(Blog neglect plus backed-up posts= blogger overload. At some stage I'll get around to posting the old stuff, but I figured I'd start archiving the more recent work.)
(Published in the Business Standard, July 2008)
There wasn’t much surprise when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Best of Bookers—for the second time—last week. The shortlist included works by Nadine Gordimer, Pat Barker, J G Farrell, Peter Carey and J M Coetzee.
Those who voted in the public poll did so with a slight sense of déjà vu, for Rushdie had won the first Booker of Bookers for the same book in 1993; it’s a bit like handing out the same gong twice, or like presenting a re-Nobel Prize.
What the second Booker of Bookers really accomplished was to shed some light on the process of how a book becomes an enduring classic. In 1981, when Midnight’s Children won the Booker—this would be the plain vanilla version of the prize—Rushdie was seen as a fierce young talent with a pile of unpublished books in his drawer and a work of equivocal merit behind him.
Grimus, his first published work, hadn’t done that well and remains a literary curiosity—though this early, science fiction-influenced work, still has its admirers and was a pointer to the sometimes alarming erudition that Rushdie would summon throughout his literary career.
But Midnight’s Children, though it drew puzzled reviews in the UK, captured the imagination of Indians and some of the more attentive reviewers in the US fairly soon. Rushdie’s central conceit was the perfect metaphor for a nation still looking back at Independence and Partition. His protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born (like Rushdie himself) in 1947, and along with those born on or close to midnight on August 15 of that year, possesses certain talents. Saleem is a telepath; the boy with whom he’s accidentally switched at birth, Shiva, possesses extraordinary fighting skills. Saleem’s fortunes mirror those of a changing India, and he and midnight’s other children are threatened by the figure of the Widow, whom most readers had no difficulty recognizing as the figure of Indira Gandhi in the Emergency years.
It’s just as hard to assess the impact that Midnight’s Children has had on Indian writers as it is to imagine Indian literature without this book. The novel has its detractors: Amit Chaudhuri attacked the “loose, baggy monsters” that it spawned in its wake. It also has its imitators, those who have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to carry off Rushdie’s swashbuckling brand of magical realism or to create equally large, “holdall” novels where everything of importance about India can be crammed.
For my generation of readers, Midnight’s Children gave us a voice that had been either constrained or limited previously. From the publication of the first Indian novel in English—Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—writers had struggled with what might be called the “salad” problem. Struggling to find the words to describe the dish created by a Bengali housewife from vegetables plucked in her garden, Bankimchandra came up with the term “garden salad”, though the very English image that conjures up is nowhere near the reality of the Indian dish it describes.
A few writers—R K Narayan, Raja Rao—had found a way out, deploying simple, almost artless language that allowed them to duck the problems of depicting accent and cadence. A good eight years after the publication of Midnight’s Children, a writer like Shashi Tharoor would feel free to employ his very Stephenian English to rework the Mahabharata into his The Great Indian Novel. But Rushdie’s English in Midnight’s Children was deliberately, exuberantly over-the-top. Saleem ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’ Sinai, “handcuffed to history”, switched back and forth from Indianisms to lyrical flights of almost classicist English—in exactly the same way that most Indians do when we speak.
Some have suggested that Midnight’s Children has survived because of Rushdie’s personal, and growing, fame, his second life as a celebrity. But that’s a facile interpretation. The difference between Midnight’s Children and a worthy, but now little-remembered work like Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (Booker winner, 1978) is that the former continues to generate new readers. Each generation reads Rushdie very differently, perhaps; but none can bypass him, can ignore this blaring, audacious and triumphant early novel.
If this remains true in another 20 years, I suppose we’ll have to put our hands together for Rushdie and Saleem Sinai yet again in 2028, presuming they win some future Absolutely The Best of the Bookers. To paraphrase Rushdie, sometimes the legend really does outstrip reality.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Jhumpa's world
I know, someone who works as an editor in publishing shouldn't comment on another publisher's writers. But I took a private call on this--how likely is it that I'll make a pitch for Jhumpa Lahiri? Answer: I don't think she'll shift from Picador for a while--and figured I could consider myself free to write about her latest book, Unaccustomed Earth.
I didn't buy Unaccustomed Earth right off: instead, I read the reviews, all of which seemed to stress the point that Lahiri had returned to the rich but narrow and circumscribed world of Bengali immigrants, the world she's explored before in Interpreter of Maladies and in The Namesake.
Then I bought the book, and spent a few weeks with her stories. Don't expect literary criticism in this post; I'm not going to attempt a review when there are so many available on the Net. But reading and living with these stories made me question the validity of those reviews--when reviewers spoke of her mining the comfortable and small world of Bengali immigrants, did they know what they were talking about? Because in this book, Lahiri seems to have given herself permission to go beyond the relatively safe, if riddled with faultlines, terrain she charted in Interpreters.
Let's take this objectively. Look at the subjects she's tackling in Unaccustomed Earth. There's hidden alcoholism that rips a family apart, several times over. There's an abortive suicide, attempted by a woman whom you would never have suspected of being suicidal. There's desperate, married sex, applied like a Band-Aid across wounds too deep for a Band-Aid. There are affairs, betrayals, a sequence where a key character can only deal with pain by cutting herself. This is a deeply riven, often violent, often terrifying world that Lahiri's opened her writing and herself up to. And this is the genteel, limited world of the reviewers's imaginations? That's like saying Raymond Carver was a quiet, restrained writer because most of his characters come from Middle America.
This collection of stories terrified and entranced me in a way that more obviously grandly themed books by Indian writers have not, because Lahiri's craft is so deceptive, and so effective. Very, very few writers have parsed and analysed the workings of the Indian family as well as she has: she captures all of its warped toxicity, its suffocating shibboleths. Don't allow yourself to be distracted by the fact that most of her protagonists come from the same, middle class, relatively prosperous immigrants' background--that is just the background. There's more quiet violence and more understanding of fractured relationships in her stories than there is in the more dramatic Indian novels. To read her as just a chronicler of the mundane, sheltered lives of a certain class of American immigrants would be a gross misreading--something like interpreting Oedipus Rex as an unpleasant family drama played out by wealthy Greeks.
What was interesting for me about Unaccustomed Earth was the sense that Lahiri has given herself permission, unshackled herself from the unspoken protective responsibilities that an Indian woman writer of her class might be expected to bear. She has a searing, unforgiving eye for the truth, and this collection bears out not just her talent, but her honesty. Read this, and ignore the reviewers; this is not a quiet, genteel collection, but its exact opposite--it's a collection of short stories that analyses the great violence that the construct of the perfect Indian family has visited on all of its inhabitants.
I didn't buy Unaccustomed Earth right off: instead, I read the reviews, all of which seemed to stress the point that Lahiri had returned to the rich but narrow and circumscribed world of Bengali immigrants, the world she's explored before in Interpreter of Maladies and in The Namesake.
Then I bought the book, and spent a few weeks with her stories. Don't expect literary criticism in this post; I'm not going to attempt a review when there are so many available on the Net. But reading and living with these stories made me question the validity of those reviews--when reviewers spoke of her mining the comfortable and small world of Bengali immigrants, did they know what they were talking about? Because in this book, Lahiri seems to have given herself permission to go beyond the relatively safe, if riddled with faultlines, terrain she charted in Interpreters.
Let's take this objectively. Look at the subjects she's tackling in Unaccustomed Earth. There's hidden alcoholism that rips a family apart, several times over. There's an abortive suicide, attempted by a woman whom you would never have suspected of being suicidal. There's desperate, married sex, applied like a Band-Aid across wounds too deep for a Band-Aid. There are affairs, betrayals, a sequence where a key character can only deal with pain by cutting herself. This is a deeply riven, often violent, often terrifying world that Lahiri's opened her writing and herself up to. And this is the genteel, limited world of the reviewers's imaginations? That's like saying Raymond Carver was a quiet, restrained writer because most of his characters come from Middle America.
