The Memoirs of Big Watermelon

Clinton's memoirs have been sanitised by China's translators and book pirates.
The counterfeit edition of Clinton's book, My Life, starts with a memorable line: "The town of Hope, where I was born, has very good feng shui."
Another story reports:
Out went: "I was concerned about China's continued suppression of basic freedoms" and "I went to bed thinking that China would be forced by the imperatives of modern society to become more open."
In came: "She (Hillary) was as beautiful as a princess. I told her my name is Big Watermelon" and "China is a mysterious and unique place."
If you're a fan of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman books, he provides one of the best illustrations of the translator's role I've ever encountered.
From Flashman and the Great Game, in which the "coffin-faced Anglican fakir, the Rev Reynolds" preaches the Parable of the Prodigal Son to a regiment of "native" cavalry circa 1857:
"Reynolds lined it out in English, from the Bible, and the rissaldar stood there with his staff under his arm, at attention, with his whiskers bristling, bawling his own translation:
'There was a zamindar, with two sons. He was a mad zamindar, for while he yet lived he gave to the younger his portion of the inheritance. Doubtless he raised it from a moneylender. And the younger spent it all whoring in the bazaar, and drinking sherab. And when his money was gone he returned home, and his father ran to meet him for he was pleased--God alone knows why. And in his foolishness, the father slew his only cow--he was evidently not a Hindoo--and they feasted on it. And the other son, who had been dutiful and stayed at home, was jealous, I cannot tell for what reason, unless the cow was to have been part of his inheritance. But his father, who did not like him, rebuked the older son. This story was told by Jesus the Jew, and if you believe it you will not go to Paradise, but instead will sit on the right-hand side of the English Lord God Sahib who lives in Calcutta. And there you will play musical instruments, by order of the Sirkar. Parade-dismiss!'"

Honour, Lost and Found

Several people have claimed that Norma Khouri's deeply affecting tale of honour killings in Jordan, Forbidden Love or Honour Lost, is a fabrication. Malcolm Knox broke the story. In interviews and at book readings before the allegations were made, Khouri spoke emotionally about her friendship with 'Dalia', who was murdered by her family when they discovered Dalia's romance with a Christian army officer.
Khouri says she can prove her story is true, but has shown no signs of coming up with a credible defence. All she would have to do, as this activist points out, is to give women's organisations in Jordan the details of Dalia's murder--it strains credibility that Khouri would be unable to do that.Khouri's publishers have withdrawn the book for the moment, even though cynical observers point out that fakes are usually good for business.
One line of argument I've heard from several friends runs like this: Khouri's book drew attention to the despicable practice of honour killings anyway, so does it really matter whether she was writing fact or fiction?
It matters. This interview, for example, was given by Khouri long before the allegations surfaced, and she speaks of 'Dalia' with deep emotion:
'I want the world to know Dalia the way I knew her,' Ms. Khouri said in an interview here. 'And I want them to know that she represents thousands of women who are still dying, and who had brothers and sisters and friends in their lives who are missing them the way I am missing Dalia.'
'From the time I lost Dalia I became obsessed with honor killings,' Ms. Khouri said. 'Before, I was always the quiet one. Now I won't shut up.'"
For all those who read the book and believed it, or who cried at her readings, or who sympathised deeply with Khouri's tales of struggle, it does matter. If she did make it up, she laid claim to a story that wasn't hers, sympathy that she hadn't earned, and a life that never existed.

Why I voted for this man

"I asked him about the Nile and what the river meant to him in his personal life and as a part of the Egyptian collective unconscious. 'The Nile,' he said, pointing to the river, 'was the very source of life. You see that great river. It rolls on and on. This is our culture.' I told him how we treated our rivers like the books of wisdom, like living beings, kind and sometimes angry. 'Like the Ganga,' he intervened. I told him about how these Books of Wisdom in their polluted state now carried the sins and stains of progress. He responded in Arabic, suggesting how progress had effaced the alphabet of learning from the pages of the rivers."
That would be Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, on his encounter with Naguib Mahfouz. (From Al-Ahram--Pia, thanks for the link.)

