More from the Obit Dept

This is turning out to be a very dark week.

Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004)

The poet of Jejuri and Kala Ghoda died yesterday of cancer. Nissim, Dom, and now Arun Kolatkar: we're losing all our poets. Adil Jussawalla said of Kolatkar: "For him, all that mattered was his work. He’d spend hours researching. He wanted to be accurate and true to life. Privacy preserved that space for him. And since he was also wary of things ostentatious, he avoided big publishing houses, invariably choosing the little magazines over them.’’ Another obituary is here.
Back in college, we read Kolatkar in dhabas and cafes the way I imagine another generation elsewhere must have read Lorca and Neruda. From Jejuri, here's one of my favourites:

Yeshwant Rao

Are you looking for a god?
I know a good one.
His name is Yeshwant Rao
and he's one of the best.
look him up
when you are in Jejuri next.
Of course he's only a second class god
and his place is just outside the main temple.
Outside even of the outer wall.
As if he belonged
among the tradesmen and the lepers.
I've known gods
prettier faced
or straighter laced.
Gods who soak you for your gold.
Gods who soak you for your soul.
Gods who make you walk
on a bed of burning coal.
Gods who put a child inside your wife.
Or a knife inside your enemy.
Gods who tell you how to live your life,
double your money
or triple your land holdings.
Gods who can barely suppress a smile
as you crawl a mile for them.
Gods who will see you drown
if you won't buy them a new crown.
And although I'm sure they're all to be praised,
they're either too symmetrical
or too theatrical for my taste.
Yeshwant Rao,
mass of basalt,
bright as any post box,
the shape of protoplasm
or king size lava pie
thrown against the wall,
without an arm, a leg
or even a single head.
Yeshwant Rao.
He's the god you've got to meet.
If you're short of a limb,
Yeshwant Rao will lend you a hand
and get you back on your feet.
Yeshwant Rao
Does nothing spectacular.
He doesn't promise you the earth
Or book your seat on the next rocket to heaven.
But if any bones are broken,
you know he'll mend them.
He'll make you whole in your body
and hope your spirit will look after itself.
He is merely a kind of a bone-setter.
The only thing is,
as he himself has no heads, hands and feet,
he happens to understand you a little better.

Arun Kolatkar

Officially bats?

In the best manner of dirty old men who claim to be reading porno mags for the articles, I swear I only ever read Anne Rice courtesy houseguests who leave copies of her books behind, presumably in a desperate attempt to forget they actually bought yet another trashy vampire saga.
But given that I've read at least three Rice novels, all written fairly recently, and stopped dead on page 30, I figure she owes me at least a percentage of the refund she so generously offered recently to readers who hate her work. The brouhaha's covered here and here and here and oh hell, all over the blogverse.
Here are samples of what she said--the comments were up on the Amazon website until recently, but her post's been taken down as of today:
"Seldom do I really answer those who criticize my work. In fact, the entire development of my career has been fueled by my ability to ignore denigrating and trivializing criticism as I realize my dreams and my goals. However there is something compelling about Amazon's willingness to publish just about anything, and the sheer outrageous stupidity of many things you've said here that actually touches my proletarian and Democratic soul. But your stupid arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. And you have used this site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies. I'll never challenge your democratic freedom to do so, and yes, I'm answering you, but for what it's worth, be assured of the utter contempt I feel for you, especially those of you who post anonymously (and perhaps repeatedly?) and how glad I am that this book is the last one in a series that has invited your hateful and ugly responses."
The whole thing's over here and as far as I can make out, the moral of the story is: Think. Then hit Send. Or better yet, just go to Delete straightaway.
Please note the bit where she says: "And if you want your money back for the book, send it to 1239 First Street, New Orleans, La, 70130."
I'm guessing my cheque's in the mail, yes?

Cela's sellout

To think the man used to be one of my idols.
From The Guardian: "Camilo José Cela, the last Spaniard to win the Nobel prize for literature, continued to inform against other authors and academics even when they thought he had joined an emerging front of dissident writers.
The revelations have come from the well-known historian Pere Ysàs, who found papers showing that Cela, who died two years ago, had volunteered advice to Franco's information ministry and suggested some dissident writers could be bribed, tamed and "reconverted" by the generalísimo's regime."