This collection of stories terrified and entranced me in a way that more obviously grandly themed books by Indian writers have not, because Lahiri's craft is so deceptive, and so effective. Very, very few writers have parsed and analysed the workings of the Indian family as well as she has: she captures all of its warped toxicity, its suffocating shibboleths. Don't allow yourself to be distracted by the fact that most of her protagonists come from the same, middle class, relatively prosperous immigrants' background--that is just the background. There's more quiet violence and more understanding of fractured relationships in her stories than there is in the more dramatic Indian novels. To read her as just a chronicler of the mundane, sheltered lives of a certain class of American immigrants would be a gross misreading--something like interpreting Oedipus Rex as an unpleasant family drama played out by wealthy Greeks.
What was interesting for me about Unaccustomed Earth was the sense that Lahiri has given herself permission, unshackled herself from the unspoken protective responsibilities that an Indian woman writer of her class might be expected to bear. She has a searing, unforgiving eye for the truth, and this collection bears out not just her talent, but her honesty. Read this, and ignore the reviewers; this is not a quiet, genteel collection, but its exact opposite--it's a collection of short stories that analyses the great violence that the construct of the perfect Indian family has visited on all of its inhabitants.
Friday, August 31, 2007
'Biafra, we hail thee'
(Published in the Business Standard, June 12, 2007)
On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s website , a button invites readers to ‘Tell Your Biafra Story’. That apparently ordinary link tells an extraordinary story. Chimamanda, whose book Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize for fiction recently, is the best-known of a small but growing group of “African writers” who are challenging the stereotype of what it means, as one of them sardonically put it, to “write in African”.
“Girls I had seen struggle at the water pump and hit each other with plastic buckets, girls who had cut holes in each other’s bras as they hung out to dry, now held hands and sang,” Chimamanda writes. “Instead of ‘Nigeria, we hail thee,’ they sang, ‘Biafra, we hail thee.’ I joined them, singing, clapping, talking. We did not mention the massacres, the way Igbos had been hunted house to house, pulled from where they crouched in trees, by bright-eyed people screaming Jihad, screaming Nyamiri, nyamiri.”
There are currently 56 stories up in the ‘Tell Your Biafra Story’ section. Ugwueze Alozie shares memories of being a 7-year-old during the war: “Hunger and sickness killed so many children… After the war, the Nigerian soldiers seized our sisters for wives…” Chiedu Ezeneah offers Chimamanda a sonnet. Shirin writes about the death of a secretary called Hyacinth, and the impact it made on her as a schoolgirl.
The people who share their memories with Chimamanda may not share her talent, the way she balances terror against the banal, blood and gore against small epiphanies, war against the ordinary rhythms of life. But Chimamanda believes that their voices and their stories are important, even crucial. These are the stories that CNN and the BBC don’t cover. She believes that part of her work as a writer is to create a space where those who are normally invisible can be seen, and heard.
In her first book, Purple Hibiscus, she gave herself the freedom to disturb both sets of readers—African readers, by speaking openly about subjects not considered fit for public discussion (massacres, girlfriends), and Western readers, by not conforming to the rigid stereotypes that African writers are forced to wear like crinolines.
Many Indian writers would feel a sense of déjà vu if they read some of the comments on Chimamanda’s website from readers asking her to present a better picture of Nigeria to the world, or not to rake up old troubles. And many Indian writers would smile wryly if they read what Hillary Mantel, a fine writer and critic herself, had to say about Chimamanda Adichie’s work: “There is no wilful exoticism: no playing to the gallery of Western expectation.”
Mantel accepts tacitly that exoticism is what the world has come to expect from a certain kind of African writing. The African novel was supposed to be all about vivid colours and vastness, wars and bloodshed, and the ideal African novel would, of course, be written by a white man. Mantel also gestures at the fact that many young writers in Africa—as in India—do end up “playing to the gallery of Western expectation”, if for no other reason than that the main readers for their books are in the West.
What I love about Chimamanda Adichie’s work is that it moves away from all expectations. As a young student, she was once told by a professor that her story about middle-class Africans felt inauthentic to him—this was not his vision of Africa. Sometimes, Western readers have expressed their sense of dislocation at her evocation of an Africa where Africans might employ houseboys, or listen to jazz, or treasure beautiful old furniture. To Indians, the world Chimamanda writes about—often a middle-class world where students in their sneakers switch comfortably between Hollywood films and old Igbo legends—is, on the other hand, very familiar.
One of my favourite small moments in Adichie's writing is the part, in an early story, where the narrator’s family has to leave their house behind, abandoning leather-bound books, old china, a woman’s lavender wig specially imported from Paris. They leave in “Papa’s Peugeot”.
Chimamanda writes, “Papa stopped the car often to wipe the dust off the windscreen, and he drove at a crawl, because of the crowds. Women with babies tied to their backs, pulling at toddlers, carrying pots on their heads. Men pulling goats and bicycles, carrying wood boxes and yams. Children, so many children. The dust swirled all around, like a translucent brown blanket. An exodus clothed in dusty hope. It took a while before it struck me that, like these people, we were now refugees.”
This is what makes the work of this young writer—she has not yet turned 30—so special; the fact that she can offer both the view from the Peugeot and the view from ground level, with equal assurance.
On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s website , a button invites readers to ‘Tell Your Biafra Story’. That apparently ordinary link tells an extraordinary story. Chimamanda, whose book Half of a Yellow Sun won the Orange Prize for fiction recently, is the best-known of a small but growing group of “African writers” who are challenging the stereotype of what it means, as one of them sardonically put it, to “write in African”.
“Girls I had seen struggle at the water pump and hit each other with plastic buckets, girls who had cut holes in each other’s bras as they hung out to dry, now held hands and sang,” Chimamanda writes. “Instead of ‘Nigeria, we hail thee,’ they sang, ‘Biafra, we hail thee.’ I joined them, singing, clapping, talking. We did not mention the massacres, the way Igbos had been hunted house to house, pulled from where they crouched in trees, by bright-eyed people screaming Jihad, screaming Nyamiri, nyamiri.”
There are currently 56 stories up in the ‘Tell Your Biafra Story’ section. Ugwueze Alozie shares memories of being a 7-year-old during the war: “Hunger and sickness killed so many children… After the war, the Nigerian soldiers seized our sisters for wives…” Chiedu Ezeneah offers Chimamanda a sonnet. Shirin writes about the death of a secretary called Hyacinth, and the impact it made on her as a schoolgirl.
The people who share their memories with Chimamanda may not share her talent, the way she balances terror against the banal, blood and gore against small epiphanies, war against the ordinary rhythms of life. But Chimamanda believes that their voices and their stories are important, even crucial. These are the stories that CNN and the BBC don’t cover. She believes that part of her work as a writer is to create a space where those who are normally invisible can be seen, and heard.
In her first book, Purple Hibiscus, she gave herself the freedom to disturb both sets of readers—African readers, by speaking openly about subjects not considered fit for public discussion (massacres, girlfriends), and Western readers, by not conforming to the rigid stereotypes that African writers are forced to wear like crinolines.
Many Indian writers would feel a sense of déjà vu if they read some of the comments on Chimamanda’s website from readers asking her to present a better picture of Nigeria to the world, or not to rake up old troubles. And many Indian writers would smile wryly if they read what Hillary Mantel, a fine writer and critic herself, had to say about Chimamanda Adichie’s work: “There is no wilful exoticism: no playing to the gallery of Western expectation.”
Mantel accepts tacitly that exoticism is what the world has come to expect from a certain kind of African writing. The African novel was supposed to be all about vivid colours and vastness, wars and bloodshed, and the ideal African novel would, of course, be written by a white man. Mantel also gestures at the fact that many young writers in Africa—as in India—do end up “playing to the gallery of Western expectation”, if for no other reason than that the main readers for their books are in the West.