Baby talk

Two new hypothesis about language:
"Do we learn to think before we speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first."
And a far more controversial theory suggests that babies learn their language from their mothers.
"It was the gibberish that foraging mothers were crooning to restive infants that evolved into language, according to the theory of Dean Falk, physical anthropologist with Florida State University.
She seeks to refute earlier scientific belief that language originated from the communication needs of hominid males hunting in a group, says the latest Scientific American magazine."
Either way, the next time I meet a baby, I promise not to say "blubble" to it; instead, it will be treated to Heidegger, Sartre, and perhaps a little Rilke for variation.

It happens in Nigeria too

After Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize with God of Small Things, Indian publishing houses were inundated with manuscripts from hopeful authors--many clearly people who were seeing writing, for the first time, as a potentially respectable, potentially lucrative profession. You could "be a writer" just as you could be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer. A lot of this article was puzzling to me, especially the gratuitous swipe at the Orange Prize, but this bit should sound familiar to readers from India:
"The Nigerian reaction to all these has been predictable, but still disappointing. For instance, an unprecedented wave of interest has been woken up outside of the literary circles here (and even within them) with the sudden link between creative writing and the winning of prizes by Nigerians, everyone wants to be a writer now, just as every young woman over five feet has been clamouring to become a model from the moment Oluchi was set to sign a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar modelling deal after winning the extinct Face of Africa contest."

The Little Prince and The Sea

"Many in France would prefer Saint Exupéry's grave to remain a mystery - including his wealthy and secretive family, the literary establishment that has implacably guarded his reputation, and a political establishment keen to retain its wartime hero. 'Legends like Saint Exupéry's should not be tinkered with,' pronounced his nephew, Jean D'Agay, in the French press, a view echoed by the family's supporters.
If the plane could be shown to have been shot down, the author's reputation would remain untarnished. But when the wreck was finally raised last autumn, no bullet holes were found. Still, as France prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of its national hero's death, few are willing to confront the possibility that the author of Le Petit Prince deliberately plunged his warplane into the sea.Still, as France prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of its national hero's death, few are willing to confront the possibility that the author of Le Petit Prince deliberately plunged his warplane into the sea." From The Telegraph.

Peck Decked

I see I've just linked to stories that rove from readers to writers to agents. No fair leaving critics out; some of them seem to be having a rougher time. Like Dale Peck (the Lizzie Borden of critics), whom Stanley Crouch (writer who resented his shoulderblades being at the receiving end of Peck's hatchet) smacked. Or whacked. Or perhaps slapped. Crouch now denies he "punched" Peck; he may, however, have slapped him lightly across the face. Sounds like the drama critic of yore who assumed he'd done a bad job of his reviews if the lead actress didn't come up to him the next day and slap him, not lightly, across the face with her glove.

Scenes from the writing life: Dead Bodies 101

"...[This] is a seminar run by Allan Jamieson, director of the Forensic Institute in Edinburgh, aimed at writers of crime novels and television thrillers. People are here to brush up on bruises, strangulations, decaying bodies and false identifications: the ins and outs of forensic procedures.....
Fullerton writes political thrillers (his fourth, Give Me Death, came out this month). His fifth has a big scene in which someone's carotid is cut - that's why he wants to get the details right. Somehow, in the subsequent discussion, it becomes apparent that Jamieson and his colleagues are in the habit of taking their own blood, then coughing it up, blowing it out of their nostrils, spraying it around to see the patterns it makes, and waiting for the droplets to crust over and harden to see how long these processes take."
And then you wonder why there're so many vampire sagas out there.

The Dark Side of Publishing, nth sequel

From Stephen Policoff's 'The Polite Screed of a Publishing Cliche' (courtesy The Elegant Variation):
"My agent was thrilled. He was convinced the James Jones First Novel Prize would help sell the novel quickly. Shortly after that, he dropped dead.
The young agent to whom many of Clyde’s clients were assigned had no interest in representing my uncategorizable novel. 'I can’t imagine what to do with this book,' he shrugged. Neither could several other agents I contacted. Neither could I."

Misreadings?

