(First published in 'Speaking Volumes', Business Standard, June 7, 2005)
It is a naïve confession to make, but until I was in my late teens, it didn't occur to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was judged by mere mortals. Most of the relatives and friends whose homes I visited had libraries that shared a strange eclectism.
Amitav Ghosh, examining his uncle's "odd assortment of books", defined this: "The principles that guided my uncle's taste would have been much clearer to me had I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz-show adept the link between Grazia Deledda, Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokov, Sienkiewicz and Andric will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize for Literature."
Most of the readers I knew had a Nobel shelf, if not a Nobel bookcase. And most accepted without question the impression that the Nobel Prize carried an authority that went beyond human writ. The idea that the Academy in Stockholm might choose the right author for the wrong reasons or vice versa, smacked of the heretical, even when it was finally admitted into my adolescent mind.
The Nobel Prize for Literature still draws the mantle, however tattered, of secrecy around it, and still functions in the manner of the highest court of the land, its opinion final and beyond appeal. The Man Booker International Prize, in contrast, has been set up in an age that demands at least the appearance of transparency, for an audience of readers who believe that no judgement is so final that it cannot be questioned.
Unlike the Nobel, where a few names leak from the shortlist every year without the actual list ever being announced, the shortlist of 15 authors is up on the Man Booker website. We know the names of this year's judges-Professor John Carey, Alberto Manguel and Azar Nafisi. Unlike the confusing terms of Alfred Noble's will, with its controversial directive that the Nobel Prize be awarded to "ideal" literature, the Man Booker is clear: "Worth £60,000 to the winner, the Man Booker International prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language."
We know the judges' struggles, too, the absurd impossibility of picking just 15 writers from a shortlist of 200, and then just one to be declared first among equals. Carey likened the process of judging to Plato's noble and necessary lie, Manguel drew parallels with the absurd prizegiving in Alice in Wonderland, and Nafisi was keenly aware of the absentees, from Achebe to Ishiguro to Rushdie. She writes: "We had to be thankful that, unlike some political leaders, we as literary judges were neither God, nor even his representatives, but fallible mortals, ready to question and be questioned..."
Unencumbered by the magisterial seal of authority, it's easier to get past the petty questions: instead of asking why the judges didn't award Garcia Marquez, or Kenzabura Oe or Muriel Spark, we're free to look at this year's winner, Ismail Kadare, and his place in the pantheon.
Kadare grew up during the Second World War in Albania, and saw his country survive several invasions, make a break with Soviet Russia and come under Hoxha's repressive regime. Kadare discovered an anchor in literature; one of the anecdotes most often told about him is how he was so taken by Macbeth at the age of 11 that he copied the whole play out by hand. In the Greek dramatists, he found a theme that he would explore on and off in his work, the tribulations of "a dissident writer facing a totalitarian state".
He made his compromises; in an interview with The Paris Review, he recalled: "From 1967 to 1970 I was under the direct surveillance of the dictator himself. Remember that, to the great misfortune of the intellectuals, Hoxha regarded himself as an author and a poet, and therefore a "friend" of writers. ..In such a situation I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter...." Hoxha never persecuted Kadare directly, but four of his books were banned by decree; other books were "half-banned", meaning that they could not be discussed in newspapers or magazines. "It was as though they had never been written," Kadare says.
When Hoxha's regime fell, Kadare and his family emigrated to Paris, where he now lives. His books have often been hard to find, and readers in English see his works through the lens of a "double translation": the English is translated from the French translation of his works, a process that has sometimes muffled his voice. The General of the Dead Army, a first novel written after he had already earned a formidable reputation as a poet, was a dark, moving tale of a general sent to Albania to discover and repatriate the remains of soldiers who died in WWII: "I have an entire army of dead men under my command." I read the novel years ago, but its protagonist stayed with me, his futile quest a metaphor for those who seek to dig up the bones of history when their own history has been ripped from them.
The Palace of Dreams, a slightly later work, offered one of the most powerful visions of how far tyranny might go: it's an allegory of a world where dreams are collected from the furthest corners of Empire, as though the true tyrant has a need to own even our most unconscious thoughts.
Kadare has suffered a fate common to many writers in translation, the fate of being simultaneously known and unknown; his name has travelled much further than his books. He is often referred to as Albania's best-known writer, but the Man Booker International might make us see him as a writer for the world.
It's like the journey he makes in one of his poems, Longing for Albania, which begins with a description of a very specific homesickness and ends with these lines, applicable to exiles everywhere:
"How far and how beloved you are, my country .
The airport will tremble with the droning,
The mists will hang in suspense over the chasms.
Surely those who invented the jet engine
Must have been far from their country once."
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Monday, May 30, 2005
The Business Standard column: the Orange prize
(First published in the Business Standard, May 30, 2005)
When the Orange Prize for women’s fiction was announced in January 1996, it seemed like a retrograde step to many observers. This was the enlightened 21st century, not the dark ages: some condemned the prize for excluding men, and writer A S Byatt declared that she couldn’t support a prize that “ghettoized” women.