What I love about Chimamanda Adichie’s work is that it moves away from all expectations. As a young student, she was once told by a professor that her story about middle-class Africans felt inauthentic to him—this was not his vision of Africa. Sometimes, Western readers have expressed their sense of dislocation at her evocation of an Africa where Africans might employ houseboys, or listen to jazz, or treasure beautiful old furniture. To Indians, the world Chimamanda writes about—often a middle-class world where students in their sneakers switch comfortably between Hollywood films and old Igbo legends—is, on the other hand, very familiar.
One of my favourite small moments in Adichie's writing is the part, in an early story, where the narrator’s family has to leave their house behind, abandoning leather-bound books, old china, a woman’s lavender wig specially imported from Paris. They leave in “Papa’s Peugeot”.
Chimamanda writes, “Papa stopped the car often to wipe the dust off the windscreen, and he drove at a crawl, because of the crowds. Women with babies tied to their backs, pulling at toddlers, carrying pots on their heads. Men pulling goats and bicycles, carrying wood boxes and yams. Children, so many children. The dust swirled all around, like a translucent brown blanket. An exodus clothed in dusty hope. It took a while before it struck me that, like these people, we were now refugees.”
This is what makes the work of this young writer—she has not yet turned 30—so special; the fact that she can offer both the view from the Peugeot and the view from ground level, with equal assurance.
1984 and the end of privacy
(Published in the Business Standard, June 5, 2007)
In the late 1940s, George Orwell battled sickness almost constantly, often spending months on end in the hospital. Illness, for him, was a curious creative trigger: he did some of his best work in the worst physical health.
By 1947, he was writing to his literary agent: “"I have been vy unwell & intend to stay in bed for some weeks & try & get right again...I have finished the rough draft of my novel, so I ought to get the book done by abt May or June… I can't work in my present state - constant high temperature etc'."
It was worth the wait; reading Orwell’s manuscript, his publisher Warburg, of the legendary firm Secker & Warburg, said bluntly: “This is the most terrifying book I have ever read.”
According to a survey conducted this week, the public believes that it is this book, a work published in 1948 about 1984, that most clearly defines the 20th century.
1984 was an instant success in the post-world war decades; the enthusiasm for the book peaked, as you would guess, in the year 1984. The novel remains one of the most haunting works of 20th century writing. It is accepted as a classic work of science fiction, prophetic in Orwell’s notions of ‘Big Brother’, Newspeak and Doublethink.
Reading it today as ‘the Definitive Novel of the 20th Century’ is a curious experience. My memories of the book centre around Winston’s resentment of Big Brother. Most readers of 1984 will recollect Winston’s brief, despairing grab at freedom through a forbidden love affair, and his eventual betrayal of the woman he loves. Many more will know the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, especially in the age of reality television where this has been taken all too literally, and in the 21st century, everyone over the age of 12 can identify the shifty, glib, meaningless phrases of Newspeak without difficulty.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” the first paragraph of 1984 begins. “Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.”
Orwell wasn’t describing a future world here, but the reality of post-war England. It was a grimy place, where the lifts didn’t work, where a “fruity voice” on the broadcasting service would read out a list of figures that had something to do with pig-iron production, where the houses were mean and ramshackle.
This is the point where, in Chapter One, Orwell made the first connection that would place 1984 in the category of the brilliant rather than the merely brilliantly effective. The most prized object in Winston’s apartment is “a peculiarly beautiful book”, with leaves of “smooth creamy paper, yellowed with age”. You can still hear the wistful longing of the deprived post-war writer in that description, hungering for notebooks that were short in supply by 1947, when Orwell was hard at work on his novel. But there was more. Winston intends to keep a diary in his precious notebook—in a world where keeping a diary is a subversive act, and where “even with nothing written in it”, the notebook is “a compromising possession”.
This is where Orwell had come to grips with the real dilemma of the 20th century. Many of the other books on the list of definitive 20th century novels cover one or another aspect of the last hundred years. J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has gained notoriety as the preferred reading of the stalkers and lone, mad gunslingers of our world, but it remains one of the best analyses of the dissociation and loneliness endemic to the 20th century. Anne Frank’s Diary, the reflections of a young Jewish girl coming of age in hiding in Nazi Germany, only to die in the concentration camps, is one of the classic, and most moving, documents of the 20th century.
But no other writer captures Orwell’s sense of what is really precious, and threatened, in the 20th century—the idea of privacy. Orwell understood more than most, and earlier than all of us, how the information age would play out. He understood that personal privacy, the right to our own secret beliefs, would be the first to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. In the 1940s, it was easy to see how this century would be dingy, grimy, even ugly. It was harder to see how relentless the chatter and roar of the information age would be. Or to visualize a world where personal privacy and the ancient right to the self counted for nothing.
Orwell saw this before almost any of the other great writers of his time did, and for that reason alone, 1984 deserves to stand as the iconic work of the 20th century.
In the late 1940s, George Orwell battled sickness almost constantly, often spending months on end in the hospital. Illness, for him, was a curious creative trigger: he did some of his best work in the worst physical health.
By 1947, he was writing to his literary agent: “"I have been vy unwell & intend to stay in bed for some weeks & try & get right again...I have finished the rough draft of my novel, so I ought to get the book done by abt May or June… I can't work in my present state - constant high temperature etc'."
It was worth the wait; reading Orwell’s manuscript, his publisher Warburg, of the legendary firm Secker & Warburg, said bluntly: “This is the most terrifying book I have ever read.”
According to a survey conducted this week, the public believes that it is this book, a work published in 1948 about 1984, that most clearly defines the 20th century.
1984 was an instant success in the post-world war decades; the enthusiasm for the book peaked, as you would guess, in the year 1984. The novel remains one of the most haunting works of 20th century writing. It is accepted as a classic work of science fiction, prophetic in Orwell’s notions of ‘Big Brother’, Newspeak and Doublethink.
Reading it today as ‘the Definitive Novel of the 20th Century’ is a curious experience. My memories of the book centre around Winston’s resentment of Big Brother. Most readers of 1984 will recollect Winston’s brief, despairing grab at freedom through a forbidden love affair, and his eventual betrayal of the woman he loves. Many more will know the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, especially in the age of reality television where this has been taken all too literally, and in the 21st century, everyone over the age of 12 can identify the shifty, glib, meaningless phrases of Newspeak without difficulty.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” the first paragraph of 1984 begins. “Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.”
Orwell wasn’t describing a future world here, but the reality of post-war England. It was a grimy place, where the lifts didn’t work, where a “fruity voice” on the broadcasting service would read out a list of figures that had something to do with pig-iron production, where the houses were mean and ramshackle.
This is the point where, in Chapter One, Orwell made the first connection that would place 1984 in the category of the brilliant rather than the merely brilliantly effective. The most prized object in Winston’s apartment is “a peculiarly beautiful book”, with leaves of “smooth creamy paper, yellowed with age”. You can still hear the wistful longing of the deprived post-war writer in that description, hungering for notebooks that were short in supply by 1947, when Orwell was hard at work on his novel. But there was more. Winston intends to keep a diary in his precious notebook—in a world where keeping a diary is a subversive act, and where “even with nothing written in it”, the notebook is “a compromising possession”.
This is where Orwell had come to grips with the real dilemma of the 20th century. Many of the other books on the list of definitive 20th century novels cover one or another aspect of the last hundred years. J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has gained notoriety as the preferred reading of the stalkers and lone, mad gunslingers of our world, but it remains one of the best analyses of the dissociation and loneliness endemic to the 20th century. Anne Frank’s Diary, the reflections of a young Jewish girl coming of age in hiding in Nazi Germany, only to die in the concentration camps, is one of the classic, and most moving, documents of the 20th century.
But no other writer captures Orwell’s sense of what is really precious, and threatened, in the 20th century—the idea of privacy. Orwell understood more than most, and earlier than all of us, how the information age would play out. He understood that personal privacy, the right to our own secret beliefs, would be the first to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. In the 1940s, it was easy to see how this century would be dingy, grimy, even ugly. It was harder to see how relentless the chatter and roar of the information age would be. Or to visualize a world where personal privacy and the ancient right to the self counted for nothing.
