A Writing Geek

Reading: Gavity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

2018-02-19T17:57:00.000+05:30

Thomas Pynchon's Gavity's Rainbow has 902 pages, and is a difficult novel to read. I've always wanted to read it. But only recently I had time to read it through.

I started in on it on 13/10/17 and finished it on 15/2/18. It's four months two days. Every evening I began reading it exactly at five pm, and continued it as long as I could endure the day's text.

Before starting it, I had a good advice from a Pynchonite: Go on reading every word, every sentence. Don't skip. Never think you'll understand all of them. There are sentences and passages you may not get at all, but you must carry on. If you can stick to the end, I bet you'll be rewarded.

I followed him while reading the entire text.

Having completed the book, I reckon GR is a difficult book, but not as difficult as it's popularly believed. There are few things like Pynchon's penchant for detailing about shit and other bodily secretions and excretions, which I didn't like, but there are so many other things - his leftist and counter- culture ideas, thoughts and comments which I immensely relished.

Tyrone Slothrop, the rocket-obsessed protagonist, is a curious character and I've enjoyed, among other things, his sexual escapades. Pynchon is brilliant in writing sex scenes: his erotica is deadpan kind, and it tickles.

GR is a post-war novel, but it touches on many things like capitalism, cocaine, dopers, whores, Soviets, army dogs, castration, Berlin, Nice, Zurich, magic, music, Byron the bulb, cartel, dildos,paregoric orgasm, light bulb, lightning bolt, roaring of the sun, Imipolex G, foam rubber penises, sonic death mirror, religion(Christianity), Tarrot cards, Sigmund Freud, sado-anarchism, Kabbalist tree of life...

Of course, Pynchon has a grasshopper mind, but he has profound knowledge in anything he writes about, and he can feed your brain relentlessly.

Reading Pynchon is like listening to a learned but good-humored professor on a difficult topic, who you can't always follow or understand, but you keep on listening because he sometimes stuns you with snippets of wisdom and insights and shares his varied life experiences and when he's done with his long lecture, you come out of the hall, a bit confused and tired, for sure, but enriched with a new vision of life.

In the end, GR has endorsed my belief in the immense scope of a novel. Novel is no longer a plot and character thing, and anything is possible in a novel.

Reading: SUBMISSION by Michel Houellebecq

2017-10-29T21:10:00.000+05:30

Submission is about an academic-intellectual's conversion to Islam, It's also about the end of a brilliant intellectual life devoted to research the life and works of J.K.Huysman, the French novelist.

The setting is the new imaginary France under Islamic rule. The professor- an atheist - loses his job in the university, but he's given a grand compensation as pension, and materially at least he has no worries for now or the future. Soon he is trapped by an intellectual whore of the new regime, who offers him the post of a departmental head in a newly founded Islamic university. But on a condition: he has to convert to Islam.

As it happens, he faces a lot of conflicts around this time. Just in his forties, a bachelor, and with a vibrant sex life, he used to choose his partners from his students in the class. Now he has to collect his women from dating sites.

In his analysis of Islam vis-a-vis Christianity or Buddhism, he doesn't find anything different or new about it, but he's curious about polygamy permitted by the religion. His new mentor suggests him he could have as many as three wives along with a fat salary in his new position.

The professor has submission at last, fully aware that his dear intellectual life with his special fascination for Huysman is now over.

Written in the first person, Michel Houellbecq's "Submission" is apparently a simple story, but a fine and discreet critique of Islam in the new order of world politics. It's also a masterly narrative about the academic environment and intellectuals not only of France, but the world over.

It's an honest and original work. I liked it.

Man Booker Prize 2017

2017-10-18T17:56:00.000+05:30

So the Man Booker Prize goes to another American writer this year: George Saunders. Last year it was Paul Beatty. Tow Americans in a row.

No doubt the Man Booker is now US-cenrtic. And there will be less and less chance for any non-American writer to get it now. Forget the days when Arundhati Roy, then a first-time author based in India, won it.

But George is a brilliant short-story writer. And he treats writing very seriously. He has a humanitarian world-view, and pens his characters with insight and empathy. But what I like about him is his thoughts about fiction writing. Try to read any of his interviews.

Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel. I ought to be interested in it, but it deals with death and has a narrative in which more than one hundred ghosts deliver their insight and wisdom around it. It seems so weird to me, and frankly, I can't bring myself to like it. I don't think I'll ever read it.

But our Booker judges liked it. May be ghosts are a new thing after the vampire that has ruled the American publishing scene for far too long.

Ali Smith on Novel

2017-10-16T18:31:00.002+05:30

I’ve come to believe that all the arts are about time, but that the novel in particular is about the and-so-on of things, continuance and continuity, the continuum. It’s a form, too, very interested in the workings of society, so it tells us about how we’re living, who we’re living with, and where we are in the endless social structural cycle that eventually gets called history.

Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 goes to Kazuo Ishiguro

2017-10-05T12:03:00.000+05:30

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British writer - a traditional novelist with some popular appeal. A Japanese who migrated to UK when he was just five, and subsequently raised in England.. Has an oeuvre of seven/eight novels, wrote just one novel in last 10 years. Interestingly, he's a school-trained writer( has an MA which is equivalent to MFA), and probably the first one to have received the Nobel Prize.

