A Writing Geek

Salman Rushdie interview, post-Jaipur Lit Fest

2012-01-25T23:39:00.000+05:30

NDTV's Barkha Dutt has a long and interesting interview with Salman Rushdie soon after the "black farce" in just-concluded Jaipur Literatur Festival.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously. If you don't that is not great for me but that's the only way to make it. The only way to make it is to make it with the fullness of your personal vision.

What is a lit Fest?

2012-01-23T18:07:00.000+05:30

"It’s a private party and even though the line says “Everyone’s Invited”, they retain the right to decide who “Everyone” is. Or anyone. All that money, all that effort, all that energy, organisation, coordination, travelling, planning, operational logistics, talking and debating, sassing and faffing, boozing and schmoozing, it’s not about books at all. It’s about riding on the goodwill and glamour generated by books and literature, great writing and great authors, taking all that classy chic intellectual pride and amortising it into sponsor-sized chunks of social currency."

Rushdie a coward: Taslima Nasreen

2012-01-22T14:23:00.000+05:30

Taslima Nasreen, who is sometimes called female Salman Rushdie, now slams Rushdie for cancelling his Jaipur literary Fest.

"Cancelling his India trip is his latest cowardly act," she says.

It may be recalled here that Taslima's books have been banned in her own native country Bangladesh as well as in India for the same reason as that of Rushdie for hurting religious sentiments of the Muslims, and she has been on exile for a long, long time.

Is Taslima braver than Rushdie, one wonders. But why does she call him a coward?

As we now understand, Rushdie was fooled into believing that he was under threats from the mafia. The fact was, it was a ploy to keep him away from the fest. The cancellation of the visit does not necessarily make him a coward.

Rushdie cancels visit: "a stain on India's international reputation"

2012-01-20T23:05:00.000+05:30

"very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to "eliminate" me. Will do video link instead. Damn"
SalmanRushdie Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie dropped from Jaipur Lit Fest?

2012-01-17T17:54:00.002+05:30

Salman Rushdie is an unwanted writer right now in India. The Rajasthan Government does not want him to attend the Jaipur Lit Fest (20 -24 January, 2012). Nor do the powers-that-be in Delhi. Do the organizers of the fest want him? Perhaps not, at this moment. So the unstoppable Rushdie has no other option but to skip the fest.

The government says that Rushdie's visit may cause a law and order problem. But if you dig it a little, there is a series of things that lead to this decision. First, the head of a Muslim group protests against Rushdie joining the fest. Then a Congress leader in Delhi echoes him more or less along the same line. Now it is the turn of the state government to pick up the thread and go ahead with the request to the organizers that Rushdie be persuaded to stay away from the festival. And what do you expect from the organizers? They would go with their jamboree anyway - with or without Rushdie.

But how Rushdie could be a law and order problem? He's a serious writer and thinker. You may not like him for your primitive instincts or lack of intellectual capacities, but how can a government bar him from attending a lit fest? India is where Rushdie was born, and he has visited India a number of times. And we all know he has always promoted pluralism.

So, what do you read in this Rushdie visit ban decision? First, the Government has scant regard for writers or artists.Remember how it behaved with Taslima Nasreen or Makbul Fida Hossain in the past?

Secondly, those in power can bend over to just do anything to appease the minority community - in the interest of keeping its vote-bank intact and unchallenged, literature/art be damned. And now is really election time in five states in India.

And lastly, can we say that its secularism is a fakery (to borrow a word from Rushdie) of the highest order?

I would like to see what Rushdie tweets on this.

Pakistan's English-language novelists

2012-01-15T18:51:00.000+05:30

Stephanie Nolen has an interesting article on Pakistan's English-language novelists in The Globe and Mail.

A hunger for access to that reality has, in the past few years, created an opening for Pakistan’s English-language novelists: Intense Western interest in the country has vaulted the work of a handful of Pakistani writers on to prize lists and foreign bookstore shelves. “There’s a collision of talent and interesting times – something is really happening there in terms of writing,” said John Freeman, editor of the British literary magazine Granta. The issue focusing on Pakistani writers was the bestseller of the past three years.

New, phenomenal interest in Albert Camus!

2012-01-14T17:57:00.000+05:30

This phenomenal revival of interest in his work is pregnant with a significance that deserves scrutiny for it can reveal a thing or two about the world we live in today. Clearly, the present generation in France acknowledges Camus as a contemporary. It regards his literary and philosophical output to be of topical relevance to its insecurities. Here, they say in substance, is a man who saw through the conceits of the reigning ideologies of the day, the delusions of religion, the tyranny of dogma, the arrogance of power and the dubious complicities of intellectuals with those who invoked reasons of state to plunder, loot and murder.

László Krasznahorkai interview

2012-01-13T19:48:00.001+05:30

Q: Many people have the impression that your books are hard to readand to understand. That’s a myth, but don’t you think you’ve got some bad PR?