Orwell saw this before almost any of the other great writers of his time did, and for that reason alone, 1984 deserves to stand as the iconic work of the 20th century.
100 % Sparkly New Writing
(Published in the Business Standard, May 7, 2007)
One of the most touching love stories of our times has to be the one between the publishing industry and debutant authors. It isn’t, admittedly, easy on the debutant authors, who can find themselves loved, cherished, seduced and then cast aside on the remainder heap as the industry rushes off in pursuit of the next hot young writer, but it is, as the blurbs have it, A True Heartwarming Love Story.
Editors love debut writers because they come with no history—read no negative sales record or YouTube video clips of the time they barfed on a Nobel Prize winner—and are therefore acceptable to both the marketing and the publicity department. Marketing and publicity departments love debut writers because they rarely read the fine print in contracts. Literary agents love debut writers because a Fresh New Discovery is worth its weight in gold, in terms of the other writers and editors who will then flock to the agent and not argue overmuch over mere trifles like percentage points when it comes to the agent’s cut.
Readers seldom love debut writers, and with good reason. Every literary season brings along a clutch of writers whom you’re supposed to have read. And it’s increasingly hard to tell whether you should read “the new Nabokov” or “the new Rushdie” or even “the new J K Rowlings”. If you add the plethora of helpful forced marriages to this—“the O C meets James Joyce”, “a cross between Jane Eyre and Jane Goodall” etc—it’s hard for the honest reader not to suspect that the really talented, brilliant debut writer is a mythical beast.
This summer, though, four previously unpublished writers restored my faith in the mirage of the truly good debut writer. Five if you count Ambarish Satwik, whose new novel Perineum is a splendidly ribald exploration of “the nether parts of Empire”—for once, the blurb that calls this an “original and brilliant debut” is spot on.
The other four, like Satwik, take established genres and break the mould, which is what makes reading them so much fun.
Yiyun Li learned English for the first time only six years before she wrote a collection of short stories called A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. In the title story, Mr Shi, the father of a young Chinese-American woman, accuses his daughter of talking over the phone with “immodesty”, of laughing “like a prostitute”.
“…We talk in English and it’s easier. I don’t talk well in Chinese,” the young woman replies. “… Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk in that language. It makes you a new person.”
Perhaps the most haunting of Yiyun Li’s characters is a young man hired as an impersonator for the close resemblance he bears to the dictator of that time, but all her characters break down the wall between the old, romantic China and the country of today’s headlines.
Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a much gentler novel. Torday is a fisherman himself, and that knowledge and love of the sport of angling comes through in this whimsical book about a UK government-sponsored project to get salmon running through the waters of Yemen. The project has unexpected, even dark, consequences, but Torday’s kindly vision draws us beyond the expected parodies into trickier spaces.
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics may be the most consistently incorrectly-shelved book in history since Hunter Thomson made it to the Wildlife section in a few Indian bookstores. It’s a knowing, sassy, irreverent take on the death-onna-campus novel, and is redeemed from an overdose of uber-coolness by the character of its narrator, Blue van Meer. In blurbspeak, cross The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with its portrait of an obsessive and compelling teacher, with a riveting new-age mystery, add in noir humour, and you have one of the most enjoyable reads of 2007. It brings you all the joys of watching mindless TV soaps from a position of superiority, where you can joke about the silly plot twists and turns while referencing Aeschylus.
Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts initially feels like a mashup of all the clever “missing memory” movies and a literary thriller, until you realize that this debut author is deeply, and obsessively, in love with the trashy B-grade film, Jaws. Hall throws in every David Foster Wallace device ever invented—the clever text-within-text references, the shark created out of lines of type, the throwaway literary allusions. But at its heart, this is a beautifully imagined remake of the film that made us worry about whether we would ever get in, or out, of the water, without hearing that mind-numbing da-da-da-da-da theme. Hall’s bet, in between a moving elegy to love, loss and moving on, is we won’t, and I’m with him.
One of the most touching love stories of our times has to be the one between the publishing industry and debutant authors. It isn’t, admittedly, easy on the debutant authors, who can find themselves loved, cherished, seduced and then cast aside on the remainder heap as the industry rushes off in pursuit of the next hot young writer, but it is, as the blurbs have it, A True Heartwarming Love Story.
Editors love debut writers because they come with no history—read no negative sales record or YouTube video clips of the time they barfed on a Nobel Prize winner—and are therefore acceptable to both the marketing and the publicity department. Marketing and publicity departments love debut writers because they rarely read the fine print in contracts. Literary agents love debut writers because a Fresh New Discovery is worth its weight in gold, in terms of the other writers and editors who will then flock to the agent and not argue overmuch over mere trifles like percentage points when it comes to the agent’s cut.
Readers seldom love debut writers, and with good reason. Every literary season brings along a clutch of writers whom you’re supposed to have read. And it’s increasingly hard to tell whether you should read “the new Nabokov” or “the new Rushdie” or even “the new J K Rowlings”. If you add the plethora of helpful forced marriages to this—“the O C meets James Joyce”, “a cross between Jane Eyre and Jane Goodall” etc—it’s hard for the honest reader not to suspect that the really talented, brilliant debut writer is a mythical beast.
This summer, though, four previously unpublished writers restored my faith in the mirage of the truly good debut writer. Five if you count Ambarish Satwik, whose new novel Perineum is a splendidly ribald exploration of “the nether parts of Empire”—for once, the blurb that calls this an “original and brilliant debut” is spot on.
The other four, like Satwik, take established genres and break the mould, which is what makes reading them so much fun.
Yiyun Li learned English for the first time only six years before she wrote a collection of short stories called A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. In the title story, Mr Shi, the father of a young Chinese-American woman, accuses his daughter of talking over the phone with “immodesty”, of laughing “like a prostitute”.
“…We talk in English and it’s easier. I don’t talk well in Chinese,” the young woman replies. “… Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk in that language. It makes you a new person.”
Perhaps the most haunting of Yiyun Li’s characters is a young man hired as an impersonator for the close resemblance he bears to the dictator of that time, but all her characters break down the wall between the old, romantic China and the country of today’s headlines.
Paul Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a much gentler novel. Torday is a fisherman himself, and that knowledge and love of the sport of angling comes through in this whimsical book about a UK government-sponsored project to get salmon running through the waters of Yemen. The project has unexpected, even dark, consequences, but Torday’s kindly vision draws us beyond the expected parodies into trickier spaces.
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics may be the most consistently incorrectly-shelved book in history since Hunter Thomson made it to the Wildlife section in a few Indian bookstores. It’s a knowing, sassy, irreverent take on the death-onna-campus novel, and is redeemed from an overdose of uber-coolness by the character of its narrator, Blue van Meer. In blurbspeak, cross The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with its portrait of an obsessive and compelling teacher, with a riveting new-age mystery, add in noir humour, and you have one of the most enjoyable reads of 2007. It brings you all the joys of watching mindless TV soaps from a position of superiority, where you can joke about the silly plot twists and turns while referencing Aeschylus.
Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts initially feels like a mashup of all the clever “missing memory” movies and a literary thriller, until you realize that this debut author is deeply, and obsessively, in love with the trashy B-grade film, Jaws. Hall throws in every David Foster Wallace device ever invented—the clever text-within-text references, the shark created out of lines of type, the throwaway literary allusions. But at its heart, this is a beautifully imagined remake of the film that made us worry about whether we would ever get in, or out, of the water, without hearing that mind-numbing da-da-da-da-da theme. Hall’s bet, in between a moving elegy to love, loss and moving on, is we won’t, and I’m with him.
