Andrea Hirata's story of literary stardom

“It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer"

Nadeem Aslam interview

"People always say to me that my books are very melancholy, very sad, even bleak. I am aware that I work in the tragic mode. Plenty of people don’t. They write comic novels. I am not one of them. I like to put people under pressure within a certain set of circumstances and see how that reveals their true character.

There are some writers who want to leave politics out of their novels. I don’t. Any number of writers: Dostoevsky, Orwell, Milosz, Tolstoy, Gordimer, Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul; any number of them have made use of politics in their books. Political horror is at the center of the New Testament, isn’t it? What is the story of the death of Christ if looked at through secular eyes, if not about the corruption and compromises within the political system? Cynthia Ozick reviewed J.M. Coetzee’s Life and times of Michael K in the New York Times when it was published, and in the first sentence she states that “the literature of conscience is about the bewilderment of the naïve.” The people we consider mentally defective, the children, the powerless, the people who actually ask the question: why? Why is the world this way? I think at the deepest level, that is what I am trying to do, to ask the question why."
via Guernica

Andrey Kurkov interview

“I have been watching Ukrainian politics for years and years and I analyse it like a chess player, trying to see who is going to do what.”

Happy hundredth birthday to Boris Pahor

Reading: Maidenhair/ Mikhail Shishkin

What is maidenhair? 

On page 452 of the 506-page eponymous novel, you get its first mention. "We roamed among the ruins, and she broke a fernlike twig:What's this? Maidenhair." But you get a clearer picture on page 500: "For us, this is a house plant; otherwise it wouldn't survive, without human warmth, but here it's a weed. So, you see, this is in dead language, signifying something alive: Adiantum capillus veneries,Venus hair, Genus Adiantum. Maidenhair. God of life."

I mention this because this is the key to understanding the novel. Of course, it's a difficult novel - for me at least - and I found it hard to grasp and appreciate.

I got to reading the novel with enthusiasm as ever. The interpreter who was interviewing hordes of hapless Russian asylum-seekers to locate the genuine among them seemed to be the protagonist of the novel. His accounts and insights about varied people and their awful conditions were quite fascinating. Then the 'soliloqui' began, and I was lost. Parts of it being inaccessible to me. I could not figure out where the novel was heading..

Then you get access to a singer's diary as if for a distraction. This portion is a light read: the artist's days of struggle, her love, her stardom, her beyond-glory days. You enjoy reading them up to a point, then it begins to suck. I had problem linking it with the interpreter's narrative.

A bit disappointed, I kept the novel aside for a couple of weeks, then, on a rainy evening when I stayed at home, I took it up again. Read it all through in one sitting. Loved the last pages of the book - even the soliloqui incorporated in this part.

So what's Maidenhair about? It is about civilization, history, religion, philosophy, art, music, war, brutality, depravity, dehumanization, but it's first and foremost about human conditions in different times and spaces down the ages.

It's a modern classic.

I recommend it - for the right reader, that is.

World literature today

"Today’s World Lit is more like a Davos summit where experts, national delegates, and celebrities discuss, calmly and collegially, between sips of bottled water, the terrific problems of a humanity whose predicament they appear to have escaped."

"Global Literature can’t help but reflect global capitalism, in its triumph, inequalities, and deformations. In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers: Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. It has its prizes: the Nobel, of course, but more powerful and snazzier is the Man Booker, and the Man Booker International. Its political arm is PEN. And it has a social calendar full of literary festivals, which bring global elites into contact with the glittering stars of World Lit. Every year, sections of the dominant class fly from Mexico City to have Julian Barnes sign books in Xalapa, or from Delhi to Jaipur to be seen partying with Mario Vargas Llosa. The Hay Festival, started in Hay-on-Wye in rural Wales, now has outposts in Dhaka, Beirut, Nairobi, and elsewhere. “Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias” is an accidentally funny phrase — Sí, hay festival — redolent of a strange new intimacy between global north and south."

New Murakami novel in 2014

The English translation of Haruki Murakami‘s latest novel  Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage is likely to be finished by the end of 2013, according to a Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group source.

So if you're a Murakmai fan like me and  read Murakami only in English, expect to get it sometime in 2014
. 
A reviewer says of the novel, "I felt that the Great East Japan Earthquake loomed in the background of the novel. I had the impression that Murakami faced the disaster straightforwardly. The book has strong messages and many encouraging words."

The novel has sold one million copies each week in Japan since its publication  in April this year.

America's Nobel | E L Doctorow quote

'America's  Nobel: The Neustadt International Prize for Literature
 “The jurors would probably be more subject to the impact of writer’s reputation and world status if they were primarily critics or book reviewers. However, they are always writers who are discussing their peers when they deliberate, probably people they know and possibly collaborated with at some point. Thus, as “insiders” in the writing world they know so much more about who is writing and what people are writing than the reputations could convey by themselves. As such, the jurors are incredibly sophisticated judges, and they tend to see each writer within a very large context of what is happening in world literature. They may know that a particular writer is famous or his or her work is trendy at the moment, but since they know so much more about that writer than his or her fame, they are “immunized” in their decision making by their high level of knowledge about all of the writers being considered for the prize.  The fact that the juries are made up of professional and highly accomplished writers shapes a lot of what happens on these juries and is probably the secret of why the Neustadt prizes traditionally have gone to such appropriate and deserving writers.”