The Washington Post has a nice piece on "reading Reading Lolita in Teheran in Teheran".
"There were two issues here, the bookseller explained at length. One was obvious.
'It's dated,' she said of 'Reading Lolita.'
'It's what the Americans think it's still like here. Wearing lipstick and putting a scarf on is not a major issue these days. It was when she was here.'
Iranians who travel abroad are irritated by the persistence of the puritanical image of their society. The stark image of the chador -- the head-to-toe veil, black as night and so seductive as an image of severity -- no longer sums up Iran, they say.
'It's so dated. They don't know. They quote hearsay. They get a small thing and magnify it. And actually they put you in the position of being pro-Islamic Republic! I hate it!'
But she hates the memory of past fetters for all the reasons in Nafisi's book. This is the second point."
It made me wonder about reading about India in India. Some of us flinch when we recognise a truth about our society that we'd rather not acknowledge is there, and that's what Naipaul sometimes does. (Not always; as Dalrymple pointed out recently, Naipaul's a great writer but often alarmingly loose with his historical facts.) Some books make us flinch in embarrassment for the ignorance of the writer--a friend of mine calls this the "we should've been better hosts, we should've given him better guidebooks" response. Some books elicit contempt: not only did the idiot in question get it wrong, but he got it wrong out of laziness, or blindness (most of the subgenre of backpacker tales and Raj romances belong in this category). And some, though a very, very few, evoke admiration: not just because the writer's "got it right" but because she's done it beautifully, or because distance has sharpened her vision and made us see our narrow, familiar world the way a new lover makes you see yourself differently.

Honey, I'm Home

Coming back after a relatively long break, I realised that this is a pyjama blog: the kind of thing you slip into after work is over and the guests have gone; slightly worn at the edges, a little bit ratty, perhaps; but comfortable. And, after just a year, familiar. (Okay, two months and a bit after just a year. Maybe three. The Babu's not very good at anniversaries; he and the partner celebrated theirs on the wrong day three years running, moved house the fourth year because they forgot, and on one grand occasion, remembered the right day...but got the month wrong. On the other hand, he always knows where his pyjamas are kept.)
So what'd I miss? Plenty. (BTW, drop by here or here or here or here or here when the Babu goes missing in action next. Great blogs.)

Hmmm...more Galsworthy than Steinbeck

"John Steinbeck's surviving blood heirs are suing the estate of his third wife, Elaine Steinbeck, alleging a '30-year hidden conspiracy' to cheat them of royalties and copyright control and detailing a bitter family feud worthy of a Steinbeck novel."

I, Robbed

Which is roughly how anyone who knows Asimov's robot stories will expect to feel when they see the Hollywood spin on I, Robot. I have no idea why Hollywood dumbs it down and screws it up so thoroughly, but given what they've produced in the way of inept sci-fi movies, I'm willing to script an inanity-guaranteed, mankind's-worst-fears realised good-robot/ bad robot series for them.
Meanwhile, Philip Ball gets to the heart of the problem:
"I, Robot is not in the end a movie about robotics (forget the token stuff about robots evolving feelings, which was handled far better in Blade Runner, a movie to which I, Robot is deeply indebted). Instead it is the old promethean legend once again - the story of the Golem of Prague, of Viktor Frankenstein, of the man who makes a monster he cannot control. It was in just such a tale, written by the Czech playwright Karel Çapek in 1918, that the word 'robot' first appeared, derived from the Czech robota, meaning 'forced labour'. In Çapek's story, a race of beings created as slaves by a scientist called Rossum (from the Czech rozum, reason) rebels and wipes out humanity.
It was precisely such a clichéd view of the robot that Asimov sought to displace. 'Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum', he said, 'there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot - robots were created and destroyed by their creator. I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. I began in 1940 to write robot stories of my own - but robot stories of a new variety.' Evidently it is not so easy to dislodge a myth."

Freedom is Not Free...

... and neither, as Shiv Khera is learning, are the copyrighted words of other authors. Shiv Khera's management books sell in the millions in India, but he has an unusual approach to "sourcing" his research. A retired civil servant, Amrit Lal, was invited by Khera to "work together" on Khera's next book.
As Sheela Reddy reports in Outlook: "Just what he meant by 'working together' struck Amrit Lal only when he was out of Khera's posh condominium in Singapore. Flicking through the book Khera had given him as a parting gift, Freedom is Not Free, Lal discovered sentence after sentence lifted from his own book, India—Enough is Enough, published nine years ago."
Given that Khera thanked Amrit Lal for his help and penned a personal inscription to the retired civil servant while gifting him a copy of, his, er, their, book, it seems that he regarded this as justifiable borrowing rather than plagiarism. Perhaps Shiv Khera needs a refresher course on a certain subject, and luckily, help is at hand in the form of a neat little bestseller called Living With Honour. It was penned, coincidentally, by Shiv Khera a few years ago.