Ten years on, I think Kate Mosse, the founder of the Orange Prize, saw something that none of us had—precisely because we assume that we live in an age of equality. Mosse’s frustration had to do with the 1991 all-male Booker shortlist; she and others in the publishing world felt that women writers had to work that much harder to be visible, and that even the most talented women writers were judged differently from men.
MobyLives, a leading literary blog, would agree: over the years, MobyLives has tracked the New York Times coverage of male and female authors and sees a tremendous gender gap. If you’re looking at literary prizes, the Nobel for literature has a dismal reward: in its 105-year-old history, only ten women have won the prize. The Booker has honoured 12 women in 33 years, but its shortlists are still tilted towards male authors.
This week, Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins published the results of a survey they conducted across a sample of 100 academics, critics and writers. They found that while support for the Orange Prize was almost unanimous, there was an astonishing gender gap in terms of reading habits. “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men. Consequently, fiction by women remains ‘special interest’, while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style,” write Jardine and Watkins.
The bias doesn’t seem to be deliberate, but it’s there. In the late ‘90s, the editors of Random House’s Modern Library series put together a list of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys were the only women to feature on the list; Woolf was the only one in the top 50. In 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled its own list of novels to counter the Modern Library list—the aim was to correct several biases, not just the gender bias, but it was a revealing exercise. Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein joined the company of women, and added a sense of the range and variety of women’s writing.
If you look at the second list of names, you might begin to gain an insight into how easy it is to overlook women’s writing, and how strange that omission seems once it’s pointed out. There are still names missing from the Radcliffe list: Margaret Drabble and Nadine Gordimer, for instance, but it goes some way to restoring the balance.
Ten years gives you enough time to assess the worth of a prize, and with the Orange, there’s no question that it’s become one of the most respected literary awards in the business. This is partly because the Orange has stuck to its agenda, which is to showcase the best writing available in any given year. Aside from the fact that the prize is open only to women’s writers, there is no other agenda, no particular kind of women’s writing that the juries are encouraged to promote. Borderline chicklit hasn’t been excluded; neither has the huge, sweeping, historical saga. The themes authors have tackled range from vaudeville to hostage situations, from race equations in postwar England to Nigeria in the throes of a coup, from the travails of a lesbian pickpocket to drama on the Titanic. And the Orange seems to feel no need to bend over backwards in order to accommodate newer writers at the expense of more established names: from Margaret Atwood, E Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison and the late Carol Shields to newer writers like Trezza Azzopardi, Oonya Kempadoo or Kamila Shamsie, they’re all there.
The worth of the Orange lies in the fact that it restores the balance. Once in a while, an author like Shirley Hazzard will get a fair shake from the mainstream awards. More often, you’re dealing with writers like Ann Patchett or Andrea Levy who get some media attention, but who gain from the Orange’s endorsement of their worth. The Orange’s record with regard to authors from the subcontinent has been good: it’s flagged authors from Anita Desai to Kamila Shamsie to Shauna Singh Baldwin to Monica Ali.
It’s often argued that the Orange has no business discriminating against male writers; this year, as the tenth anniversary of the prize came up, a few commentators argued that the original biases that had prompted the setting up of the prize were diminishing, and that there was no need for a women’s-only medal any more. But Jardine’s research makes it clear that there is a difference: that even among the ranks of people who might appear to be beyond prejudice, the ways in which we read are inherently polarized. I’m fascinated by the question Jardine raises but doesn’t answer: if men and women read differently, where exactly does the difference lie? But that’s a subject that demands a column to itself.
It’s hard to look at mainstream book reviews and argue with conviction that women writers are given the same space as male writers: just because some women are on an equal footing doesn’t mean that the gender as a whole has progressed. There might come a time when the Orange Prize is no longer necessary; when the Nobel committee automatically considers women authors alongside men without the need for recourse to affirmative action, when the mainstream media’s book review sections have a fifty-fifty split between women writers and male writers as a matter of course, not of deliberate policy, when men become as comfortable with reading women authors as women are reading male authors.
There might be a time when the Orange shortlist is redundant, because most of the authors on it are also featured on the Whitbread and the Booker shortlists; but that time hasn’t yet arrived. Until it does, the Orange is needed, as a reminder of how easy it is to overlook fine, talented authors just because they have the wrong chromosome.
When the Orange Prize for women’s fiction was announced in January 1996, it seemed like a retrograde step to many observers. This was the enlightened 21st century, not the dark ages: some condemned the prize for excluding men, and writer A S Byatt declared that she couldn’t support a prize that “ghettoized” women.
Ten years on, I think Kate Mosse, the founder of the Orange Prize, saw something that none of us had—precisely because we assume that we live in an age of equality. Mosse’s frustration had to do with the 1991 all-male Booker shortlist; she and others in the publishing world felt that women writers had to work that much harder to be visible, and that even the most talented women writers were judged differently from men.
MobyLives, a leading literary blog, would agree: over the years, MobyLives has tracked the New York Times coverage of male and female authors and sees a tremendous gender gap. If you’re looking at literary prizes, the Nobel for literature has a dismal reward: in its 105-year-old history, only ten women have won the prize. The Booker has honoured 12 women in 33 years, but its shortlists are still tilted towards male authors.
