Gliterature!

The Lit zone is the new hot spot. If earlier it was Rohit Bal taking his shirt that caught your pg 3 eye, now it'll be William Dalrymple like a big dervish(thankfully with his kurta on)doing the trick. There's a new influx of babalogs and Beautiful People in the earlier boring world of book events. The truth is: even the writers look smarter and prettier these days. With a dash of Brechtian 'temporary suspension of disbelief', you could be at a Taj hotel attending not the lunch of the winter collection of Tarun Tihalini but at the lunch of Rana Dasgupta's new novel.

Of course, it's from a story of an Indian daily's culture page, done by a literary savvy scribe. Take note of the tone of the writer. He seems to take great delight in reporting Dalrymple's trick, new influx of 'babalogs and Beautiful People'(who never read literature) in the book events, and glamorous book lunches.

Alas, this sums up the literary scenario in India and elsewhere, courtesy the new culture that free market economy has fostered. Literature is now touted as gliterature. Would you laugh or worry?

Death of the sentence!

A kind of death of the sentence by collective neglect. Kloske is right that the incessant dribble of mini-messaging has made most people’s daily use of written language brutally factual in character, more private ad copy than prose.

Jaipur Lit Festival & William Dalrymple

The article is more than a fortnight old, but since the Jaipur Lit Festival is still on, it's not stale yet, featuring as it does William Dalrymple, "the pompous literary arbiter of literary merit in India", who calls the shot as its director.

It is not for nothing that over the recent past, Dalrymple has been in conversation with authors as diverse as Tishani Doshi (though a romance linking Wales and Gujarat is perhaps a fit setting for him) and Sonia Faleiro (what could Dalrymple have to contribute to the Bar Girls of Bombay?; on the evidence of the evening, not much). Symbols matter, and if Dalrymple appears central to our literary culture, it says something far more damaging about us than about him.

Literary Festival or Fashion Week?

Some literary festivals have become the Bombay Times party of the book world. Not surprising, considering that some writers now get more advances than models. With money and fame both at their feet, the literati is no different from the glitterati. This is why even those whose bedtime reading is their credit card statement will elbow their way to the DPC Jaipur Literary Festival opening this Friday. It has evolved into a new genre of Fashion Week. Everyone is turned out in intellectual chic, or the bohemian Dalrumpled look.

From Jaipur to Kolkata, this is the season of literary festivals all across India. I know no one better to give a low-down on them than Bachi Karkaria, that fabulous columnist, with her cutting wit and humour.

Roberto Bolano on literature and exile

"Literature and exile, I think, are two sides of the same coin, our fate placed in the hands of chance. "I don't have to leave my house to see the world," says the Tao Te Ching, yet even when one doesn't leave one's house, exile and banishment make their presence felt from the start. Kafka's oeuvre, the most illuminating and terrible (and also the humblest) of the twentieth century, proves this exhaustively."

Shalom Auslander on publishing

It’s terrible what’s happened to publishing lately; there’s hardly any time to read at all.

Oh, the Joy of reading Haruki Murakami!

I've begun the new year with Haruki Murakami, and want to read his works exclusively this year. For a while now, Murakami has captured my attention and interest. Last year, it was Roberto Bolano who piqued me this way.

The Murakami book that I just finished was After the Quake, a collection of six short stories. I read one story a day, and though I was tempted to begin the next one, I decidedly held back. Each story had its resonance, and I needed to live it in full. For three stories, I jotted down my impressions there and then.

Thailand: A wonderful story about man-woman relationship in today's hectic world. The metaphor of polar bears is just as apt and brilliant.

All God's Children Can Dance: It's about a young man who seeks his biological father in vain. Offers great insights into religion (Christianity) and sexuality.

Super-Frog Saves Tokyo: An amazing story of Katagiri, an average Japanese ("All I do is eat, sleep and shit"), who fought his battle - not in real terms though - to save his beloved city from an earthquake.

A Quest for the soul of wit and honesty

Yet writing, that noblest of tasks, painful and frustrating at times, easy-flowing at others, a never-ending quest for the soul of wit and honesty, wherein one aspires only to say what it is one has to say, and to get it right—that is my true joy, and the only act which gives me any sense of peace in this bumpy journey we call existence.

Helon Habila interview

"People should not compare ours with the generation of Chinua Achebe. Our content is not the same. It is not this generation that will judge us. This generation judges the books written 50 years ago. Likewise we shall be judged by the next generation maybe in another 50 years."

New Year Resolution

The best resolution to make this New Year's Day might be to open your eyes to everything around you—while also recalling that most of our lofty resolutions will ultimately come to naught.


Pico Iyer reviews Arto Possillina's famous novel "The year of the Hare". But it's more than a review article. Iyer gives a rare and wonderful insight into living the other way. Which is consistent with the theme of the novel.