He was not on Ladbrokes or any betting site. The SA's picking of him has surprised a lot of people simply because he happens to be a writer that no one was talking about and even betting on.

He is best known for his novel "Remains of the Day" which was also filmed.

The same novel - that still sits in my shelf- I tried to read some years ago. I remember I had put it down halfway through. It seemed so dull and austere to me. He was obviously not my kind of writer.

Ishiguro is, to my mind, not that influential or important in the way Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood is. But he is lucky to have a godfather in Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Laureate, who has been recommending him for more than a decade. His cross-cultural background and apolitical stand in these turbulent times seems to have helped him.

He is of course, a safe choice after last year's controversial Bob Dylan.

But Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami might have to eventually suffer because of this selection. Rushdie is not going to win the Nobel Prize in next four tears, and for Murakami, the original Japanese writer, there is really no hope for the Prize at all.

Is "The Vegetarian" popular for the wrong reason?

2017-07-14T20:54:00.000+05:30

Just finished "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang. It's a Booker-winner and has got rave reviews in the West. It's about a schizophrenic woman (Yeong-hye) who stops eating meat and begins to think that she is a tree. Her life is of course pitiable and sad, and Han Kang portrays her wonderfully with realistic details. But why would anyone care about this? Incorporated in the storyline is a long session involving a video-artist (In-hye's husband) who has all kinds of wild and immoral fantasy and infatuation around Yeong-hye, and preys on her until he gets his desire fulfilled . This section is visceral and erotic, may be in an unintended way. Is this the reason why so many critics and readers loved it?

Arundhati Roy's The ministry of Utmost Happiness: Five reactions

2017-06-28T18:41:00.001+05:30

I wrote down these reactions on Medium at different stages of my reading the novel.

First reaction

Reaction 2

Reaction 3

Reaction 4

Final reaction

Shadowland is out in Kolkata Book Fair

2017-01-30T19:59:00.000+05:30

Publisher: Gangchil, Kolkata, India.

Length:335 pages. Literary fiction.

me with my editor, V Ramaswamy(right).

Serendipity in a new avatar! Is it a kind of plagiarism?

2017-01-11T19:52:00.000+05:30

How do you feel when you see some chapters of your yet-to-be completed novel published as a book on a foreign website without your permission?

I got really surprised when I came across twenty chapters of my novel "Serendipity and After" as a book with a new title"A novel about publishing of a novel" on Ridoro, a Russian website. Interestingly, it selected the chapters that related to publishing only.

I published this novel on Medium a couple months ago - one chapter every day for seventy one days at a stretch and then stopped for some reason, leaving it incomplete. I haven't worked on it since. The new title was actually the tagline of the serialized novel.

Is it right for this website to publish my novel this way without my consent?

I wanted to shoot an angry email to the owner of the website, but strangely there was no contact email at the site. So I wrote to my editor-friend V Ramaswamy asking for his take and what I should do under the circumstances.

Ramaswamy was also taken aback, and advised me to write to the website editor to take down my work from the site.

But he added,"Actually, I wouldn't worry. It spreads the word."

SHADOWLAND: Publishing Notes

2016-10-30T18:35:00.001+05:30

Done with final proof read. Adhir will come this week to take back proof.

So I had another read of my upcoming novel "Shadowland" - after about sixteen years.

Still readable and relevant.

....

Reading Don Delillo's Mao II. It's about a reclusive author who has been writing a book for twenty six years and is now sitting over it. Just two days ago I had stopped publishing my novel after 71 installments as the book had burnt me out. I was so sick of writing. So we share more or less the same kind of problem.

I find the book therapeutic for me at my present state of being.

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Last day.

2016-10-28T19:07:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/71 and Last Installment

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 70.

2016-10-27T18:29:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/70

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - one new chapter every single day. It's my Day 69.

2016-10-26T17:11:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/69

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - one new chapter every single day. It's my Day 68

2016-10-25T17:12:00.002+05:30

Serendipity and After/68

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - one new chapter every single day. It's my day 67.

2016-10-24T17:07:00.002+05:30

Serendipity and After/67

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 66.

2016-10-23T16:56:00.002+05:30

Serendipity and After/66

I'm publishing a novel on Medium- a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 65.

2016-10-22T17:22:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/65

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 64.

2016-10-21T16:50:00.000+05:30

Serendipity and after/64

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 63.

2016-10-20T17:15:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/63

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 62.

2016-10-19T16:18:00.000+05:30

Serendipity and After/62

I'm publishing a novel on Medium, a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 61.

2016-10-18T08:33:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/61

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 60.

2016-10-17T16:58:00.002+05:30

Serendipity and After/60

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 59

2016-10-16T09:04:00.003+05:30

Serendipity and After/59

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 58

2016-10-15T16:24:00.001+05:30

Serendipity and After/58

I'm publishing a novel on Medium - a new chapter every single day. It's my Day 57

2016-10-14T18:41:00.000+05:30

Serendipity and After/57