Kolkata Book Fair ( Jan 27 to Feb 9 )

Kolkata Book Fair, Asia's largest book fair, and the most attended book fair in the world - about 2 million visitors- has shifted its venue to Milan Mela ground this year. The venue - way too distant from the centre of the city - is conspicuous by its lack of structure. It does not have any transformer for proper arrangements of elctricity or any water supply system, let alone any adequate fire-fighting measures.

I've been so put off by the venue and its lack of structure that I've decided not to visit it this year. Oh, I remember I didn't visit last year's book fair even. Actually, I have never been a book fair regular.

But I've some happy memories when the book fair was held in ever-green Maidan. One of my favourite haunts was the Bangladesh section of the fair. I visited the Bangladesh Publishers' stalls with sharp eye on new titles by authors across the border. On one occasion, I remember I bought complete works of Syed Waliullah. On another occasion, I was frantically looking for a new title by Hasan Azizul Huq, but most stalls were selling crappy bestsellers by Bangladeshi authors. At long last I got the book in a small stall.

Yet another lingering memory is that of Subimal Misra, the anti-establshment fictioneer, selling his books under a big and colourful umbrella with placrds requesting audiences to read anti-establishment writers and writing.

Last time I visted the book fair at Maidan, I bought a translated copy of Don Quixote, and a novel by Henry James. But both were awful, the first one for bad rendering, and I never got around to reading those two books.

New Yorker's homage to John Updike

He was American literature’s great noticer, and his work was always a reminder of the texture, the detail of life: of flesh, of the drape of clothes, of a way of speaking, a quality of light. Two works, neglected by the obituarists, stay in my mind: a lovely essay on the experiences of being barefoot on Martha’s Vineyard, and the utterly persuasive Africa of his novel “The Coup.” He helped us see. I regard him as a master, appreciative in ways that enlarged his vision and made his writing sing.
Paul Theroux

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10 forbidden classics

Just in time for Valentine's Day, HarperPerennial is releasing new editions of ten “erotic tales” under the flag Forbidden Classics. Have you read any of these titles?

1.Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleaure by John Cleland

2.Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue by D.A.F. Marquis de Sade

3.Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Maso

4.The Way of a Man with a Maid by Anonymous

5.The Autobiography of a Flea by Stanislas de Rhod

6.Sadopaideia by Anonymous

7.The Pearl: Two Erotic Tales by Anonymous

8.My Secret Life by Walte

9.Venus in India by Charles Deverea

10.Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan, translated by Lowell Bair

Short short-story

Lying down beside his 14-year old son, he dreamt he was being greeted, amid a houseful of curious men, women and children, by a young, nattily dressed lady, her face encased by shampooed wavy hair, with a twinkle in her eye.

Title: DREAM
Word count:40

What do you think of it?

Future of novels and novelists

Just read this Time article. It makes some cool observations, with which I agree in full. But it leaves me wondering how the future novelists will have any income from their books.

Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

Hasan Azizul Huq's debut novel review

Aagunpakhi invokes Partition trauma and memories 

 So I bought and read Aagunpakhi at last. It has been exactly three days since I finished it. I’m still under its spell, though in a much diminished form at this moment. It’s a great Bengali novel written by arguably the best living short-story writer of Bangladesh, Hasan Azizul Huq. 

 Aagunpakhi is about a woman’s lone struggle and determination to stick to her homeland in the wake of Indo-Pakistan partition even when other members of her family, her husband included, left for Pakistan for security and new home. She never could bring herself to believe that she was no more wanted in the land where she was born, raised up, married, gave birth to her sons and daughters and lived through her childhood, youth, prosperity of her groom, famine, world warII and Hindu-Muslim riots upto the partition of the big land that was India. Her poignant  query as to why this land - moral wasteland actually - was no longer hers simply because of her being a Muslim dumbed and overwhelmed me as a reader. I could not check back my tears at her predicament. 

 But while reading the novel, I was wondering – I like to deconstruct novels, especially the debut ones - why Hasan was writing about the partition after such a long time. Partition, as a theme, is no doubt a bit stale these days. The last chapter provided the clue to my question, and the protagonist suddenly seemed familiar to me. As a Hasan aficionado, I have been tracking him since I loved to admire his work. 