Get yer gists here

Would a gist ever be on sale? Can you get your gists at a discount? Is there a gist for every person, or is a gist a one-size-fits-all thing? Blame it on Lynne Truss. She's the one who got me thinking about getting the gist, such as a gist is.
"Yet there is an idea steadily gathering force in this country that communication should be judged only by functional effectiveness and that, if you 'get the gist' of what someone is saying, this is enough. Notions of 'correct' English are for fuddy-duddies who take nasty pleasure in other people's mistakes.
Not surprisingly, I am not persuaded by this argument. In fact, it makes me weep and thunder by turns. 'Please don't use the expression 'Get the gist'!' I pray, whenever I have to engage in chat-show debate with the latest person advocating the liberating joy of a grammatical free-for-all.
But they always do. 'Ah, but does it matter, so long as we get the gist?' they ask, as if saying something original and profound. 'Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language?' I ask (sometimes a bit emotionally). 'Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!'"

"A cemetery of greatness"

Birnbaum interviews James Wood and asks a question that every reader asks himself or herself at some stage:
RB: What should any reader care whether what they are reading rises to the level of a future classic. Or care about posterity?
JW: For most readers, it’s asking—which is a very hard thing to ask of readers, as it is of writers—how much of what you are consuming week after week do you really think will still be around in 40 or 50 years time? Let alone 100. The danger then, and I know sometimes I am charged with this, is that you then are constantly drawing people away from the present and saying, 'Forget all that stuff.' And actually you should be reading Flaubert and Henry James, and that you are just wandering around then in a cemetery of greatness and the great touchstones."

Rage against the machine

Arundhati Roy on the unacceptable cost of big dams:
">"The people of Harsud are razing their town to the ground. Themselves. The very young and the very old sit on heaps of broken brick.
The able-bodied are frenetically busy.They're tearing apart their homes, their lives, their past, their stories.They're carting the debris away in trucks and tractors and bullock carts. Harsud is hectic. Like a frontier town during the Gold Rush. The demise of a town is lucrative business. People have arrived from nearby towns.Trucks, tractors, dealers in scrap-iron, timber and old plastic throng the streets, beating down prices, driving hard bargains, mercilessly exploiting distress sales.Migrant workers camp in makeshift hovels on the edge of town. They are the poorest of the poor. They have come from Jhabua, and the villages around Omkareshwar,
displaced by the other big dams on the Narmada, the Sardar Sarovar and the Omkareshwar. The better off in Harsud hire them as labour. A severely malnutritioned demolition squad. And so the circle of relentless impoverishment closes in upon itself.
In the midst of the rubble, life goes on. Private things are now public. People are cooking, bathing, chatting (and yes, crying) in their wall-less homes. Iridescent orange jalebis and gritty pakoras are being deep-fried in stoves surrounded by mounds of debris. The barber has a broken mirror on a broken wall. (Perhaps the man he's shaving has a broken heart.) The man who is demolishing the mosque is trying to save the coloured glass. Two men are trying to remove the Shivling from a small shrine without chipping it. There is no method to the demolition. No safety precautions. Just a mad hammering. A house collapses on four labourers. When they are extricated, one of them is unconscious and has a steel rod sticking into his temple. But they're only adivasis. They don't matter. The show must go on. There is an eerie, brittle numbness to the bustle.
It masks the government's ruthlessness and people's despair. Everyone knows that nearby, in the Kalimachak tributary, the water has risen. The bridge on the road to Badkeshwar is already under water."
If you're inclined to justify the submersion of villages, the loss of
towns, the devastation of wildlife on the grounds that the Narmada Dam
has a higher purpose, a tiny statistic in Roy's essay might make you
want to reconsider.
"Madhya Pradesh currently loses 44.2 per cent of its electricity—12,000 million units a year—in transmission and distribution (T&D) losses. That's the equivalent of SIX Narmada Sagars. If the MP government could work towards saving even half its current T&D losses, it could generate power equal to three Narmada Sagar projects, at a third of the cost, with none of the social and ecological devastation," Roy writes.
So why are we letting this happen? You tell me.