In Conversation with Kiran Desai: Part I
(Published in the IIC Quarterly, June 2007)
Kiran Desai, interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
Kiran Desai’s first brush with fame came in 1997, when Salman Rushdie included the young writer in his controversial anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork. Rushdie described her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, as “lush and intensely imagined”. Kiran, who has lived in Chandigarh, Delhi and New York, spent the next nine years in America earning a living, working on her second novel and occasionally traveling with her mother, eminent writer Anita Desai. Inheritance of Loss moves between the crumbling world of the hill station of Kalimpong at a time of insurgency and the underground world of New York’s immigrant workers. The novel was critically acclaimed and won the Booker Prize in 2006. In this freeflowing conversation in Delhi, Kiran Desai discussed her writing, “enormously fat” books, immigrant New York and language with Ira Pande and Nilanjana S Roy.
Ira Pande: I’m impressed by how you managed to sustain the feeling for this book over such a long period of time—nine years.
Kiran Desai: We writers get competitive about this—how long did it take Mohsin (Hamid) to write his book? Many years… Nadeem Aslam took eleven years.
IP: More, I thought, and he shut himself in a room…
KD: He took eleven years, I took seven. It wasn’t hard to sustain the feeling for the book, not hard at all. It was hard to finish, to put a stop to it, to go the other way from writing in every direction—that was easy, the difficult thing was realizing that to make a book, I had to do the opposite process and start throwing out bits. I cut a lot from the book.
Nilanjana Roy: I heard you threw out about eight chapters?
KD: It wasn’t even eight chapters, it was 1,500 pages, and 800 pages, and 350 pages of it…
IP: People have started to complain about the doorstopper book from India, because everyone’s writing these enormously fat books. Sometimes I feel it would work better if there was more editorial intervention, because as a writer, few could do what you did—chuck out whole bits on your own.
KD: It is hard, because there are so many angles, you can go on forever, turning something around, going into another character, another angle of the whole thing. You have to realize you can’t just go on forever, but there is a trend towards big books all over the world. Look at American books—the new (Thomas) Pynchon, (Dave) Eggers..
NR: In a way it was a pity you didn’t do this, just to correct the gender imbalance.
KD: It is a gender thing! My mother (the writer Anita Desai) was saying this, how young men are encouraged to write really, really big books, and women are often made to cut that down, almost as if it is a gender thing, that women write smaller, slimmer books and men write big, ambitious books. And the men are being accused of—what is the phrase?—hysterical realism. Which is funny, that’s an amusing gender argument, where men are accused of being hysterical and women are being curbed and careful.
I sometimes think it’s just the process of writing. We work on a computer, it’s easy to keep everything, to research, add more and more. I bet if computers weren’t around, a lot of men would write smaller books. Someone said that with Dave Egger it’s really obvious—all those additions and all those footnotes that he can only do because he can play on the computer. But Salman (Rushdie) was saying, I realize we should write shorter books because we get paid the same amount! (Laughs)
IP: Can I ask you about The Inheritance of Loss? Did the title suggest the book, or did the book suggest the title?
KD: The title came right at the end. I’m still not sure it completely fits. A lot of people didn’t like it—I’ve been told it sounds like a self-help manual, someone said, you should just call it The Loss of Inheritance, and that would make much more sense.
I was struggling to come up with something because it’s a book of so many different parts. I thought of all the typical ones: The Judge of Kalimpong—sounds vaguely like colonial literature, The House of Cho Oyu, and then this came up.
NR: It struck me how much loneliness and isolation there is in the book. Biju, the cook’s son in America, Sai, cut off from a normal childhood, the judge alone in England, where you almost feel sorry for him, despite his harshness later… Was that taken from family history?
KD: Not quite that close, but the judge’s story was certainly taken from hearing about the experiences of people going to England. There is often an attempt to cover up what actually happens when you go abroad. For all immigrants, the story that you create at the end is the story you can live with and that you like to tell. It’s not what actually happened. Immigration is like the act of translation, the possibilities of dishonesty are so big, so immense. It’s a place where you can embroider any kind of story, and I think most people do. You also want to go there saying that you haven’t come struggling like other immigrants might have, you’ve come from a position of dignity, it’s also an attempt to create your past, I think, in a different way. You have to make up a story about that as well.
The loneliness is immense. You’re plucked from everything you know, your entire community, you’re telling lies to everybody, immigrants are telling lies to other immigrants. I think people find themselves in really lonely places. When I think of myself, I grew up speaking English and being brought up, in a way, to leave successfully. That’s what my father said, sadly, to one of his friends: “What we did in our generation, we made good immigrants.” He was also brought up to be a good immigrant and he chose not to be one.
NR: You left at 14, when you were studying at a convent in Delhi, are there echoes of that school in the convent you described in your book?
KD: Oh god, it was awful. I got a note from one of the nuns, I almost fell off my chair, I was so scared (laughs) The fear was immediately there. It was so awful, I wonder whether other people’s experiences were so bad.
IP: The fact that all of us did go to these Catholic convents also opened up for us the possibility of looking at another identity for ourselves. I remember leading two completely dissimilar lives. I came from a very traditional, conservative family, puja was part of my day, but I also went and did Angelus and Benediction and all the rest. It made me a better Hindu after I was exposed to Catholicism. I began to understand and respect what we had much more. What was your convent experience like?
KD: I think of dislocation. We went first to Kalimpong, briefly, went back to Loreto, briefly, went to England for a year, and went to the states, and at a really bad time—it was 13 or 14, that age for me. But when I look back at that convent education, I hope they’re not bringing up children in that same way, because every bit of art is stamped out. Wanting to write, or paint, that side of things.
NR: How did you get that back?
KD: It took a long time. I saw reading as an escape from this world. Writing came later, at a much happier and freer time. It was encouraged, it was considered a legitimate activity. I am really lucky for that brief bit of space.
IP: In India you lived in Delhi and in Kalimpong; which cities do you remember best?
KD: I lived in Chandigarh as well, and Bombay for a while, and then Delhi. I lived in Delhi the longest. And now there’s totally new things I love about Delhi, I come back, I go to my father’s house, climb up on to the rooftop. And it’s lovely. The sun sets by the idgah, and we listen to Abida Parveen singing Khusro. Those are the best, those are the good bits of Delhi for me.
IP: And the bad bits?
KD: The bad bits? For me it was the memories of Loreto Convent, now it’s just a completely different relationship with Delhi. I love Bombay, I have very happy memories of Bombay. If you grow up in Bombay, if you spend part of your childhood in Bombay, you get deeply attached to it. It’s true of everybodyI know who’s grown up in that city. And I always envied Bombay writers –they seemed to have that emotional depth of attachment to Bombay that seems to power all their writing forever! And it’s a glamorous city, the whole package, the Mafia and Bollywood, and crime on that glamorous scale. For a long while, Delhi writers felt slightly bad, we only had monuments.
NR: How about New York? So many of you seem to be colonizing New York now.
KD: There’s such a huge number of Indian writers living in New York, and few write about it. Suketu is one of the first to venture into New York, and he really should do it; I think he was 14 when he went there, so he has childhood memories of growing up. Akhil Sharma may be writing about it, New Jersey.. so it is shifting.
NR: Are you uncomfortable with labels such as “diaspora writer”, or “immigrant writer”?
KD: You know, you go down those roads and inevitably end up in a place that’s senseless after a bit. I always hope that I’ll hear some writer talking about these issues in a really clever way so that I can copy what they say, but nobody has. I haven’t heard anyone really manage to undo these knots. You stop talking about literature all together, and you start talking about class and immigration, and end up with a debate that’s about much bigger arguments. You can’t escape labels as a writer…
NR: Inheritance would have been a lot less rich if you hadn’t had that split perspective, the New York immigrant underworld on one hand, the crumbling houses of privilege in Kalimpong on the other…
KD: It’s a completely half-and-half book.
NR: How did you start the process of looking at the immigrant population in New York?
KD: It wasn’t hard to find those stories. Those stories are as easily available as they are here. It’s the same people on both sides of the world; the woman who cleans your house in India, those stories come into your house every single day. It’s the same in New York. The characters are made up of people I know, in bits and pieces—like the Zanzibarian community, I couldn’t have made that up. People who worked in a little bakery near where I used to live; all the stories of the rats are really based on what happened. There’s always a mixture, journalists always ask you how much is fact and how much fiction, but it’s always a mixture.