Never-Ending Stories

From the New York Times (*), a piece that reminded me of the late Douglas Adams on how he loves deadlines, especially the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
"But there is another category of writer, one for whom the laws of space and time seem to disappear altogether. Years bleed into one another as file cabinets bulge with extraneous information. Sentences are committed and retracted. Pages stack up -- or don't. A decade passes, and the end of the tunnel remains dark. Only by scratching away the layers of Liquid Paper on the line of the contract reading ''delivery date,'' as if it were an instant lottery ticket, is it possible to ascertain when exactly the manuscript was first due."
(Dedicated to some of my favourite writers. All I have to say to Messieurs Joshi, Chandra, Friese and Kesavan is get on with the novel(s), boys, the Babu's running out of reading material here.)

Ah, that explains it

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
"Novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni taps into another source of inspiration that requires her only to fall asleep."
Which is what I did halfway through her sugary new melodrama, Queen of Dreams. Now all I have to do is duck when this gets into movie theatres.

From the LNR: Judging the Booker by its covers

What's not to love? Part One and Part Two.
(Link via Return of the Reluctant.)

The Treatment of Baby Haldar

This BBC "news" story gave me the strangest feeling of deja vu until I remembered that Outlook broke the story about six months ago.
"Baby Haldar worked as a maid in a home in Gurgaon, in the state of Haryana, before turning her attention to a more creative passion.
Her first book, Aalo Aandhari (Light and Darkness), was published last year in Hindi.
Since then, two editions of the book have been printed."
Good for her. I remember a Jhumpa Lahiri story called 'The Treatment of Bibi Haldar', which attempted to take a compassionate look at the life of a downtrodden domestic servant in India (she's not the only one--from Manil Suri to Rupa Bajwa to Thrity Umrigar, there's a whole subgenre of Life Inside The Servants Quarters writing, most of it struggling hard not to be condescending). It's great to have the subaltern perspective instead of the more readily available Upstairs view of Downstairs life.

Jane's Thing

Life after chick-lit: posh porn. I have a minor quibble with this thesis about the proliferation of books by women who bonk like rabbits and aren't afraid to write about it in a sort of endless post-coital effusion: "In other words, they are not only personal memoirs but documents of a wider sexual evolution."
Now that would be nice, except that I just finished reading The Bride Stripped Bare, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, and One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (yeah, yeah, standard disclaimer time: it was all in the cause of research, really truly it was)...and what came to mind every time I lifted my head from a page of courageously frank prose was, "Oh shit, I nodded off again". It's like reading really bad Mills & Boon sex turned into academic theses.

The "damned dictionary"

The Babu hears that OUP India will soon release a Dictionary of National Biography, presumably on the lines of the original UK volume. John Ezard, who contributed an entry on Dame Barbara Cartland to the mammoth UK tome, explains what it's like to be part of history:

"...the late Dame Barbara now carries my entire hope of posterity, as well as her own. Tomorrow, the small coracle of my Cartland article - 2,000 words long - will join with a mighty flotilla of others in the 45m-word published text of the DNB. When its 60 embargoed volumes hit libraries and bookshops with gigantic thuds in the morning, Dame Barbara will sit beside Shakespeare, who has deposed Queen Victoria as the longest entry, and also beside Keith Moon, dead drummer of the Who. For this is not just any old DNB supplement covering a recent decade only. It is the entirely revised, £6,500 New Dictionary of National Biography stretching from the dawn of human time in the British Isles to the famous who died just before its cut-off point of December 31 2001: from Pete Marsh, aka Lindow Man, the garotted relic from the first century AD found in a Cheshire peat bog, to the singer Kirsty McColl, the singing postman Allan Smethurst, the bandleader Jimmy Shand and Sir Jack Jacob, barrister and legal scholar, all of whom died just before the cut-off date.
It is the first revised edition since the novelist Virginia Woolf's father Leslie Stephen produced the original 117 years ago... Stephen, philosopher, athlete, critic, mountaineer and liberal agnostic, accepted the commission to edit "the damned dictionary", as he came to call it, in 1880, the year of Virginia Woolf's birth."
(Link via Bookninja.)