This week, Lisa Jardine and Anne Watkins published the results of a survey they conducted across a sample of 100 academics, critics and writers. They found that while support for the Orange Prize was almost unanimous, there was an astonishing gender gap in terms of reading habits. “Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men. Consequently, fiction by women remains ‘special interest’, while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style,” write Jardine and Watkins.
The bias doesn’t seem to be deliberate, but it’s there. In the late ‘90s, the editors of Random House’s Modern Library series put together a list of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys were the only women to feature on the list; Woolf was the only one in the top 50. In 1998, the Radcliffe Publishing Course compiled its own list of novels to counter the Modern Library list—the aim was to correct several biases, not just the gender bias, but it was a revealing exercise. Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein joined the company of women, and added a sense of the range and variety of women’s writing.
If you look at the second list of names, you might begin to gain an insight into how easy it is to overlook women’s writing, and how strange that omission seems once it’s pointed out. There are still names missing from the Radcliffe list: Margaret Drabble and Nadine Gordimer, for instance, but it goes some way to restoring the balance.
Ten years gives you enough time to assess the worth of a prize, and with the Orange, there’s no question that it’s become one of the most respected literary awards in the business. This is partly because the Orange has stuck to its agenda, which is to showcase the best writing available in any given year. Aside from the fact that the prize is open only to women’s writers, there is no other agenda, no particular kind of women’s writing that the juries are encouraged to promote. Borderline chicklit hasn’t been excluded; neither has the huge, sweeping, historical saga. The themes authors have tackled range from vaudeville to hostage situations, from race equations in postwar England to Nigeria in the throes of a coup, from the travails of a lesbian pickpocket to drama on the Titanic. And the Orange seems to feel no need to bend over backwards in order to accommodate newer writers at the expense of more established names: from Margaret Atwood, E Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison and the late Carol Shields to newer writers like Trezza Azzopardi, Oonya Kempadoo or Kamila Shamsie, they’re all there.
The worth of the Orange lies in the fact that it restores the balance. Once in a while, an author like Shirley Hazzard will get a fair shake from the mainstream awards. More often, you’re dealing with writers like Ann Patchett or Andrea Levy who get some media attention, but who gain from the Orange’s endorsement of their worth. The Orange’s record with regard to authors from the subcontinent has been good: it’s flagged authors from Anita Desai to Kamila Shamsie to Shauna Singh Baldwin to Monica Ali.
It’s often argued that the Orange has no business discriminating against male writers; this year, as the tenth anniversary of the prize came up, a few commentators argued that the original biases that had prompted the setting up of the prize were diminishing, and that there was no need for a women’s-only medal any more. But Jardine’s research makes it clear that there is a difference: that even among the ranks of people who might appear to be beyond prejudice, the ways in which we read are inherently polarized. I’m fascinated by the question Jardine raises but doesn’t answer: if men and women read differently, where exactly does the difference lie? But that’s a subject that demands a column to itself.
It’s hard to look at mainstream book reviews and argue with conviction that women writers are given the same space as male writers: just because some women are on an equal footing doesn’t mean that the gender as a whole has progressed. There might come a time when the Orange Prize is no longer necessary; when the Nobel committee automatically considers women authors alongside men without the need for recourse to affirmative action, when the mainstream media’s book review sections have a fifty-fifty split between women writers and male writers as a matter of course, not of deliberate policy, when men become as comfortable with reading women authors as women are reading male authors.
There might be a time when the Orange shortlist is redundant, because most of the authors on it are also featured on the Whitbread and the Booker shortlists; but that time hasn’t yet arrived. Until it does, the Orange is needed, as a reminder of how easy it is to overlook fine, talented authors just because they have the wrong chromosome.
Blood on the dance floor
(Published in The Indian Express, May 27, 2005. This was in response to a suggestion from the paper that an author and a reviewer might separately want to express their views on the business of book reviewing in India. The Marginalien cast an impartial eye on reviewing and authorial responses from the perspective of a seasoned writer; I did my bit as a reviewer.
Here's Manjula Padmanabhan's piece:
"It’s a familiar phenomenon: a new book bursts upon the market like a horde of triumphant Goths on a raiding party and a month later its author is heard ranting about the pathetic standards of literary criticism in the country. The most recent example is a first novel, which was received with cautious rather than effusive praise. In an interview some weeks after the launch, the author referred to Indian reviewers as ‘‘out-of-work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers.’’
As disgruntled creative spirits go, however, he was fairly restrained. Artists whose exhibitions have received negative reviews tend to be more physical. For instance, my sister Geeta Doctor, who reviews both art and literature, was once almost strangled by a muralist because she dared to ask him how many screws he’d used in one of his creations. Another one tried to force her to buy one of his paintings in penance for her mildly negative review. By contrast, authors generally restrict themselves to verbal responses in the form of the occasional death-threat by mail, anonymous phone calls and acid rejoinders in the letters columns of journals that have published unfavourable notices."