IP: You’ve spoken a lot about your mother’s presence and her support for you and her general aura, and it is visible. Shashi Deshpande (the writer) said she sometimes felt a sense of déjà vu reading you, that it could be Anita in a younger voice. Quite apart from the mother-daughter relationship that you share, which is obviously very close, were you influenced by her style of writing? Her way of looking at India, because she’s also had several dislocations, and she’s tread almost the same ground, except that it was in another time and in another way.
KD: I was conscious of that, the realization that what we were living through was something that she had lived through and that her parents had lived through. She grew up in an India that was very different from the India of a lot of the people around her, because she had a German mother and her father was a refugee from Bangladesh and had very little family in India as well. So she grew up in a very strange little community, I think, somewhat dislocated, on her own.
So was my father, because his parents left Gujarat ages ago, my grandfather went on this long journey to England, spent the rest of his life in Allahabad and never saw his relatives. There was hardly any communication with them. And that was a whole process, of breaking what we think of as being so deeply Indian, these bonds of community and family and religion.
On my father’s side it was ambition to be part of the ruling class, but it was also part of the idea of a secular India, which was really new. He was breaking all of this and gaining a wider idea of India, he was also losing something very old, that had gone back as far as anyone could remember. It’s a process that happened within India as well as within the community of people who had left, who had always been leaving and returning.
NR: Do your mother and you travel a lot together?
KD: Yes, we did, still do… When we left India, it was just the two of us. I was the youngest child, so I was taken along. We both went through that whole immigrant thing together. She had spent her entire life in India at that point, and all of a sudden, in her late forties, I think, she had to learn how to teach. She was out of the whole cozy world of being a middle-class Indian woman, and suddenly she had to make a living, learn how to drive in different countries, get her pension, all the rest of it, it must have been very difficult.
IP: Was it visible for you then?
KD: No, it’s only now I realize how difficult it must have been. She kept it from me, kept all the worry for me. I certainly must have been influenced by her, her writing…
(contd in next post)
Kiran Desai, interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
Kiran Desai’s first brush with fame came in 1997, when Salman Rushdie included the young writer in his controversial anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork. Rushdie described her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, as “lush and intensely imagined”. Kiran, who has lived in Chandigarh, Delhi and New York, spent the next nine years in America earning a living, working on her second novel and occasionally traveling with her mother, eminent writer Anita Desai. Inheritance of Loss moves between the crumbling world of the hill station of Kalimpong at a time of insurgency and the underground world of New York’s immigrant workers. The novel was critically acclaimed and won the Booker Prize in 2006. In this freeflowing conversation in Delhi, Kiran Desai discussed her writing, “enormously fat” books, immigrant New York and language with Ira Pande and Nilanjana S Roy.
Ira Pande: I’m impressed by how you managed to sustain the feeling for this book over such a long period of time—nine years.
Kiran Desai: We writers get competitive about this—how long did it take Mohsin (Hamid) to write his book? Many years… Nadeem Aslam took eleven years.
IP: More, I thought, and he shut himself in a room…
KD: He took eleven years, I took seven. It wasn’t hard to sustain the feeling for the book, not hard at all. It was hard to finish, to put a stop to it, to go the other way from writing in every direction—that was easy, the difficult thing was realizing that to make a book, I had to do the opposite process and start throwing out bits. I cut a lot from the book.
Nilanjana Roy: I heard you threw out about eight chapters?
KD: It wasn’t even eight chapters, it was 1,500 pages, and 800 pages, and 350 pages of it…
IP: People have started to complain about the doorstopper book from India, because everyone’s writing these enormously fat books. Sometimes I feel it would work better if there was more editorial intervention, because as a writer, few could do what you did—chuck out whole bits on your own.
KD: It is hard, because there are so many angles, you can go on forever, turning something around, going into another character, another angle of the whole thing. You have to realize you can’t just go on forever, but there is a trend towards big books all over the world. Look at American books—the new (Thomas) Pynchon, (Dave) Eggers..
NR: In a way it was a pity you didn’t do this, just to correct the gender imbalance.
KD: It is a gender thing! My mother (the writer Anita Desai) was saying this, how young men are encouraged to write really, really big books, and women are often made to cut that down, almost as if it is a gender thing, that women write smaller, slimmer books and men write big, ambitious books. And the men are being accused of—what is the phrase?—hysterical realism. Which is funny, that’s an amusing gender argument, where men are accused of being hysterical and women are being curbed and careful.
I sometimes think it’s just the process of writing. We work on a computer, it’s easy to keep everything, to research, add more and more. I bet if computers weren’t around, a lot of men would write smaller books. Someone said that with Dave Egger it’s really obvious—all those additions and all those footnotes that he can only do because he can play on the computer. But Salman (Rushdie) was saying, I realize we should write shorter books because we get paid the same amount! (Laughs)
IP: Can I ask you about The Inheritance of Loss? Did the title suggest the book, or did the book suggest the title?
KD: The title came right at the end. I’m still not sure it completely fits. A lot of people didn’t like it—I’ve been told it sounds like a self-help manual, someone said, you should just call it The Loss of Inheritance, and that would make much more sense.
I was struggling to come up with something because it’s a book of so many different parts. I thought of all the typical ones: The Judge of Kalimpong—sounds vaguely like colonial literature, The House of Cho Oyu, and then this came up.
NR: It struck me how much loneliness and isolation there is in the book. Biju, the cook’s son in America, Sai, cut off from a normal childhood, the judge alone in England, where you almost feel sorry for him, despite his harshness later… Was that taken from family history?
KD: Not quite that close, but the judge’s story was certainly taken from hearing about the experiences of people going to England. There is often an attempt to cover up what actually happens when you go abroad. For all immigrants, the story that you create at the end is the story you can live with and that you like to tell. It’s not what actually happened. Immigration is like the act of translation, the possibilities of dishonesty are so big, so immense. It’s a place where you can embroider any kind of story, and I think most people do. You also want to go there saying that you haven’t come struggling like other immigrants might have, you’ve come from a position of dignity, it’s also an attempt to create your past, I think, in a different way. You have to make up a story about that as well.
The loneliness is immense. You’re plucked from everything you know, your entire community, you’re telling lies to everybody, immigrants are telling lies to other immigrants. I think people find themselves in really lonely places. When I think of myself, I grew up speaking English and being brought up, in a way, to leave successfully. That’s what my father said, sadly, to one of his friends: “What we did in our generation, we made good immigrants.” He was also brought up to be a good immigrant and he chose not to be one.
NR: You left at 14, when you were studying at a convent in Delhi, are there echoes of that school in the convent you described in your book?
KD: Oh god, it was awful. I got a note from one of the nuns, I almost fell off my chair, I was so scared (laughs) The fear was immediately there. It was so awful, I wonder whether other people’s experiences were so bad.
IP: The fact that all of us did go to these Catholic convents also opened up for us the possibility of looking at another identity for ourselves. I remember leading two completely dissimilar lives. I came from a very traditional, conservative family, puja was part of my day, but I also went and did Angelus and Benediction and all the rest. It made me a better Hindu after I was exposed to Catholicism. I began to understand and respect what we had much more. What was your convent experience like?
KD: I think of dislocation. We went first to Kalimpong, briefly, went back to Loreto, briefly, went to England for a year, and went to the states, and at a really bad time—it was 13 or 14, that age for me. But when I look back at that convent education, I hope they’re not bringing up children in that same way, because every bit of art is stamped out. Wanting to write, or paint, that side of things.
NR: How did you get that back?
KD: It took a long time. I saw reading as an escape from this world. Writing came later, at a much happier and freer time. It was encouraged, it was considered a legitimate activity. I am really lucky for that brief bit of space.
IP: In India you lived in Delhi and in Kalimpong; which cities do you remember best?