Beside the Point

Very few entries for the To The Point (really) short story competition do what they're meant to: ie, work as short stories. If you're creative enough, though, you can shuffle them around and create an entirely comprehensible long short with the entries received so far. Like so:

When I first saw a puffer fish I was six years old.
Dad and I were walking between sand dunes under neon skies with the ocean crashing bang beside us and sea-salt whirling in our lungs.
A couple of months after I met Sarah, we went to my dad's holiday place in Cornwall for the weekend.
"Blimey," my dad said, as he handed over the keys, "I wish my dad had had a holiday house I could have taken my girlfriends to." He grinned.
Before I met my acupuncturist, my love life was in disarray:
acute disappointments, incongruent pairings, missing variables (sense of humor, stable income, deodorant). Then, needle by needle, I fell in love.
My grandfather illustrated with cutlery.
In his white vest over lunch at the kitchen table he'd compose entire cityscapes with tableware. Knives made the best sidewalks, while salt and pepper shakers, bottles of HP Sauce or even - to the undisguised chagrin of my grandmother - half-gnawed chicken bones.
He cooks a meal in her kitchen.
The knives are all blunt, he says. How can you cut anything with these? He buys her a knife-sharpening tool, he sharpens the knives. Then cutting things becomes easy. Amazingly so. A pleasure for her too. They get married and together they prepare, cook and eat lots of meals. Chopping, slicing, filleting and carving.
Sieve
the flour, beat in the eggs and add the brandy. I don't feel up to making it this year. Not with Ed gone, and Geoff and Anna only coming for Boxing Day. The house will feel cold
This transmigration of the soul lark is getting too much for me.
840,000 different incarnations until you reach the point when your spirit becomes one with the Almighty. Here I am 12 seconds from death and I think I messed up and will have to start all over again.

See? Now the only thing they have left to sort out is the copyright hassles.

Proofreader for the Prophet, please?

Not that I disagreed with this otherwise well-researched story on the issue of triple talaq, but Outlook might want to get the name of the Prophet's wife right next time round.
From the article: "The Prophet's own life and preachings were radically forward-looking and gender-just for his times, point out women. He married Fatija, a widow much older than him, and urged that others do the same. In times when men married numerous women as a norm, he allowed no more than four wives to a man and that too only if all could be loved, cherished and nurtured equally.He provided for the remarriage of women deserted and rejected by their husbands."
According to most authorities, the name of the "widow much older than him" the Prophet (PBUH) married was Khadija.

Vijay Seshadri

Poets & Writers has this interview with Vijay Seshadri (link via Amardeep Singh):
"The fact that I came from one civilization to another, however young I was, puts me in historical circumstances. History has a density simply because in the movement from one society to another its reality is made more painfully apparent to you. When you have the problem of history as a poet, you have to find a way to manage it, to appropriate it and not have it appropriate you. By "appropriating you" I mean, I think, the conventional immigrant narrative, which has been repeated by every immigrant group. It has a certain marketability, but that marketability tends to be ephemeral. I would say that that’s a way in which history is determining the writer rather than the writer somehow finding a way to get himself or herself out of history. I was always taken with Stephen Daedalus’s saying, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ That was, in a nutshell, the response of the people I regarded as literary models."

Back of the book

Philip Hensher on his passion for indexes:
"The Yale editions of James Boswell's journals are so fully indexed they provide a breathlessly exciting story on their own: "adventure with a monstrous big whore; Lady Northumberland sends polite letter showing she does not mean to do anything; JB makes jaunt to Oxford, is very unhappy; low-spirited; visits Newgate; sees an execution, terribly shocked, dares not sleep by himself; wretched; locked out of his lodging; meets S[amuel] J[ohnson]; alarmed by fear of another infection; solaces his existence with two girls..."
Cookbook indexing is of course beneath Philip Hensher's notice, but whereas a bad index has never ruined a work of fiction for me, a bad cookbook index has ruined dinner. One particularly fiendish Indian cookbook index provided no recipe list and instead of listing dishes by ingredient or anything remotely as sensible, listed recipes alphabetically. So if you wanted to look up Prawn Malai Curry, you waded through the Ps and the Ms before you found it, diabolically, under the Cs, chingri being the Bengali word for prawn. I gave up in despair when I finally located a recipe for gooseberry fool by dint of flipping through the book; out of curiosity, I wasted half-an-hour trying to figure out where the indexer had placed it. It was under P, for "puree of gooseberries with cream".