And here's mine:
“He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto, ‘Everyman, I will be thy guide’; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; ‘They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,’ he thought, weighing one in his hand…” –From ‘A New World’, by Amit Chaudhuri.
Amit Chaudhuri’s protagonist, Jayojit, could be every Indian author’s nightmare reviewer. Never mind that these days “books by Indian writers” can look as bulky as a wrestler on steroids; the fear of being weighed and found wanting is common to all authors, regardless of language or location. If it’s a little stronger in Indian writers who’re building their own kind of literature in English, that’s only to be expected.
There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase in my house that is given over to works of fiction by Indian writers. In that bookcase, I see a reflection of the publishing landscape over the last decade. Some of those books acquired classic status slowly, some were acclaimed at birth; some were pronounced dead-on-arrival, some, like G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr, are indestructible even if they spend long years in hibernation until a new generation clamours to be introduced to the book all over again. But the vast majority of the books that have found, and lost, house-room were received with lukewarm appreciation and read by less than a thousand people in the country. It’s a hard lesson. If you’ve poured two, or three, or ten years of your life into writing a book, you don’t want to be reminded that this might be your fate.
One of the arguments we often hear from authors, usually when they’re pleading to be treated with more respect, accorded a few more superlatives, offered a shade more understanding, is that Indian writing in English is a young, growing body of literature. It needs encouragement, and nurturing, and other things that reviewers in India don’t provide. The classic reaction when an author feels that he hasn’t received his due is to lash out, sharply, at the one section of his audience that can be held accountable. There’s not much point to criticizing publishers or alienating readers; reviewers, though, can always be faulted for not realizing that what lies before them is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
The view from the reviewer’s chair looks a little different. All the reviewers and critics I spoke to for this article nailed two things that make reviewing Indian books a very strange business. The first is, as critic and editor Anita Roy put it, that everyone knows everyone else’s “co-ordinates”. Most literary circles are incestuous; but even by that standard, the Indian literary world is composed of people who share incredibly complicated, tangled histories.
This should change, once you reach a critical mass of really good writers, and it can’t change too fast for anyone of us. Knowing the co-ordinates does nothing for readers or writers except to make everyone paranoid. The writer who has the “right” co-ordinates fears that this might make him or her a target for universal envy, the writer who doesn’t complains about being left out in the cold; and it’s a rare reviewer who doesn’t resent having to navigate the deep, politically messy waters of this sort of knowledge.
The second aspect of reviewing Indian books, as a writer who shuttles between the US and India puts it, is that you cannot help but set the bar lower. If you review books regularly, you’re likely to fall into the trap of being kind, which is the worst sort of insult you could offer any writer—and any reader. Very few of the forty-odd books that come in for review each month are distressingly, painfully bad; very few rise above the mediocre. To be a reviewer in India is to know firsthand the triumph of hope over experience—but when a truly, unequivocally great book does come your way, the joy it brings in its wake is all the reward any reader could ask for.
How good does Indian writing have to be? In the last few months, we saw really brilliant work from writers as disparate as Haruki Murakami, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Andrea Levy, to name a scant handful. In the increasingly eclectic world of Indian reviewing, these books are also up for review; if you’re a reviewer who reads in another Indian language aside from English, as many of us do, you’re looking at another 10-15 potentially great books to be read every month.
There isn’t space any more for kindness. There isn’t the room to make allowances for the Indian writer working in English. And from what I’ve seen of young Indian writers at home and elsewhere, there’ll be no need for grace marks in another few years. Until then, though, if you’re an author in search of adulation and you don’t get it, follow the advice that V S Naipaul famously offered a fellow writer: take it on the chin and move on.
Here's Manjula Padmanabhan's piece:
"It’s a familiar phenomenon: a new book bursts upon the market like a horde of triumphant Goths on a raiding party and a month later its author is heard ranting about the pathetic standards of literary criticism in the country. The most recent example is a first novel, which was received with cautious rather than effusive praise. In an interview some weeks after the launch, the author referred to Indian reviewers as ‘‘out-of-work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers.’’
As disgruntled creative spirits go, however, he was fairly restrained. Artists whose exhibitions have received negative reviews tend to be more physical. For instance, my sister Geeta Doctor, who reviews both art and literature, was once almost strangled by a muralist because she dared to ask him how many screws he’d used in one of his creations. Another one tried to force her to buy one of his paintings in penance for her mildly negative review. By contrast, authors generally restrict themselves to verbal responses in the form of the occasional death-threat by mail, anonymous phone calls and acid rejoinders in the letters columns of journals that have published unfavourable notices."
And here's mine:
“He began to look for a book at random; noted the motto, ‘Everyman, I will be thy guide’; stared, with some scepticism, at some of the books by Indian writers; ‘They not only look light, they feel lightweight as well,’ he thought, weighing one in his hand…” –From ‘A New World’, by Amit Chaudhuri.
Amit Chaudhuri’s protagonist, Jayojit, could be every Indian author’s nightmare reviewer. Never mind that these days “books by Indian writers” can look as bulky as a wrestler on steroids; the fear of being weighed and found wanting is common to all authors, regardless of language or location. If it’s a little stronger in Indian writers who’re building their own kind of literature in English, that’s only to be expected.