KD: I lived in Chandigarh as well, and Bombay for a while, and then Delhi. I lived in Delhi the longest. And now there’s totally new things I love about Delhi, I come back, I go to my father’s house, climb up on to the rooftop. And it’s lovely. The sun sets by the idgah, and we listen to Abida Parveen singing Khusro. Those are the best, those are the good bits of Delhi for me.
IP: And the bad bits?
KD: The bad bits? For me it was the memories of Loreto Convent, now it’s just a completely different relationship with Delhi. I love Bombay, I have very happy memories of Bombay. If you grow up in Bombay, if you spend part of your childhood in Bombay, you get deeply attached to it. It’s true of everybodyI know who’s grown up in that city. And I always envied Bombay writers –they seemed to have that emotional depth of attachment to Bombay that seems to power all their writing forever! And it’s a glamorous city, the whole package, the Mafia and Bollywood, and crime on that glamorous scale. For a long while, Delhi writers felt slightly bad, we only had monuments.
NR: How about New York? So many of you seem to be colonizing New York now.
KD: There’s such a huge number of Indian writers living in New York, and few write about it. Suketu is one of the first to venture into New York, and he really should do it; I think he was 14 when he went there, so he has childhood memories of growing up. Akhil Sharma may be writing about it, New Jersey.. so it is shifting.
NR: Are you uncomfortable with labels such as “diaspora writer”, or “immigrant writer”?
KD: You know, you go down those roads and inevitably end up in a place that’s senseless after a bit. I always hope that I’ll hear some writer talking about these issues in a really clever way so that I can copy what they say, but nobody has. I haven’t heard anyone really manage to undo these knots. You stop talking about literature all together, and you start talking about class and immigration, and end up with a debate that’s about much bigger arguments. You can’t escape labels as a writer…
NR: Inheritance would have been a lot less rich if you hadn’t had that split perspective, the New York immigrant underworld on one hand, the crumbling houses of privilege in Kalimpong on the other…
KD: It’s a completely half-and-half book.
NR: How did you start the process of looking at the immigrant population in New York?
KD: It wasn’t hard to find those stories. Those stories are as easily available as they are here. It’s the same people on both sides of the world; the woman who cleans your house in India, those stories come into your house every single day. It’s the same in New York. The characters are made up of people I know, in bits and pieces—like the Zanzibarian community, I couldn’t have made that up. People who worked in a little bakery near where I used to live; all the stories of the rats are really based on what happened. There’s always a mixture, journalists always ask you how much is fact and how much fiction, but it’s always a mixture.
IP: You’ve spoken a lot about your mother’s presence and her support for you and her general aura, and it is visible. Shashi Deshpande (the writer) said she sometimes felt a sense of déjà vu reading you, that it could be Anita in a younger voice. Quite apart from the mother-daughter relationship that you share, which is obviously very close, were you influenced by her style of writing? Her way of looking at India, because she’s also had several dislocations, and she’s tread almost the same ground, except that it was in another time and in another way.
KD: I was conscious of that, the realization that what we were living through was something that she had lived through and that her parents had lived through. She grew up in an India that was very different from the India of a lot of the people around her, because she had a German mother and her father was a refugee from Bangladesh and had very little family in India as well. So she grew up in a very strange little community, I think, somewhat dislocated, on her own.
So was my father, because his parents left Gujarat ages ago, my grandfather went on this long journey to England, spent the rest of his life in Allahabad and never saw his relatives. There was hardly any communication with them. And that was a whole process, of breaking what we think of as being so deeply Indian, these bonds of community and family and religion.
On my father’s side it was ambition to be part of the ruling class, but it was also part of the idea of a secular India, which was really new. He was breaking all of this and gaining a wider idea of India, he was also losing something very old, that had gone back as far as anyone could remember. It’s a process that happened within India as well as within the community of people who had left, who had always been leaving and returning.
NR: Do your mother and you travel a lot together?
KD: Yes, we did, still do… When we left India, it was just the two of us. I was the youngest child, so I was taken along. We both went through that whole immigrant thing together. She had spent her entire life in India at that point, and all of a sudden, in her late forties, I think, she had to learn how to teach. She was out of the whole cozy world of being a middle-class Indian woman, and suddenly she had to make a living, learn how to drive in different countries, get her pension, all the rest of it, it must have been very difficult.
IP: Was it visible for you then?
KD: No, it’s only now I realize how difficult it must have been. She kept it from me, kept all the worry for me. I certainly must have been influenced by her, her writing…
(contd in next post)
In Conversation with Kiran Desai: Part II
(Published in the IIC Quarterly, June 2007)
Kiran Desai: Interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
(Continued from previous post)
Ira Pande: You said somewhere that as you enter that house, your mother’s house, you feel as if you’re in the presence of a writer.
Kiran Desai: It is strange to go into her house in New York because she lives very much in and among her books, and sometimes it feels like a house of real exile. A lot of immigrants like the thought of being exiled, because it’s so much more romantic, so much more elegant than being an immigrant. A lot of people who are immigrants will call themselves exiles…
But the word has a deeper meaning. People who are immigrants do feel that they’re exiled in many ways, even if the decision to leave has been their own. I go into her house and it does feel like the house of an exile, sometimes I walk into it and it’s like looking at those old Russian photographs of Osip Mandelstam’s house. How strange that my mother’s house should remind me of, you know, looking at photographs of a Russian poet’s house! But it has that atmosphere.
IP: And how do you feel when you come to India and enter your father’s house, what kind of change is that?
KD: I’m struck by how much at ease he is, in his own life. I was very conscious when writing this book that I’ve given up that complete ease. You never have it as an immigrant, when you pretend to fit in and you may even feel comfortable, but that kind of ease in your skin and in your house and in your language is missing.
I think as an immigrant your language is curbed, it becomes much more formal, in terms of communicating you have to hold it to a much more basic grammar in order to get your point across. The eccentricity of language goes, unless you really insist on centering yourself within the Indian community. You can’t keep the humour. It’s a really sad loss, and I could see a lot of the writers in Jaipur who had come from elsewhere, I saw it very much in Salman Rushdie, an incredible happiness in talking.
IP: I hadn’t thought of it this way, but a lot of the immigrant writers lack the ability to be irreverent in the way you can if you live here. We curse India all the time but when the same thing is said by somebody who lives abroad we get very defensive.
KD: This brings back vivid memories of growing up in India and having the foreign relatives arrive. And then after they’d left, we used to laugh at them...
Nilanjana S Roy: Was that what got you into trouble, when people in Nepal and Kalimpong objected to the way they were reflected in your novel?
KD: It was really unexpected, that bit of anger, I hadn’t expected it. And it only happened after the Booker, at first there was no bad response at all, only a good response. You try to write about characters in particular; suddenly you realize that you’re seen as representing a people. That’s always just terrible.
Your whole desire is to talk about what one human being might be going through against all these big forces, against what’s happening in the world. You’re writing in a world of complete imbalance, you aren’t trying to represent an entire people. It was just a muddy time, nobody there really knew what was going on in the early stages of the GNLF struggle.
Barkha Dutt (of NDTV) asked me during the Jaipur Festival, well, what is this mixture of sweet and threatening, I didn’t put it together in my head at the time, on stage. But of course that’s the whole argument against colonial literature, that you’re seeing the “natives” as being simultaneously sweet and naïve, but also as a threat. And my attempt at that moment was to describe what I saw when I was there.
Part of being Indian, or having a childhood in India, is that there will be a moment in your life when you will see normal life slide into violence, and you will hear the sound of a riot, and you will grow up hearing the sound of people screaming for their lives, and you will see fires burning. And you see all the boys in the market, and they’re suddenly out on the streets pulling people out of their cars and setting them on fire, and then it’s all over, and then they’re back in the market. I don’t know how you get your mind around it and your heart around it, you can’t.
