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.”

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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.
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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.