There’s a wall-to-wall bookcase in my house that is given over to works of fiction by Indian writers. In that bookcase, I see a reflection of the publishing landscape over the last decade. Some of those books acquired classic status slowly, some were acclaimed at birth; some were pronounced dead-on-arrival, some, like G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr, are indestructible even if they spend long years in hibernation until a new generation clamours to be introduced to the book all over again. But the vast majority of the books that have found, and lost, house-room were received with lukewarm appreciation and read by less than a thousand people in the country. It’s a hard lesson. If you’ve poured two, or three, or ten years of your life into writing a book, you don’t want to be reminded that this might be your fate.
One of the arguments we often hear from authors, usually when they’re pleading to be treated with more respect, accorded a few more superlatives, offered a shade more understanding, is that Indian writing in English is a young, growing body of literature. It needs encouragement, and nurturing, and other things that reviewers in India don’t provide. The classic reaction when an author feels that he hasn’t received his due is to lash out, sharply, at the one section of his audience that can be held accountable. There’s not much point to criticizing publishers or alienating readers; reviewers, though, can always be faulted for not realizing that what lies before them is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
The view from the reviewer’s chair looks a little different. All the reviewers and critics I spoke to for this article nailed two things that make reviewing Indian books a very strange business. The first is, as critic and editor Anita Roy put it, that everyone knows everyone else’s “co-ordinates”. Most literary circles are incestuous; but even by that standard, the Indian literary world is composed of people who share incredibly complicated, tangled histories.
This should change, once you reach a critical mass of really good writers, and it can’t change too fast for anyone of us. Knowing the co-ordinates does nothing for readers or writers except to make everyone paranoid. The writer who has the “right” co-ordinates fears that this might make him or her a target for universal envy, the writer who doesn’t complains about being left out in the cold; and it’s a rare reviewer who doesn’t resent having to navigate the deep, politically messy waters of this sort of knowledge.
The second aspect of reviewing Indian books, as a writer who shuttles between the US and India puts it, is that you cannot help but set the bar lower. If you review books regularly, you’re likely to fall into the trap of being kind, which is the worst sort of insult you could offer any writer—and any reader. Very few of the forty-odd books that come in for review each month are distressingly, painfully bad; very few rise above the mediocre. To be a reviewer in India is to know firsthand the triumph of hope over experience—but when a truly, unequivocally great book does come your way, the joy it brings in its wake is all the reward any reader could ask for.
How good does Indian writing have to be? In the last few months, we saw really brilliant work from writers as disparate as Haruki Murakami, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Andrea Levy, to name a scant handful. In the increasingly eclectic world of Indian reviewing, these books are also up for review; if you’re a reviewer who reads in another Indian language aside from English, as many of us do, you’re looking at another 10-15 potentially great books to be read every month.
There isn’t space any more for kindness. There isn’t the room to make allowances for the Indian writer working in English. And from what I’ve seen of young Indian writers at home and elsewhere, there’ll be no need for grace marks in another few years. Until then, though, if you’re an author in search of adulation and you don’t get it, follow the advice that V S Naipaul famously offered a fellow writer: take it on the chin and move on.
Friday, May 27, 2005
For all my poet friends
Annie, Zigzackly, and all of you poets out there who occupy the letters of the alphabet in between, this quote's for you:
"Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, 'It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it's coming along shortly...' We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat....and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I've lost so many I can't count them. I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don't, it sings us awake, it's irresistible, it's contagious."
--Barbara Kingsolver, 'Stealing Apples', from the collection Small Wonder.
"Whether anyone pays us or respects us or calls us a poet or not, just about any person alive will feel a tickle behind the left ear when we catch ourselves saying, 'It was a little big and pretty ugly, but it's coming along shortly...' We stop in our tracks when a child pointing to the sunset cries that the day is bleeding and is going to die. Poetry approaches, pauses, then skirts around us like a cat....and poems roll under the furniture, left and right. I've lost so many I can't count them. I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another. It reassures us of what we know and socks us in the gut with what we don't, it sings us awake, it's irresistible, it's contagious."
--Barbara Kingsolver, 'Stealing Apples', from the collection Small Wonder.
Book review: First Proof
(This was written for Time Out Mumbai, about the only magazine I've ever worked for where the editor has mastered the art of screaming with EXTREME POLITENESS whenever I overshoot my deadlines, which is pretty much all the time.)
First Proof
The Penguin Book of New Writing From India: 1
Penguin India, Rs 295,
218+202 pages
Has Indian writing in English ever been formally taken off the Endangered Species List? There are only a handful of R K Narayans, people said just before a guy called Salman Rushdie quit advertising to become a writer. There’s only one Midnight’s Children , I was told just before A Ghosh, V Seth, Sealy and company took centrestage. The new generation has produced no one like A Ghosh and company, we were informed the year before The God of Small Things and the boom in big advances ushered Ruchir Joshi, Pankaj Mishra, Raj Kamal Jha, into the spotlight. Roy’s Booker was a flash in the pan, said doomsayers a few months before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer. There was a brief, and we hope, embarrassed, silence, before a brand-new refrain came up: see, the best writing will come from the diaspora, everything in the homeland is dead.