The Borrowers

"At 2.30 pm on a working day, the only sound in India's most expensive and best-equipped library—an architectural milestone by Raj Rawal—is of the vacuum cleaner being run with unsarkari thoroughness over the sandstone walls and ceiling.
The steady overpowering din, like that at a construction site, does not disturb the readers for a good reason: there is not a single visitor in the 55,000 sq mts Parliament Library." India's Parliamentarians don't read, says Sheela Reddy in this story; but they do "borrow" books. "The library recovered a whopping fine of Rs 1,25,917 from the MPs
for books they had 'lost'."

A conversation with hate

Seminar has an excerpt from Amitava Kumar's soon-to-be-published Husband of a Fanatic (link courtesy Poorvi Vora and others on Sasialit):
"The apartment, with the sunlight falling on the bulky white furniture, some of it covered with transparent plastic, appeared clean and bright, especially after the darkness of the corridor outside with its musty carpeting. I was happy that I had gotten so far. I had spoken to Mr. Barotia for the first time only during the previous week. On the phone he had called me a haraami, which means bastard in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn’t mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.
Although I had no idea of Jagdish Barotia’s identity till recently, I had wanted to meet him for well over two years. I wanted to meet face to face a man who thought I was his enemy, to see if I could understand why he hated me so much, and why he hated other people who were different from him. My name had appeared on a hit-list put on a website in the year 2000. The website belongs to a group called Hindu Unity – none of whose members, including Mr. Barotia, were named on the site – and it presented links to other right-wing Hindu groups. My name was on a list of individuals who were regarded as enemies of a Hindu India. There was special anger for people like me, who were Hindus but, in the minds of the list’s organizers, traitors to Hindutva, the ideology of a resurgent, anti-left, ultranationalistic Hindu cause."

Will Post-Its saying 'Out of Cat Litter' do?

"...Joyce's lustful outpourings were being treated by critics as if they were some kind of preparation for Ulysses, a work once unpublishable because of its representation of sex, masturbation, defecation and the rest. We do not have Nora's side of the correspondence, though this played what might be called an active part in Joyce's epistolary excitement. 'My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways.' There are pages and pages of this, with Joyce reliving their couplings and imploring 'my dirty little fuckbird' to write back 'sweetly, dirtier, dirtier'. They have become classic examples of erotic prose.
'James Joyce would feel pretty bad about this,' comments Solange. 'He did write to his wife to keep his letters secret or to destroy them, which she did not, of course.' But an author's manuscripts often escape him or her after death."
The Babu has some love letters wandering around the universe, he thinks, but since he borrowed everything he wrote in them from a) Gone With the Wind b) Tagore novels and c) Neruda, he has nothing to worry about. Biographers of the future are welcome to the Babu's listful outpourings: "Rem to ring plumber about flush; water leaking from cistern and that blue dye stuff we put in makes it look v alarming, pls don't forget." Emails are better: "Didn't take the James Blish with me to Cal, it's on top of the bookshelf behind the Dalai Lama crap we're donating to the library." The SMSes can get a bit steamy: "V humid drling today hope u got the ac [air-conditioner] fixd." And he did, once, write about a sweet, dirty little cat but that was after Beagle Boy crapped on the shoes of a house guest we didn't like.

Ruth among the alien corn

The Independent reviews Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Nine Lives: "It is enticing to try and glimpse the real author through the fiction woven around the facts of her life. In all the stories there is a narrator: a young woman who may be a poet, writer or translator, whom Prawer Jhabvala admits is herself. She often has estranged parents. The woman sometimes has an affair - in one story, with an egocentric pianist, in another, with a young Indian politician. It usually ends in tears."

The Salman Rushdie Special...

It's not Mohja, but it's good.
From Michael Muhammad Knight's The Taqwacores, excerpted on Muslim Wake-Up!:
"Lynn, the Muslimah-gone-wrong; maybe it was Islam-done-her-wrong. She had converted to Islam, or re-verted to Islam or embraced Islam or however they say, from a Catholic upbringing. Somebody had turned her onto Rumi which led her to read up a little on the deen and she liked the general idea of it—you know, One God who doesn’t beget children, remembering your Creator five times a day, the whole racial-unity Malcolm sense and theoretical lack of a priesthood. So she went to a masjid in the suburb of Amherst and took shahadah. They gave her a hejab but were nice about it. They were nice about everything—those guys could say the meanest, most ignorant things but still use a gentle voice and try to sound rational and loving through it all. Told her she had to break up with her then-boyfriend, get rid of her dog, throw away old kufr clothes and cover it all except the face and hands, take a nice Arabic name, stop listening to her favorite artists, give dawah to her family or else their brains would burn and boil like Abu Talib, the whole nine. Eventually Lynn gave up on it, kept to her Rumi and stopped going there. We constituted the last vestige of her abusive relationship with the umma.
“You here to carry out the fatwa?” she asked.
“What?”
“You know—I’m an apostate, technically you can kill me.”
“Really,” I replied with a half-laugh.
“Give me the Salman Rushdie Special,” she said with arms outstretched and eyes closed."

