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.

Of a short debut novel: half a million dollar advance, 26 Rights deal

This Too Shall Pass is a less-than-200 page novel which opens in a cemetery where the narrator, Blanca, is reeling following the loss of her mother. The reader travels with Blanca to her family summer house in the village of Cadaqués, where she spends time with her children, her two ex husbands, her friends, her lover, and a few dogs, all the while exploring the painful and passionate bond she had with her mother.
via

Ewa Lipska's concepts

 Karel Capek, one of the most important Czech writers, once said that "Humour is the salt of life and whoever is well salted will long keep his freshness." I used my own definition of poetry on the cover of my book, which has just been published in Bulgaria, but also have some other concepts. Let me give you a few: Love – an incurable disease everybody dreams about. A writer – a musician of the word. Politics – the oldest profession in the world. God – an emergency for those who believe. Morality – the ten commandments. Beauty – replacing thinking with seeing.
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--EWA LIPSKA in an interview with Eurozine

Independent publishers vs Megapublishers

Independent publishers are not hybrids, they are instead original seeds, the matrices, the sources of cultural diversity. They bring bibliodiversity to face the humongous behemoth of megapublishing and bookselling.

--Susan Hawthorne at Publishing Perspectives

Home to Best American Writing today

 It’s no accident that much of the best American writing today is to be found not inside the covers of a book but in magazines and online journals. (A case in point: William Deresiewicz, the author of unapologetically brilliant essays in The New Republic and The Chronicle of Higher Education, is also the author of A Jane Austen Education, a good book that would be a lot better if it didn’t have “proposal” written on every page.) True, most of the writers publishing in those forums can’t make a living at it anymore, but at least their editors are committed to publishing the best of what they can find rather than most marketable or the most "concept driven"

Joan Didion still matters

Vogue has a great article on Joan Didion
The ultimate standard for great writing is not clarity or intelligence or entertainment. It’s the capacity to haunt: to get under the reader’s skin and stay there even as external circumstances change. Didion’s finest books are haunting, which is why they are still discovered, admired, and pawed-over. To read her is to understand what writing, at its most exquisitely controlled, can do.

The Point of Karl Ove Knausgaard's Writing

I once met a German journalist who compared me to a rock band. He said, the books don’t really have any focus, it’s just loose, it’s like just having some songs about drinking and they don’t have anything else. But it’s in that band photo, that image, where everything comes together. He wondered if I had a certain point in my writing, because it’s all, you know, bits and pieces and nothing. And then he saw pictures of me, he said, “You pose like a rock star, you kind of summarize everything there.” And I said, “It’s very unfair of you to say that, because…” [laughs] You know, he meant it really, really badly. It has a lot to do with other things. But what I can say is, my face is… I can’t look at myself in the mirror. If I do I see the English cover, you know, and it’s just, I’m dead. [laughs]

Related
How serious a writer is Karl Ove Knausgaard?

Literary Text vs Published Product

We must make the distinction between a literary text and a published product. I’ve always written literary texts; I’ve had different priorities. I’ve never written to make a living, but have made a living in order to be able to write.