It doesn’t take a First Proof to tell us that reports of the demise of Indian writing have been greatly exaggerated. As the editors write: “The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise).” They’ve got a mixed bag of allsorts to back up the claim. Of the 17 short stories and 13 essays, travelogues, and assorted pieces of non-fiction here, there’s little that stands up and demands to be called a classic—but even less that doesn’t deserve to be here at all.
First Proof is planned as an annual event, and if it’s meant to showcase the best of new, original and brilliant writing from India, the editors have a tough job ahead. The Little Magazine and a few others of its kind aside, there are few forums where you can publish original short fiction, and fewer still where an editor will push hard enough to coax a brilliant story from the author of a merely adequate one. Civil Lines got past the problem of acquiring sterling writing from writers who’re seldom allowed to break the 300-word or 900-word barrier by delaying publication until the editors felt they had a good enough set; this led to magisterial delays, two-and-a-half years between volumes in one case.
This hits the journalists hardest: Nirmala Subramaniam has a great subject in Prabhakaran as does Saba Naqvi Bhaumik in a more legally acceptable Don, and both of them do a solid reporting job—but they don’t produce great writing. Sankarshan Thakur’s controlled rage leads to something more memorable in his foray into “the heart of Backward country”, as does Mishi Saran’s focused passion on the distant journeys of a long-dead monk. The lack of experience also mars the fiction, where the quality wobbles from the spectacular to the devastatingly mundane.
But First Proof scores in its variety. Some writers here have familiar bylines, but, like Mitali Saran or Anuradha Roy, are making their first foray into fiction; some, like Ranjit Hoskote, are better known in other fields; some are seasoned authors, like Indrajit Hazra or at a more austere level, Andre Beteille. None of them lack confidence. The fiction ranges from the wildly experimental, as with Sarnath and Rana Dasgupta, to Arun John’s quiet, moving tale of a young man setting out in search of the parents who disappeared years before into Africa, to Renuka Narayanan’s florid imagining of Vaak, the deity of speech. The non-fiction takes in the familiar—grandmothers, boarding school odysseys, the world post 9/11—and the unusual—colonial bibis, vamps, Cuba. What comes through is absolute confidence: postmodernism, no problem; journeys to the centre of the human heart, coming up; the markets of Matunga, Fidel sightings in Cuba, Turki in North Bihar—it’s all accessible, none of it beyond imagination.
It’s a bumpy, uneven ride, with more than a few potholes thrown in. But what First Proof says is, buy the ticket, take your chances, come on board—the view’s pretty good from where we sit. This anthology is a brave attempt; and even if it’s a bit of a chalta hai collection, we’ll use the oldest Indian mantra of them all, and simply adjust.
First Proof
The Penguin Book of New Writing From India: 1
Penguin India, Rs 295,
218+202 pages
Has Indian writing in English ever been formally taken off the Endangered Species List? There are only a handful of R K Narayans, people said just before a guy called Salman Rushdie quit advertising to become a writer. There’s only one Midnight’s Children , I was told just before A Ghosh, V Seth, Sealy and company took centrestage. The new generation has produced no one like A Ghosh and company, we were informed the year before The God of Small Things and the boom in big advances ushered Ruchir Joshi, Pankaj Mishra, Raj Kamal Jha, into the spotlight. Roy’s Booker was a flash in the pan, said doomsayers a few months before Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer. There was a brief, and we hope, embarrassed, silence, before a brand-new refrain came up: see, the best writing will come from the diaspora, everything in the homeland is dead.
It doesn’t take a First Proof to tell us that reports of the demise of Indian writing have been greatly exaggerated. As the editors write: “The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise).” They’ve got a mixed bag of allsorts to back up the claim. Of the 17 short stories and 13 essays, travelogues, and assorted pieces of non-fiction here, there’s little that stands up and demands to be called a classic—but even less that doesn’t deserve to be here at all.
First Proof is planned as an annual event, and if it’s meant to showcase the best of new, original and brilliant writing from India, the editors have a tough job ahead. The Little Magazine and a few others of its kind aside, there are few forums where you can publish original short fiction, and fewer still where an editor will push hard enough to coax a brilliant story from the author of a merely adequate one. Civil Lines got past the problem of acquiring sterling writing from writers who’re seldom allowed to break the 300-word or 900-word barrier by delaying publication until the editors felt they had a good enough set; this led to magisterial delays, two-and-a-half years between volumes in one case.
This hits the journalists hardest: Nirmala Subramaniam has a great subject in Prabhakaran as does Saba Naqvi Bhaumik in a more legally acceptable Don, and both of them do a solid reporting job—but they don’t produce great writing. Sankarshan Thakur’s controlled rage leads to something more memorable in his foray into “the heart of Backward country”, as does Mishi Saran’s focused passion on the distant journeys of a long-dead monk. The lack of experience also mars the fiction, where the quality wobbles from the spectacular to the devastatingly mundane.