Post 9/11, the deluge

"The examination of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks through fiction is, understandably, a fairly recent phenomenon. There is the issue of publishing lead time, and worries that the subject was simply too raw for writers to deal with honestly. However, as the third anniversary of 9/11 approaches, several notable novels, especially on the crime fiction side, have done -- or at least attempted to do -- just that." Sarah Weinman rounds up post 9/11 fiction; her selection goes way beyond the obvious, thankfully.
I've noticed a growing trend on the part of authors to deploy that date to bump off characters they can't handle; Timeri N Murari is the latest to do that in his Arrangements of Love, where he uses a no-details, the-date-says-it-all approach. It gets scarier: the Babu was at a book launch party recently where two young authors were discussing their novels. "So this guy, he's an Indian working as a software consultant and everyone thinks he got it in the WTC attacks..." "Yeah, yeah, plausible," says the second author. "Yaar, but too obvious, na? So instead I make him survive but then he goes to Saudi to close a deal for his company and gets kidnapped and offed there instead." "Brilliant twist, man, brilliant."
So now if you're writing fiction, you have two choices. Your characters can get nine-elevened. Or post-nine-elevened. It's the 21st century's version of the one-size-fits-all deux et machina.

Elizabeth Costello, the cheat sheet

Some months back, a friend called with a problem. "I'm reading [Coetzee's] Elizabeth Costello," he said. "That's good," I said. "No," he said. "I'm reading it for the fourth bloody time and I still don't bloody get the bloody book."
S, this one's for you.
"OK, for those of you keeping score at home, we've got a fictional character whose career– in her own fiction– consists of rewriting a famous fictional character. But in this fiction, she doesn't write any fiction." Michael Bérubé makes it sound so simple.

Satan, Editor-in-Chief?

"The alleged publication of 'devil worshipping' articles in the current issue of the arty-and-alternative magazine The Vacuum has caused a stir within Belfast City Council. The magazine features an interview with an exorcist and an article called I peed in church, and has been deemed blasphemous by certain city councillors." (Link via The Bookslut.)

Eleven Years of Solitude

How to write a novel: 1) take eleven years of your life. 2) Use them up.
I'm cynical about the hard-luck story; it's become so much part of the hype in which debut authors are packaged that it's difficult not to go "yeah, yeah" at the umpteenth tale of author writing in cafes, subsisting on dog food, washing dishes, taking weird gigs as a juggler... But Nadeem Aslam's story is truly astonishing. I began reading Maps For Lost Lovers a few days ago, and something of what he went through has been transmitted into those pages: the novel pulls you in and demands that you put the phone off the hook in a way very few books do.
From The Independent: "Draping the windows with black cloth, he wouldn't go out for six weeks at a time. Sometimes he would fall asleep on the floor rather than go to the bed. If he did go out he would feel disoriented. 'I'd wonder, 'Why is it snowing?' because it would be summer in the town I was writing about.' But seclusion was essential. 'I always think of the silence and the darkness of a root that enables the flower to grow.'"
From The Daily Telegraph: "He migrated between Asian neighbourhoods around Britain, going wherever free accommodation was on offer. For the last lap, he received financial assistance from the Royal Literary Fund, but handed back a third because he thought it was too much, only to see the money run out as he rounded the final bend. Friendships withered. 'You can ask somebody to pay for your meal once, you can ask them 100 times, but there comes a 101st time when you think, actually, I can't, not again.'"

Time to Kill?

"EVER since Inspector Morse died, there has been a hole in my soul that makes me pick up any fat book with a shadowy illustration on the cover. Indian whodunits are still low on the evolutionary scale, but the bereft reader grasps at straws.
Ramesh Menon has written a pair of thrillers, someone has published it, and two well-known columnists have supplied praises for the back cover, surely after having read something else entirely." Latha Anantharaman, in a demonstration of the rare art of how to kill a book in one line.
It's a bad week for Indian thrillers--in Outlook, Manjula Padmanabhan politely eviscerated Ravi Shankar Etteth's A Village of Widows.
I would have extended my deepest sympathies for the two authors if I hadn't read the books in question. Having done so, I accept that the only way to review these specimens of the thriller is with an axe, a spade and someone to read the last rites at the gravesite.