Khushwant Singh's current take on Salman Rushdie

There is more to Rushdie than his fertile imagination and powerful pen. Besides his brain, he has other parts of his body well-endowed. How else can one explain that this beady-eyed, bearded man in his middle age had a succession of wives and mistresses to warm his bed? That is yet another reason why I envy and admire him.

Source: Khushwant Singh's column "With malice towards one and all" published in the Hindustan Times dated Dec 26, 2010.

Literary greatness= a game of hype?

EILEEN BATTERSBY has an interesting article in The Irish Times

HYPE HAS a great deal to answer for. It embellishes, it manipulates, most of all, it distorts. Hype creates a subplot; it elevates a sideshow to a main event. If Jonathan Franzen had not taken nine years to write Freedom, it would most likely have been received as the novel it actually is – a sloppy, overwritten, mildly amusing extended sitcom that is being inaccurately, even grotesquely, hailed as a masterpie

" I have unbounded admiration for her."

KHUSWANT SINGH on ARUNDHATI ROY

I do not know Arundhati Roy well as I have met her briefly a couple of times. But I have unbounded admiration for her. She is good-looking, animated, unconventional, a gifted writer, gutsy and a champion of lost causes. I am by no means her only admirer; she has millions of them in India and abroad. I am not wrong in believing that she is the best known Indian woman in western democratic nations and regarded as the leading voice of dissent in democratic india.. To penalise her will further enhance her reputation abroad and bring India a bad name.

Source: Khuswant Singh's column "With malice towards one and all" in the Hindustan Times dated Dec 19, 2010.

Liu Xiaobo's collection of poems in English

Literary news: Graywolf Press of Minneapolis will be publishing the first collection of poems in English by Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident poet and literary critic who is the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Lecture

"Without fictions we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion. Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world. Whether they want it or not, know it or not, when they invent stories the writers of tales propagate dissatisfaction, demonstrating that the world is badly made and the life of fantasy richer than the life of our daily routine. This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.
"

Gao Xingjian interview

"Literature can neither change nor save the world. A work of literature is nothing more than the voice of the writer as an individual, and it is an illusion for any writer to think he or she can change the world. During the 20th century, literature became too intimately involved with politics. In China, literature became a screw that turned the machinery of proletariat dictatorship, and writers became public relations personnel of the Communist Party. But literature is--and should be--about exploring the complexities of human nature and seeking the truth. Literature must remain independent.
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Mohsin Hamid’s talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist

"As a novelist, I think of both my books as ‘buildings of the mind’. It is not my job to design a journey that has set junctions. The reader should be able to go wherever they want; whenever they want within the premise I have created. I like that fluidity."

Khushwant Singh interview

In the Outlook magazine, Sheela Reddy has an interesting interview with Khushwant Singh, India's dirty old man.

“I’ve no idea how many of them will be read after I’m gone. I’ve done serious books like history and translations from the scriptures, translations from Urdu poetry and short stories from other languages. But what will last, I’ve no idea. As Hillaire Belloc said: “I hope when I’m dead it will be said/ his sins were scarlet/ but his books were read.

Hans Keilson is 101

"My work is being rediscovered. What is odd is that I am still alive while that's happening."

Mario Vargas Llosa: my reading experience

Every year the Nobel Prize spurs me on to read (or reread) one or two imporatant works of the new Nobel Laureate. I’ve never read MarioVergas Llosa before, andI thought it was time to catch up on his novels.

The first novel I picked up - not by anybody’s recommendation, but from its unique title – was The Feast of the Goat . A 475-page,almost daunting tome.

But what an easy read! Meticulously researched, well-crafted. Spiced with lots of sex. Racy style. It’s about Rafel Trujillo, the despot of the Dominician Republic, and centres around his ssassination. It’s also about Urania Cabral, who was violated by Trujillo when she was just sixteen year old.

Mario Vargas Llosa depicts Trujillo as a man with rarified intelligence and refined tastes, even with a penchant for Pablo Neruda poems. Not very convincing for a paranoid who kills his enemies, real and perceived,at the drop pf a hat.

Half way through the novel, I found my interest flagging, but I was curious about the depiction of the ultimate scene where the debauchee would violate Urania, who was sent as a gift by her father, an onetime trusted aide of Trujillo, to win back his chief’s favour. The scene had one obvious thing missing. Urania’s mother was Trujillo’s most favourite woman, and he often boasted to his close aides that hers was the best cunt he ever enjoyed. But on this occasion, Trujillo never for a moment thinks of Urania as daughter of somone who aroused him in a big way and feels any exra excitement . Was Trujillo devoid of memory? Of course, these things matter little in the blockbuster plot of the novel. Then when he fails to have sex due to his prostate problem, the way he breakes her “cherry” – with a nail of his finger – is hugely repugnant.

Where is literature in all of these ghastly details? I don’t find any thing of value, or edifying in this kind of cartography.