But First Proof scores in its variety. Some writers here have familiar bylines, but, like Mitali Saran or Anuradha Roy, are making their first foray into fiction; some, like Ranjit Hoskote, are better known in other fields; some are seasoned authors, like Indrajit Hazra or at a more austere level, Andre Beteille. None of them lack confidence. The fiction ranges from the wildly experimental, as with Sarnath and Rana Dasgupta, to Arun John’s quiet, moving tale of a young man setting out in search of the parents who disappeared years before into Africa, to Renuka Narayanan’s florid imagining of Vaak, the deity of speech. The non-fiction takes in the familiar—grandmothers, boarding school odysseys, the world post 9/11—and the unusual—colonial bibis, vamps, Cuba. What comes through is absolute confidence: postmodernism, no problem; journeys to the centre of the human heart, coming up; the markets of Matunga, Fidel sightings in Cuba, Turki in North Bihar—it’s all accessible, none of it beyond imagination.
It’s a bumpy, uneven ride, with more than a few potholes thrown in. But what First Proof says is, buy the ticket, take your chances, come on board—the view’s pretty good from where we sit. This anthology is a brave attempt; and even if it’s a bit of a chalta hai collection, we’ll use the oldest Indian mantra of them all, and simply adjust.
Border song
(This piece was written for The Kolkata Telegraph, which runs a small section on offbeat travel stories every Sunday. I should point out that the idea of frontiers being strange and meaningless constructions is hardly new: read Amitav Ghosh if you want to know just how much a simple pair of compasses and the circles you draw on the map can challenge your sense of national boundaries. And read Kai Friese if you want the grown-up take on borders...hell, just read Ghosh and Friese anyway.)
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
My mental map of the world was made of orange peels and tracing paper. The orange peels were to explain the Mercator projection of the world; the teacher carved the peel of a dessicated fruit in three large strips, to help us understand how a globe might be carved up for convenience.
The tracing paper was how we carefully copied maps, by laying those thin, butter-translucent sheets on pages of the atlas and tracing the outlines. For a long time, when I imagined countries, their borders stood out in sharp relief, thick and definitive in Camlin marker black.
My father’s job meant that he travelled a lot, often to forsaken outposts of the modern Indian empire; he compressed work and vacations together by taking us with him when possible. On one of those, we went to a place in Sikkim that’s now almost a tourist attraction. Two decades ago, it was a godforsaken speck of cold winds, ice and steep climbs called Nathu-la. It was on the border; China lay on the other side.
Travelling up, it was the first time we plains-and-delta people had seen snow, and we didn’t know what to do with it. We stood awkwardly on a grassy verge with distant birds calling so far up in such a blue sky that they seemed to be from another planet. My sister, always resourceful, solved the dilemma by shoving a fistful of snow into a plastic bag. It travelled back to Delhi and remained in the freezer until a power cut turned it into a polybag of dirty water.
I couldn’t contain my excitement as we drew near the frontier. It was only when we saw the small, forlorn, concrete outpost, fortified for a few km around, mirrored by its Chinese counterpart, that I realised I’d got it all wrong. In my mind, a country’s fortress was marked by barbed wire. Or lantana bushes; even bamboo fences. But the sparse shrubs on the other side were exactly same as the shrubs here. The slush in China was as coarse as the slush in India. The wind whipped my face in sharp rebuke as I stared at the Chinese soldiers across a line of barbed wire fencing that extended only some kilometers in either direction. I couldn’t understand why China and India looked so similar, why there was no thick black fence saying, “This is a frontier.”
Over the years, I crossed various kinds of borders between various places. But it would be almost twenty years before I received my second lesson in the nature of borders—not elsewhere, but very close to home, in fact in Sikkim again.
This time it was at the northernmost point of the state, in a place called Gurudongmar, which housed a makeshift army shelter and the highest Sikh shrine in the world. The two structures sat perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, a vast, stunningly beautiful place of ice and bony rock where the freezing winds howled and the air was so thin that every breath sent my heart thudding against my ribs.
“Here is the border!” a soldier told me, pointing to a moderately high set of hills. “That side is China, this side us.” Wanting to get it right, I asked, “So… those first two hills, those are Indian? The others, they’re Chinese?” The soldier had premature lines of ageing on his face that folded like an accordion when he grinned. “The hills are made out of sand,” he said. “So they shift all the time; sometimes they are Indian, sometimes they are Chinese.”
I’m an adult, I believe in borders; the dreary checkpoints, the immigrant official’s interrogations, the stamps on my passport let me know that frontiers are real. But there are also memories, of deserts outside Jaisalmer where you can’t tell the point where a grain of sand stops becoming Indian and assumes Pakistani citizenship, of hills that shift allegiance, of leaves changing colour in tune in both the US and Canada. The world is a porous place, a small voice says in my head. I believe in borders because I have to. But somewhere along the way, I lost my faith in those thick, black lines on the map-they define some sort of certainty, but I don’t know what it is any more.