Ooh, imagine Naipaul doing that headbanging thing

"Perhaps this should be the aim of literary festivals, to help people discover writers, make them superstars for a week, and create a sufficient buzz to keep their words in circulation. After all, if rock stars can claim to be poets, why shouldn't writers reap the benefits of rock stars too?" Tishani Doshi, reporting from Hay-on-Wye.

Kunzru, Done To A Turn

So what's it really, really like being a hip, young, rich author? Hari Kunzru shared his view of the other side at the Delhi launch of Transmission: he did so many book tours in so many places that he began to entertain the suspicion that the flights to and fro were a sham; he was actually in the same hotel room all the time, they just kept changing the wallpaper and bringing in a different crew of journalists. He was over here; he was overinterviewed; but he didn't seem to mind much. The fatigue shows in brief interviews like this one, but Samit Basu got a little more out of him. Especially when he asked Kunzru the what's-your-next-book-about question. Previous answers include: it's a romance, it's a historical whodunnit, it's part of a five-volume magnum opus. And now:
"It's a science fiction novel featuring a tribe of Amazonian women…(laughs). I've been trying saying this with a straight face."
I've been trying to figure out whether the Author Interview needs to be mothballed for the next decade (all those in favour of running Pictures of Naked/ Drug-Crazed/ Gunrunning Author in the same space instead, say Yea.) If the author in question isn't Famous, the "interview" is going to be scrunched into three soundbytes anyway. And if the author is Famous, he, she or it is going to have to answer the same questions a thousand times in a hundred different places--the publishers might as well clone the poor fish and train them all in Robotspeak.
Or perhaps we should change the questions. Insist that chicklit authors discuss globalisation. Make crime fiction maestros discourse lengthily on when it's wrong to use "furbelow" in the same sentence as "Manichean". Biography writers should be banned from any mention of their subject, but will be encouraged to share their views on Whither the Novel. And make it a rule that anyone, interviewer or interviewee, who uses the word "muliculturalism" will be subject to immediate defenestration.

We're Their Worst Nightmare?

"Q2A Solutions, a publishing company, is now exporting creative work to India where it has recruited illustrators, designers, editors, website producers, picture researchers and writers to produce books for the Western market.... The manufacturing jobs have long gone, the unskilled office jobs are going, white-collar gigs in software, finance, science and engineering are on their way, and now the creative, media and marketing sectors are looking to Asia. Many of these jobs were once considered 'safe'. Not any longer."
The Independent has a story about publishing jobs being outsourced to India. Perhaps they should've run this under a different headline: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid. All I can say is that it's the long-delayed revenge of Macaulay's children. Educate us and first we produce wobbly fiction, but eventually we get down to what matters: jobs.

Pogroms, Not Poetry

Narendra Modi's USP remains restricted to the rarefied field of pogrom organisation. The man we fondly call the Butcher of Gujarat is apparently also a poet with more ambition than print runs.

Bérubé on Iraq

BTW, Michael Bérubé's back from vacation. (If I love the guy so much, why isn't his blog on my blogroll? Because I'm a lazy git who really needs to run updates more often, that's why.)
If you're wondering why you should read him, here's a recent Bérubé post. Will this persuade you to drop by? It's titled 'Welcome to the New Iraq'.
"Please be advised that our menu of options has recently changed. If your town or city does not have electricity, please press "one" now. If your local police force has disbanded or cannot be located, please press "two" now. If your water supply has been degraded by targeted military strikes and not purified since 1991, please press "three" now. If your local judges or legal authorities have been assassinated, please press "four" now. If your family members have been detained by American forces and you have not seen them in the past year, please press "five" now. If you have a question or concern about the privatization of municipal and other civil-agency functions, please hold while we transfer your call to our representatives from Halliburton. If you have a question or concern about the privatization of security forces, please hold while our service representatives from Blackwater trace your call and locate you for questioning. If you are being detained, questioned, kidnapped or abused at the moment, please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.
Thank you for calling the new Iraq. Your call is important to us."