László Krasznahorkai: You know, the problem is that anything that’s the least bit serious gets bad PR. Kafka got bad PR, and so does the Bible. The Old Testament is a pretty hard text to read; anyone who finds my writing difficult must have trouble with the Bible, too. Our consumer culture aims at putting your mind to sleep, and you’re not even aware of it. It costs a lot of money to keep this singular procedure going, and there’s an insane global operation in place for that very purpose. This state of lost awareness creates the illusion of stability in a constantly changing world, suggesting at least a hypothetical security that doesn’t exist. I see the role of the tabloid press somewhat differently. I can’t just shrug it off and say to hell with it. The tabloid press is there for a serious reason, and that reason is both tragic and delicate.

Mikhail Shishkin interview

2012-01-10T17:18:00.003+05:30

If you say to yourself: “I will write for such-and-such areadership,” you immediately stop being a writer and become a servant.

Indian publishing to boom in 2012?

2012-01-06T20:39:00.000+05:30

"The new thing I have discovered is that Indian writers and readers are no longer taking their cues from the West. They are making their own decisions about what is relevant to them and concentrating on what they enjoy writing or reading."

Tehelka's "Original Fictions :4"

2012-01-05T23:47:00.000+05:30

Tehelka, though a news weekly, loves literature ( may be because Tarun Tejpal, its editor, is a literary writer himself) and every year devotes an issue to original fictions by Indian writers writing in English and other languages on a theme pre-determined by the weekly.

This year the theme is romance.

I started casually flipping through "The Foreigner" by Amitava Kumar, and was instantly hooked. Great style, odd but interesting characters, funky dialogue, and perfect story-telling. I had a sense of a well-crafted piece as I was done with the story.

I'm sorry I can't say the same things about any other story. Our Nabarun Bhattacharya, writer of that great short novel Herbert, under-delivered. He seems like a misfit in this group.

Then there were stories which were excerpts of soon-to-be published first novels by their writers. They read like crap. Not original in any way.

Finally, the editor of this issue should have been more careful in selecting the stories. After all, romance has not really disappeared from the surface of our world, and it can still touch our chord if the writer can work it the right way.

Dag Solstad interview

2011-12-30T17:20:00.000+05:30

" I may not be the Norwegian writer with the most numerous female readers, but I have the best."

Writing as a career

2011-12-20T21:00:00.000+05:30

" If you want a career that makes sense, don’t work as a writer."

V.S Naipaul interview

2011-12-14T23:25:00.003+05:30

"But if you’re a writer, you do the one book, then you have to go on to do the second, and then the third… It never ends. At the age of nearly 80, I am still tormented by this need to go on a little bit more... So perhaps a lot of the discoveries about the nature of writing came to me from this need to go on."

Teju Cole in A Public Space

2011-12-10T22:21:00.002+05:30

"At this fractured moment, our American agora appears to be dominated by noisemakers. Political debates are “won” by those who shout loudest, op-eds are written on little more than conjecture, and popularity counts more than anything else. The more thoughtful and reflective spaces are being silenced. And yet a self-preserving and self-nurturing instinct tells us that the essential work of interpretation is best found in a culture’s quieter spaces. We need reports in fiction, nonfiction, and photography that are engagé without being ephemeral and are steeped in a proper thoughtfulness."

Another e-book: a plug for myself

2011-12-06T23:08:00.011+05:30

I have another e-book out, this time at Amazon.com. It's a novella called Delhi Riddle. It is about an artist who encounters a strange physical relationship between a man and a woman, both married separately, while in Delhi during a group show, and is so deeply moved that he tries to capture it on his canvas.

Of course, it's literary fiction: not the dull, stodgy kind, but an easy, fast-paced narrative. In it, though, I have handled such things as love, sex, art, urban life in post-globalisation India.

The book's cover is done by my artist-friend Basudev Ghosh.

Please read the book if you feel interested, and give me feedback, if you have time.

Umberto Eco interview

2011-11-26T22:45:00.002+05:30

"Literature is a perverse game because it’s too easy to say that the teller pretends that Little Red Riding Hood or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina is a fiction. Step by step, I want you to lose your critical control and start crying about the fate of Anna Karenina. But then I know that once you finish reading the book, you come back to reality and at the second reading you don’t cry any longer but simply appreciate the way in which I obliged you to cry the first time. That is the perverse literary game. Simonini is more cruel. He wants you to believe. He doesn’t want to show his inner strategy. The writer desires that you discover my strategy. Simonini, no. Every forger wants to be taken seriously."

Indian Litfests: "Buy my book."

2011-11-25T23:38:00.004+05:30

In today's Hindustan Times, Farrukh Dhondy has an interesting - and brutally honest - take on Indian literary festivals that are so common now-a-days( sorry, no link is available).

The central idea that emerged, at least in my mind, was that the lack of critical response and debate, the total absence of criteria of what is good, bad, necessary, imitative, blatantly stolen, fresh, redeeming, skilful, pioneering etc will give us a consumer industry in books but no 'culture' of literature.

Dhondi further writes:

The Colonel Sanders and the Ronald McDonalds of the Indian literary scene can be seen at all all the litfests peddling their goods and there is no one, literally no one, to discuss, raise the questions or debate the nourishment or debilitating obesity therein.