Hasan was born and raised in a Burdwan village in West Bengal. After his school, he went on to East Pakistan to live with his elder sister and her husband. I noticed such a character in this novel. I presume Hasan draws heavily - as any real writer should and does – from his childhood experience to write this novel. And the protagonist is actually his mother. Hasan gives an intimate portrait of this lady – simple, naïve, humanitarian - against a Bengal countryside complete with social and demographic details in his original, realistic and pared-down prose. Her transformation in the end to a rebel of sort, though a bit abrupt, touches our chords.

 P.S. Some translator should step in immediately to grab this novel for translation.

Farewell to John Updike

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

Is Yu Hua a real writer?

Just finished Pankaj Mishra's The Bonfire of China's Vanities in the NewYork Times Magazine. A long sprawling piece, but readable, though you sometimes lose thread of the article. So, is Yu Hua, the writer of the largest-selling novel Brothers (due to be published in English soon)in China, a real writer? I've my doubts.

100 novels everyone should read

Of course, UK-centric. And far from being comprehensive. But most are real writing by real writers. I've read about 50 novels out of this list. But I miss some:
God of Small things by Arundhati Roy, and A fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry immediately come to mind. I'm glad Boris Pasternak's Dr.Zivago is there.

Guardian 1000 Novels To Read Before You Die Meme

Of course, it's a very long list. Anyway, have a look.

Jaipur Literature Festival(21st to 25th January 2009)

Jaipur is a long way from where I live, and I'm no fan of such literary festivals. Honestly, I'm pissed off by William Dalrymple (Is he a real writer?) and his ilk. As I understand, it's a no-holds-barred jamboree with plenty of music, dance, dinner, drinks, you name anything, with a few literature-related events sloted in between. A perfect melting pot for our fake and fashionable writers!

In the list you find names like Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Vikas Swarup, even Chetan Bhagat. Do you miss any real writer? Yes, Arundhati Roy being one of them. The list gives you an idea of what bullshit they are going to talk about or discuss in the name of literature and in what fashion.

Who's sponsoring this extravaganza in this time of global economic meltdown?

But the festival finds favour with India's English media.

Lit News: The novel that landed its writer in a jail

Harry Nicolaides, an Australian writer, was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting Thailand's royal family in his novel, a rare conviction of a foreigner amid a crackdown on people and Web sites deemed critical of the monarchy

Mr. Nicolaides, a 41-year-old from Melbourne, was charged with insulting Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the crown prince in his 2005 book “Verisimilitude,” a piece of fiction that only sold seven copies.

Tejpal's second novel launch

Tarun J. Tejpal comes up with his second novel called The Story of My Assassins (HarperCollins). His first novel The Alchemy of Desire, published three years ago, also by the same publisher, was a big success, and sold more than 3 lakh copies woldwide so far. He is perhaps the most widely read modern Indian writer in English.

Tejpal is primarily a journalist and edits the famous weekly newsmagazine Tehelka. But he has a literary side, and though he devotes "almost 99 per cent" of his time to running Tehelka weekly, he managed to "put together this 500- page novel about the real India, real people and its million turmoils, by shutting his mind out in the few minutes he managed to steal from his hectic schedule."

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Current climate for new writers

Q:What do you make of the current climate for new writers?

A:I do not envy them. It's a hostile environment. The old way of just writing a book, signing an agent, finding a publisher to nurture you is long, long gone. But also, how exciting to be working right now, when things are changing. You have to be fluid and quick on your feet and inventive, but that stuff is all fun.

Jessa Crispin, hugely experienced and savvy blogger of Bookslut, is interviewed here.

An exiled writer's last hopes

Taslima Nasreen on Bangladesh's new government

I am pinning my last hopes of a secular government on the Awami League. Will it act like the forces that banned my Amar Meyebela (My Childhood) and prevented me from returning home to meet my ailing mother and father? Will it all change? Will they allow me to return home? I doubt that.

Full article here..

Tao Lin: a real writer?

