on Roberto Bolano

I’ve read a number of Bolaño’s books, but not all of them (I’m a very slow reader). I think that in his final books, and especially in 2666, Bolaño achieved something that very few writers manage: a style that permitted him to address any theme, something like a machine for converting any sort of information or perception into a literary experience.
--Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Reading: In the Light of What We Know/ Zia Haider Rahman

Sometimes I read  two books simultaneously, switching from one book to the other for a change when the book I'm reading begins to tire me. It was on one such occasion I got hold of a third book: In the Light of What We Know.

When I was casually glancing at the first chapter, I got simply hooked. I continued reading and forgot about the books that I was reading. Then I read on and on. It's an immersive reading experience. I could separate myself from the book only when I was done with it.

For me, the draw of the book was not so much the storyline as the telling of the story. Each chapter starts with two or more epigraphs, and you see Jafar, the protagonist, or the writer, his friend, telling the story from his perspective. First person account, no chronology, there is often a drift into another time another place, and you have lot of real, serious stuff to read and consider.

It's a grand and compelling narrative. Too many settings, too many events. Things happen - in a phantasmagorical way - in London, Dacca, Islamabad, Kabul and elsewhere. And you find Jafar everywhere in the thick of events, not just as an observer, but as kind of an activist. For one whose journey began inconspicuously from an obscure village in Sylhet in Bangladesh, and who raised himself up in a hard way, these were just too much. Despite his talent, intellect and wisdom, Jafar's story is a sad one, but thought-provoking and deeply haunting.

 Zia has a free-wheeling style, and it looks like he does not care about the way he gets across what he wants to say. And he dwells on umpteen things starting from mathematics to international politics to banking to literature to philosophy. What versatility! Zia knows how to incorporate non-literary stuff in a literary novel.

I believe Zia has exhausted himself writing this novel. Will he be able to write a second novel, I  wonder.

Michel Houellebecq Quote

Part of my work is to talk about what everyone is talking about, objectively. I belong to my own time.

2015 is the Year of Literature in Russia

The decreeing of 2015 as "The year of Literature" in Russia looks a bit weird. I don't know if Vladimir Putin has any hidden agenda behind it(Is Mr Putin a literature lover, by the way?), but I welcome it considering that literature has already taken a backseat and very few people talk literature these days, and even those who talk it like to sub-categorize it under Entertainment.

I wonder if Mikhail Shiskin is going to participate in any of those "interesting, large-scale" events that will be held across Russia round the year.

When Amazon or Goodreads send you to books....

When Amazon or Goodreads send you to books that you might like because clever algorithms have crunched data and made matches, we should be reeling in horror, because this can only drive us into silos of one, underground caverns populated by everything made in our own respective images. There can be no conversation across buried walls.
--Zia Haider Rahman in an interview

Making a Few Faded Words Visible Again: Patrick Modiano

Unfortunately I do not think that the remembrance of things past can be done any longer with Marcel Proust's power and candidness. The society he was describing was still stable, a 19th century society. Proust's memory causes the past to reappear in all its detail, like a tableau vivant. Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.
Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.

---From Patrick Modiano's Nobel Lecture

Reading: The Narrow Road to the Deep North/ Richard Flanagan

It's a bit tricky to categorise The Narrow Road to the Deep North. You'll tend to call it a historical fiction based on its WW11 setting and characters, but it's actually first-rate literary fiction, though at some points it reads like a non-fiction novel.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is about the horror and survival of seven-hundred POWs trapped in Siam(now Thailand) working for Burma Death Railway during WW 11. As expected you read about lots of atrocities perpetrated on the  prisoners by the Japanese Army. There is Colonel Kota who has special affinity for enemy necks and does not only gloat over beheading the enemies, he also teaches this skill with live demonstrations. There is again Major Nakamura who, doped with "shabu", would do anything however brutal for the sake of the Emperor and  has no remorse for dragging the sick and emaciated of the prisoners for the hard manual work for the railway, and thrashing and killing them on the slightest pretext.

The prisoners have a hell of a time with their back-breaking labour, little inadequate food, lack of hygiene and sanitation in their barracks, and many of them being attacked with deadly diseases like cholera, malaria, beriberi and so on. Still amid them you see interesting characters like Darky Gardiner the ever-helpful sergeant, Rabit Hendricks the artist, and Jimmy Bigelow who plays bugle. But most interesting of them is Major Dorrigo Evans, a doctor by training, who has been in charge of the unit and has a genuine feel for his soldiers and rushes to protect them in whatever ways, an altruist character, and always takes the heat from the Japanese.

It's a poignant narrative, but I liked the novel for a separate reason: for its wave of humanity that flows through its pages. None of the characters are depicted in black and white. Flanagan adds the gray shade to all of his characters to do them justice and feel them like human.

Oddly, however, the novelist  follows his characters - Colonel Kota included - till their death.  It feels kind of superfluous and would be better left to readers' imagination. This is where the novel reads like a non-fiction.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel. Richard Flanagan is a real writer.

I strongly recommend it.