NR: You were very ruthless in the book, when you pointed out that it’s not enough to be innocuous, harmless in the way that a lot of people who lived in and around Cho Oyu were. You said there was culpability, said it very clearly.
KD: That society is one I belong to, those two old Bengali sisters…
IP: I remember that lovely scene where the two sisters have their garden slowly being colonized by squatters.
KD: That scene was not made up, that scene of having to go and talk to the pradhan, where he said, I have to look after my people and who are you to have this land anyway—that was based on real life. There was sudden awareness then for us. You realize you were living in a complete fantasy, on this hillside where it’s madly beautiful, and you think you can have it, but you can’t have it. There are other people whose claim on it is much deeper.
NR: Will the Booker eventually free you up a bit?
KD: It’s such a strange prize, it has an effect on my life, but a prize doesn’t make you feel any different, really, it’s just a bizarre thing that’s happened. I’m not used to getting any prizes, I didn’t get any prizes in Loreto Convent!
IP: But there’s both sides to it; thankfully now you can afford to write.
KD: Yes, I can afford to write. It was hard. It was so hard, I didn’t mind that it was so hard, I don’t think you do mind if you’re writing, it doesn’t matter if you’re poor, but yes, I had no money at all, and I had to make a living and feed myself (starts laughing again) which is sad, but true! I lived in a smaller room, and then a smaller room, and then with more and more room mates, and more and more people, and finally in the end, it was really hard to work.
IP: Thankfully that’s behind you now, but the equally frightening thing is that now having got the Booker, your next book is going to be that much harder to write?
KD: In India, it seems more important than anywhere! It’s very strange, the whole prizegiving world is very strange. Publishers say it’s so useful, it brings attention to books, but it’s really scary, the focus is on three books, or four books, the rest get lost.
IP: Is there another book which one could look forward to?
KD: Not yet, I haven’t begun yet, even reading is hard for me right now.
NR: It’s strange, in terms of your writing career, this is just your second book, so you should be given the tolerance due to a writer who’s just starting to find her way.
KD: I feel as if I’ve got a long way to go. This book was an attempt to be direct and honest about a particular process, but I forgot to play. If you read Italo Calvino or someone like that, you realize that to lose that side of being a writer because it isn’t the right political moment is very tragic. I wouldn’t want to lose that imaginative ability for the sake of a literary trend.
IP: Kiran, thank you for being with us, and for your time.
Kiran Desai: Interviewed by Ira Pande and NSR.
(Continued from previous post)
Ira Pande: You said somewhere that as you enter that house, your mother’s house, you feel as if you’re in the presence of a writer.
Kiran Desai: It is strange to go into her house in New York because she lives very much in and among her books, and sometimes it feels like a house of real exile. A lot of immigrants like the thought of being exiled, because it’s so much more romantic, so much more elegant than being an immigrant. A lot of people who are immigrants will call themselves exiles…
But the word has a deeper meaning. People who are immigrants do feel that they’re exiled in many ways, even if the decision to leave has been their own. I go into her house and it does feel like the house of an exile, sometimes I walk into it and it’s like looking at those old Russian photographs of Osip Mandelstam’s house. How strange that my mother’s house should remind me of, you know, looking at photographs of a Russian poet’s house! But it has that atmosphere.
IP: And how do you feel when you come to India and enter your father’s house, what kind of change is that?
KD: I’m struck by how much at ease he is, in his own life. I was very conscious when writing this book that I’ve given up that complete ease. You never have it as an immigrant, when you pretend to fit in and you may even feel comfortable, but that kind of ease in your skin and in your house and in your language is missing.
I think as an immigrant your language is curbed, it becomes much more formal, in terms of communicating you have to hold it to a much more basic grammar in order to get your point across. The eccentricity of language goes, unless you really insist on centering yourself within the Indian community. You can’t keep the humour. It’s a really sad loss, and I could see a lot of the writers in Jaipur who had come from elsewhere, I saw it very much in Salman Rushdie, an incredible happiness in talking.
IP: I hadn’t thought of it this way, but a lot of the immigrant writers lack the ability to be irreverent in the way you can if you live here. We curse India all the time but when the same thing is said by somebody who lives abroad we get very defensive.
KD: This brings back vivid memories of growing up in India and having the foreign relatives arrive. And then after they’d left, we used to laugh at them...
Nilanjana S Roy: Was that what got you into trouble, when people in Nepal and Kalimpong objected to the way they were reflected in your novel?
KD: It was really unexpected, that bit of anger, I hadn’t expected it. And it only happened after the Booker, at first there was no bad response at all, only a good response. You try to write about characters in particular; suddenly you realize that you’re seen as representing a people. That’s always just terrible.
Your whole desire is to talk about what one human being might be going through against all these big forces, against what’s happening in the world. You’re writing in a world of complete imbalance, you aren’t trying to represent an entire people. It was just a muddy time, nobody there really knew what was going on in the early stages of the GNLF struggle.
Barkha Dutt (of NDTV) asked me during the Jaipur Festival, well, what is this mixture of sweet and threatening, I didn’t put it together in my head at the time, on stage. But of course that’s the whole argument against colonial literature, that you’re seeing the “natives” as being simultaneously sweet and naïve, but also as a threat. And my attempt at that moment was to describe what I saw when I was there.
Part of being Indian, or having a childhood in India, is that there will be a moment in your life when you will see normal life slide into violence, and you will hear the sound of a riot, and you will grow up hearing the sound of people screaming for their lives, and you will see fires burning. And you see all the boys in the market, and they’re suddenly out on the streets pulling people out of their cars and setting them on fire, and then it’s all over, and then they’re back in the market. I don’t know how you get your mind around it and your heart around it, you can’t.
NR: You were very ruthless in the book, when you pointed out that it’s not enough to be innocuous, harmless in the way that a lot of people who lived in and around Cho Oyu were. You said there was culpability, said it very clearly.
KD: That society is one I belong to, those two old Bengali sisters…
IP: I remember that lovely scene where the two sisters have their garden slowly being colonized by squatters.
KD: That scene was not made up, that scene of having to go and talk to the pradhan, where he said, I have to look after my people and who are you to have this land anyway—that was based on real life. There was sudden awareness then for us. You realize you were living in a complete fantasy, on this hillside where it’s madly beautiful, and you think you can have it, but you can’t have it. There are other people whose claim on it is much deeper.
NR: Will the Booker eventually free you up a bit?
KD: It’s such a strange prize, it has an effect on my life, but a prize doesn’t make you feel any different, really, it’s just a bizarre thing that’s happened. I’m not used to getting any prizes, I didn’t get any prizes in Loreto Convent!
IP: But there’s both sides to it; thankfully now you can afford to write.
KD: Yes, I can afford to write. It was hard. It was so hard, I didn’t mind that it was so hard, I don’t think you do mind if you’re writing, it doesn’t matter if you’re poor, but yes, I had no money at all, and I had to make a living and feed myself (starts laughing again) which is sad, but true! I lived in a smaller room, and then a smaller room, and then with more and more room mates, and more and more people, and finally in the end, it was really hard to work.
IP: Thankfully that’s behind you now, but the equally frightening thing is that now having got the Booker, your next book is going to be that much harder to write?
KD: In India, it seems more important than anywhere! It’s very strange, the whole prizegiving world is very strange. Publishers say it’s so useful, it brings attention to books, but it’s really scary, the focus is on three books, or four books, the rest get lost.
IP: Is there another book which one could look forward to?
KD: Not yet, I haven’t begun yet, even reading is hard for me right now.
NR: It’s strange, in terms of your writing career, this is just your second book, so you should be given the tolerance due to a writer who’s just starting to find her way.
KD: I feel as if I’ve got a long way to go. This book was an attempt to be direct and honest about a particular process, but I forgot to play. If you read Italo Calvino or someone like that, you realize that to lose that side of being a writer because it isn’t the right political moment is very tragic. I wouldn’t want to lose that imaginative ability for the sake of a literary trend.
IP: Kiran, thank you for being with us, and for your time.
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