Anita Desai interview

2011-11-13T22:09:00.003+05:30

The guardian.co.uk gets writer Kiran Desai to interview her mother Anita Desai, the well-known writer.

KD Your books often refer to a mix of languages. You quote Iqbal and Byron in Clear Light of Day. In Custody is about Hindi and Urdu. You quote a lot of literature in all your novels, mingle it with every geography.

AD Yes, I always give myself away! Well, Urdu was what we heard spoken in Delhi, and it was spoken very beautifully in those days. Then there were the books we bought for ourselves. My father would read Byron and occasionally he would burst out and recite snatches of what he remembered from his schooldays, Byron, Swinburne, Browning, the same scraps over and over again. Oddly enough, he never brought Bengali music into the house, which was such a pity. But perhaps because he came from a political family – he had a soft spot for communism – he loved Russian music. I remember hearing "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" played and played on our gramophone, thinking it so oppressive and dreary. Oma brought back a piano with her, had whole albums of Beethoven and Brahms, Schubert lieder and also her German library, beautifully embossed leather books in the old German script. When my father died and she left Delhi, she gave her books to the library of Delhi University, which had a German department.

Publishing today: editor is a banker now!

2011-11-05T16:06:00.004+05:30

"There was a time at the Frankfurt Book Fair when we would rush back to our hotel rooms in the evening to read manuscripts. Now, it all works with a two-page outline. A publisher reads two pages and writes a $100,000 (around Rs.50 lakh) cheque. It’s about investments. The editor has become a banker."

Anne Enright interview

2011-11-04T16:52:00.005+05:30

"Recently people have been starting to say that it’s all about sales, that the companies behind it are very proud of the sales of the books, and nobody’s talking about the books. There’s quite big PR machine behind it, and we know how PR machines are. The writer is a kind of incidental figure in the middle of this global PR exercise. Presumably writers dream of having such a thing happen but actually what we dream of is the fantasy of suddenly breaking free from your critics, which is not actually what happens. You’re freed from a certain amount of financial tension, but if you weighed money too much in the balance you’d never become a writer in the first place. When you get into it, it’s for whatever kind of reward is there. Though I am very interested in what money does to people, because I’ve had money and I haven’t. The years from 1993 to 2007 were pretty thin. I’m interested in how stressful it is not to have money, but also how, if you do have money, you cannot imagine what it is not to have it".

Hanan al-Shaykh interview

“In the West they need to label you to understand what you do. I tell [Westerners] that all those tags have become a real burden to me. I also tell them not to pigeonhole everybody. This is racism.”

1Q84: Four reviewers

2011-10-27T21:07:00.005+05:30

"And when, after 900 pages of crepuscular sex scenes alternated with sentimental thoughts about adolescent sexuality, the novel turns out to be a shaggy dog story, it no longer seems a guilty pleasure but instead a tremendous waste of the reader’s time."

"1Q84 is the only of Murakami’s translated works that’s ever struck me as overwritten. There’s a lot of internal monologue that simply revisits events and dialogue that have already transpired, that attempts to explain subtext or analyze weird happenings that we’re better off left to engage with on our own. Yet it would be wrong to assume that this ambitious novel’s flaws emerge from what might be deemed as padding or a lack of focus on the narrative core; the more 1Q84 strays from its ostensible plot the better it gets."

"You tend to forget the books the moment you finish them, and this is no less true after an immense production like "1Q84." It floats in a globalized ether. His literary forebears also peered into the abyss of lost identity, but they stood on the hard ground of venerable tradition. Mr. Murakami's books are wrapped in a cocoon—or an air chrysalis—of cultural amnesia. It's one last paradox: They are themselves too empty to say anything meaningful about emptiness.

Murakami really does stand alone, as much a "foreign element" as his heroes: a sport, an outlier, sui generis, inimitable, if often imitated. Which other author can remind you simultaneously of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and JK Rowling, not merely within the same chapter but on the same page? Viewed through the "postmodern" lens, his exemplary blend of a light touch and weighty themes, of high literature and popular entertainment, ticks every box. Posh and pop, sublimity and superficiality, history and fantasy, trash and transcendence: they switch positions and then fuse as the metaphysical speculations of an Ivan Karamazov meet the death-defying adventures of a Harry Potter.

Haruki Murakami on George Orwell

2011-10-23T22:04:00.002+05:30

“I guess we have a common feeling against the system. George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer. . . . I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.”

Man Booker Prize 2011 for Julian Barnes

2011-10-19T23:41:00.004+05:30

"Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading."

Salman Rushdie on Intellectuals

2011-10-18T16:32:00.002+05:30

"Intellectuals are not saints, and can sometimes be very stupid indeed. In the United States, it is very difficult for intellectuals to have an impact on society, whereas in Europe it is more possible. I never knew Foucault. I met Jacques Derrida several times and he had a level of personal vanity which distorted the way he expressed himself. When you look at events, things look chaotic and shapeless, but there is a strong human need for form and shape. What intellectuals can offer amid the shapelessness of the everyday is a sense of 'how to look,' so that you can begin to discern shape and form. They can be fools, but they are about finding meaning and about understanding the world you live in."