The BS column: Murdering your darlings
(First published in the Business Standard, Speaking Volumes, May 24, 2005)
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
It won’t be long now before a certain student of Hogwarts graduates from the most famous academy of magic and wizardry in the world, leaving his author, J K Rowling, with an unenviable prospect. There’s always the possibility that Harry Potter’s years at university could be written about and still draw a loyal audience, but what happens next— Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis?
Imagine Potter as an embittered, middle-ranking civil servant trapped in a bad marriage with, say, a woman like Parvati Patel. Imagine Potter as a coach with a trick knee boring a new generation of youngsters with tales of Quidditch matches lost and won. Imagine Potter escaping to the local pub to grouse with Ron and Hagrid about the good old days when they made proper evil megalomaniacs, not like the wussy dictators you get nowadays.
It’s not to be thought of, and Rowling has hinted that she would like to move on from Potter to something different—writing detective stories, perhaps, like her good friend Ian Rankin. The question Rowling faces is whether she can make the switch to a different genre and carry the millions of Potter fans with her, and whether she can resist the pressure to continue churning out Potter adventures.
She’s not the first author to face these questions, and unfortunately, very few of those who faced similar problems found solutions that made them happy. Perhaps the most famous example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a relationship with his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, that will keep generations of literary-minded psychoanalysts happy. Conan Doyle intended to make his name as a serious man of letters. He was very proud of his historical novels, though neither Micah Clarke nor Sir Nigel can be read today with ease: the first is written in a style so florid that it reads like a parody, the second is a relatively turgid historical romance. But it meant a great deal to Conan Doyle that Micah Clarke was greatly admired in its time—he particularly cherished Oscar Wilde’s praise.
And he fully intended to return from Holmes’ mysteries to high art, except that his public wouldn’t let him. As every Sherlockian knows, Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a struggle to the death with Moriarty on the Reichenbach Falls; the relish with which he wrote in one of his letters that he had found the ideal spot to murder his detective lets us see just how much he had come to loathe Holmes. There was such a public outcry, though, that he had to resurrect Holmes eventually. One of my analyst friends speculates that perhaps Conan Doyle harboured an unconscious wish that Holmes would return from the grave. My friend points out that Conan Doyle could have had his detective blown to bits, dismembered, eaten away by acid, in fact killed him in a thousand ways that would have made it impossible to resurrect him—but he chose a way that allowed for some ambiguity over the state, and the fact, of the corpse. Conan Doyle may have wanted to kill Holmes, but his subconscious had other ideas.
Rowling may get away from Potter—she’s often said that she intends to leave the boy wizard behind at some stage—but might face the same problem that highly successful writers have faced when they’ve tried to move on. She mentioned AA Milne, who wrote several novels for adults, but who, she noted, “never got reviewed without the mention of Tigger and Pooh and Piglet”. Milne’s plays were moderately successful; his novels for adults made awkward reading, and no one took the author of the Pooh books particularly seriously.
One of the few genre authors who avoided disappointment in this sphere was L Frank Baum, who dealt with the incessant demand for all things Oz by rising to the needs of his public. The author of The Wizard of Oz wrote several other series for children under pseudonyms, but spent his life writing sequels to Oz. There was an Oz newspaper, an Oz cartoon strip—and an endless series of Oz books, from The Marvelous Land of Oz to Tik-Tok of Oz , The Patchwork Girl of Oz , and The Visitors from Oz . He wrote a few books for adults, too, including an intriguing travelogue called The Last Egyptian , but he insulated himself against failure; every time one of his “serious” books tanked, he would churn out another Oz sequel.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the trauma of failing in one sphere of literary endeavour when you’ve succeeded in another is to get it out of the way at an early stage. Before Rex Stout created Nero Wolfe, he aspired to more mainstream literary success. The first mystery to star the portly, gourmandizing, orchid-lover who was a genius armchair detective was Fer-de-Lance , which appeared in 1934. Stout had spent the years between roughly 1927 and 1933 working hard at different sorts of fiction. He wrote a bizarre adventure called Under the Andes , which is a baroque precursor to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and which is sometimes credited with introducing the world to the first Swamp Woman. How Like a God , which came out in 1929, belongs to the thankfully small class of literary novels written in the second person. Golden Remedy , which came out in 1931, was about a failing marriage. Stout’s biographer believed this was autobiographical in part, though even the novelist didn’t know the full story—Stout believed his wife was dead, when the truth was that she had eloped with a Russian commissar.
Stout didn’t give up on his ambitions easily—he wrote a thriller about a vanished President the year after the first Nero Wolfe mystery came out, but Wolfe and his sidekick, Archie, began to demand all of his attention. Unlike Conan Doyle, Rex Stout never grew to resent being shackled to his detective. He took a break from Wolfe now and then, creating other detectives and other series, which seems to be the general way of dealing with over-familiarity with your characters. In more recent times, Alexander McCall Smith has attempted to break away from Precious Ramotswe, the number one ladies’ detective who made him famous, by creating an equally inquisitive counterpart in Edinburgh; but his Edinburgh mysteries sell on the back of the Botswana series that made his name. There's the rub about creating larger-than-life characters: killing them off is so hard.
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