I've been reading Tao Lin for quite a while: his stories, his blog, poems, just anything by him that comes my way. Not that I like his writing. In fact, I doubt he's a real writer. But it's fun to watch out on all of his activities. May be he's a genius.

The name of his first novel was Eeeee Eee Eeee. I don't know how he got it published. He sells his own manuscripts, doodles, page proofs, notebooks—on eBay, and last summer he generated international attention by selling, six “shares” of an unfinished novel for $2,000 each. He recently launched a tiny press that publishes, among other things, Gmail chats. He is very good at gimmickry.

Tao Lin has some fans, Jessa Crispin, the well-known book blogger, being the most illustrious among them.

Read Tao Lin, Lit Boy.

Six owls and a writing geek

Has an owl, or a bunch of owls, anything to do with a writing geek?

The thing is, they have recently landed my neighbourhood - a cluster of apartment buildings, without any trees or greenery in it. They're now staying in here, silent all day, but as the dark falls, they start hooting, and contnue it all through the night until the daybreak.

A few days ago, when I was leaving for my clinic in the evening, I saw some boys chasing a timid-looking ugly creature through entrance of my apartment. I didn't know it was an owl. It was cowering in a dark corner, and looked heplessly around as if it did not know how to fly. But it flied at last and sat itself on a cornice of our adjacent apartment building. It began to hoot soon after.

Its shrill voice is really disturbing particularly at bedime. Its hoot keeps piercing your eardrum on and on, and you hear it when you go to sleep, during your sleep, and even after sleep if it's not yet daybreak. Oh, what a nuisance! You can compare it only with a fake writer's work which you some times have to read in absence of a book by a real writer.

Then one of the owls died, probably from elctrocution from a near-by transformer. A crowd gathered around its body in front of my apartment building. There I heard some wag tell that as many as six owls were visiting the neighbourhood at the moment, and they were parched at different positions waiting to hoot as the night sets in.

The hooting however continued as ever, and there was no respite from it. My wife, a bit insomniac by disposition, cursed them regularly, but suggested at the same time that the people here contact the forest department so that these creatures could go back to where they belonged.

Another owl died yesterday.

My driver said that yet another owl had died one day back. So, with this death, only three owls remain.

Last night I heard the hoot, but it was a bit subdued as if someone was mourning. May be two owls - one male, another female - were hooting together so long, and one of them had died yesterday.

It seems like we would get rid of the owls soon(they are anyway doomed to die in this urban no-tree environs), but what bugs me is why and how they made their way down here.

Why you should listen to fiction writers

"However, writers such as Grossman in Israel or Arundhati Roy in India, who live amid some of the world's bloodiest conflicts, choose not to be somewhere else when triggers are being cocked and pulled. Their views demand respectful attention even when they provoke sharp disagreement. For they have consistently witnessed, and often spoken out, at considerable personal risk, against the ominous transformations within their countries: the emergence of powerful revanchist movements (Hindu nationalism, settler Zionism) the suppression of religious minorities and occupied territories with brute force (Gujarat, Kashmir, West Bank and Gaza); the diffusion of a shrill media culture on the American model, a contagion of ignorant TV anchors and "experts" who together with a reactionary political elite manufacture a consensus about how to deal with internal and external enemies (usually, with force and then much more force)."

Guess who's writing it? Pankaj Mishra, the brilliant literary critic and essayist, who's now writing, alas, for the international media only. Where does he live now?

Full article here.

A writer as 'thinking men's sex symbol"!

News: Indian origin author Jhumpa Lahiri, with her "hypnotic eyes", has been named among the top 10 "sex symobls of the thinking man" for 2008, which put Serbian tennis player Ana Ivanovic in the number one slot.

Now, do such news bothers you? I know the media today thrives on such news - and some people think our world now needs this kind of news. But I wonder where it would all end up.

Bangladeshi writer Taslima gets a home in Paris

"I am a wanderer in search of a nest in this vast world. I am a helpless woman, who, for over a decade now, is in search of a home of her own, in a city where she wants to live. I am Taslima Nasreen of Mymensingh, Bangladesh."
How sad, though reasuring, that Taslima gets a home - a rent-free apartment - at last, in Paris - far, far away from Dacca or Kolkata where she mentally belongs!