 E L Doctorow quote
 Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Julian Barnes on Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis

And if Flaubert in his monasticism and exemplary pertinacity is a writer’s writer, Davis was described to me recently by an American novelist as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’.

Vladimir Sorokin interview

..with every book, I want to open up something new for myself. That is why they are so different from one another—that is, so to say, my principle changes. With every new book I am a little bit changed. (pointing to an edition of Day of the Opritchnik) I am not going to write this way from now on. After this one, I wrote something completely different—The Blizzard, which is a quiet book, like a long and hopeless Russian winter.

via BOMBLOG

Russian Literature today | Jennifer Weiner on Book Clubs' selection

"Two distinct polarities appear to have emerged among the current spread of literary genres in Russia: on the one hand, there is a yearning for nonfiction, including biographies, "true stories", travelogues and investigative novels; one the other hand, there is "a fortunate impregnation of fantastic elements into realistic narratives", as writer and critic Alisa Ganieva puts it. She goes on to say: "There is an obvious drive to record the reality as true to lofe as possible (your non-fiction fad), while simultaneously looking beyond the horizons and trying to perceive what awaits this country and all of humanity in the future, taking the country's current political and social system and projecting it into a not-so-distant future. In other words, it is in a way realistic prose posing as fantasy."

Jennifer Weiner on Book Clubs' selection 
   
“A book club will by all means pick up Franzen. It’s being written about everywhere — you can’t avoid it. But are they going to read ‘The Unknowns’ or even [Meg Wolitzer's] ‘The Interestings’ — books with covers that are not playing into warm and fuzzy feelings or with a portrait of a woman shot from the back, the kind that say to book clubs, ‘This one’s for you’?”

Claire Messud interview

"If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge, it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it."

Excerpt from Luis Borges' newly translated lecture on Johnson and Boswell

Dr. Johnson was already fifty years old. He had published his dictionary, for which he was paid 1,500 pounds sterling—which became 1,600 when his publishers decided to give him one hundred more—when he finished. He was slowing down. He then published his edition of Shakespeare, which he finished only because his publishers had received payments from subscribers, so it had to be done. Otherwise, Dr. Johnson spent his time engaged in conversation.

Read on..

Orhan Pamuk interview/2

Maybe we’re not so interested in what is happening in London, but we’re interested in what’s happening in Zadie Smith’s new novel. I think the form has immense possibilities.

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Orhan Pamuk interview /1

Booker's Dozen: Colum McCann's TransAtlantic (review and author interview)

Review TransAtlantic
Readers and writers will find much to admire in McCann’s TransAtlantic: the birth of story, the sweeping narrative range spilling into numerous points of view, and the breathtaking details of life, flight, hope and death.

Colum McCann interview
It’s the idea of becoming an alternative historian that really interests me: a historian of the smaller, more anonymous moments. It’s a privileged position for the fiction writer, one that opens up a lot of pores – and sometimes wounds, as well.

Laurent Binet interview

"It was complicated. to be faithful to character, to facts; not to make things up and to resist the temptation to make things up. And so I felt it was an interesting problem and I decided to share all my thoughts about it. And you could see all my doubts, questions. Instead of erasing my mistakes or erasing when I couldn't resist the temptation to make it up, to use it for a discussion with the reader.'' 

Writers are of two kinds: Martin Amis

"A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader — be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair.

But there have been one or two writers who didn’t give a shit about the reader, like Joyce — partly because he had patronage, he didn’t need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he’s almost middlebrow, then you get The ambassadors  this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn’t be welcomed. You’d stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.

via

Booker's Dozen: The Kills by Richard House

                              The Idea behind The Kills
"When I was about half way through writing The Kills, I began wondering, what’s the worth of fiction? What does fiction do? I think most writers get to this point where you walk into a bookstore and you see thousands and thousands of books, and you wonder what the worth of that is. Are you just getting more trees chopped down?
Then I read Bolano’s novel 2666 and was inspired by how an idea can be extended across such a vast landscape. It seemed to me that that kind of enquiry was entirely worthwhile. As a reader I felt I was being engaged and entertained with a thriller, but also given a space where difficult ethical issues were being discussed. I loved how intelligent that was. I wanted to do that – to do something where a reader could be involved in the stories as thrillers, but also able to connect the pieces."

Longlist for 2013 Man Booker Prize is interesting without big name authors

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker prize for fiction, announced today, has a diverse and international flavour, with authors from Malaysia, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Margaret Atwood joins the call against ethnic cleansing in Israel

An Open Letter by Canadian writers
We, the undersigned, urge Israeli leaders to heed the call by David Grossman, Amos Oz, AB Yehoshua and 21 other Israeli writers to halt, immediately and permanently, the eviction of about 1000 Palestinians from their homes in various villages in South Hebron, West Bank (occupied Palestinian territory), in order to clear land for an Israeli army firing zone. These Palestinian villagers have inhabited their homes for several centuries. Evicting them would violate international law and cause extreme hardship.

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