It was a Stark and Dormy Night

Thanks to Zigzackly, I caught up with the good souls who keep Bulwer-Lytton's legacy of bad writing alive. This one's the winner in the 'Dark and Stormy Night' category:
It was a stark and dormy night--the kind of Friday night in the dorm where wistful women/girls without dates ovulated pointlessly and dreamed of steamy sex with bad boy/men in the backseat of a Corvette--like the one on Route 66, only a different color, though the color was hard to determine because the TV show was in black and white--if only Corvettes had back seats.
(David Kay
Lake Charles, LA)

The God of Roth

There's been tons of Philip Roth coverage. Here's Michiko, who didn't like the book but made a strenuous effort to demonstrate that she knows whereof she speaks:
"In his provocative but lumpy new novel, "The Plot Against America," Mr. Roth tries to imagine an alternate fate for the United States with the highest possible stakes. What if, he asks, the flying ace Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, and what if Lindbergh (who in real life articulated anti-Semitic sentiments and isolationist politics) had instituted a pro-Nazi agenda?
Of course, this brand of historical fiction (or "counterfactual" history) is hardly new. In "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclair Lewis created a portrait of the United States as a fascist dictatorship under the rule of a New England demagogue. In "The Man in the High Castle," Philip K. Dick conjured up a Japanese- and-Nazi-occupied America in which slavery was legal again and Jews hid behind assumed names. In "SS-GB," Len Deighton imagined a Nazi-occupied Britain in which Churchill had been executed. And in "Fatherland," Robert Harris postulated a world in which the Nazis had won World War II and covered up the Holocaust."
Roth wrote a wonderful piece about the story behind the novel, also for the NYT. Al Alvarez did a great profile for The Guardian:
"Roth's monkish routine is at odds with what he once called his "reputation as a crazed penis" bestowed on him by Portnoy's Complaint, his great panegyric to the comedy of sex. When Portnoy was published in 1969, it seemed to epitomise the anarchic spirit of the decade. Maybe it did, but the author himself was a product of the 1950s, the last generation of well-behaved, sternly educated children who believed in high culture and high principles and lived in the nuclear shadow of the cold war until their orderly world was blown apart by birth-control pills and psychedelic drugs. Portnoy was considered outrageous when it appeared, but the real outrage was Roth's and he was outraged because he couldn't help being a good boy however much he yearned to be bad."
Oh, and Kentuckians thinks he besmirched the fair name of the state.
"Before reading Roth's latest novel, a fever-dream venture into the alternate history genre, I had never given much thought to which state could serve as America's own version of Dachau. Which state would be judged the stupidest, most Aryan-infused, Stepford-citizen population in America: where a tolerance-preaching presidential candidate could be assassinated and a fascist president could mesmerize the dim-bulb citizenry a few days later by declaring that, hey, at least the nation is at peace?"
I kind of like the bit where the writer accuses Roth of picking on West Virginia too.

How to interview Margaret Atwood

Like this. I don't care if it's parody or real, it's hysterical.

Matthew Fox: Well, then, moving on to your new book Moving Targets. I particularly enjoyed “The Grunge Look.” I only have the sampler, so it only has three—

Margaret Atwood: You don’t have the whole text?

MF: I’m afraid not.

MA: Well, it’s quite a lot longer than that. Why didn’t they send you the whole text?

MF: I don’t know. I think we requested one on Thursday—

MA: But I wanted you to do this interview having read the book.

MF: Well, like I said, I’ve only been able to read the three—

MA: That seems very silly.

MF: I know.

MA: Did they even send you the table of contents?

MF: No.

MA: No? When’s your deadline?

MF: My deadline is Friday.

MA: Next Friday?

MF: This coming Friday, unfortunately.

MA: Well, that’s just truly stupid.

MF: Uh…

MA: I just can’t understand it.

MF: I’m sure if we were given more time, we would have been able to arrange something.

MA: There’s such a thing as a courier. (Laughter)

'Snot our fault: Booker judges

This is known as the Don't-Blame-Us-It-Was-A-Bad-Year-For-Books defence:
"Led by Chris Smith, the former culture secretary, the judges claimed that 'quite a number' of novels entered [for the Booker] were 'surprisingly bad'. The attack follows criticism of the judges themselves that their list of 22 books, from which yesterday's shortlist was picked, was lacklustre."
Here's the shortlist, for what it's worth:


David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Colm Toibin, The Master
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo
Gerard Woodward, I'll go to Bed at Noon

The Guardian has its usual comprehensive report; The Scotsman points out that Henry James dominates the shortlist from the grave; and The Independent has a bread-and-butter roundup.

The King Is Through

Stephen King's finished the final volume in his Dark Tower series (excerpted here): number seven has been signed, sealed and delivered 34 years after the gunslinger with the tired blue eyes first made his debut.
The Guardian has a nice profile of the man:
"I decided that I wanted to finish it. I wanted to be true to the 22-year-old who wanted to write the longest popular novel of all time. And I did: it's 2,500 pages long, maybe longer. I knew it was going to be like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub. I thought I'm just going to keep on working, because if I stop I'll never start again."
There's an early review here.
But what I'm really wondering is what he's going to do now. He's lived with the Dark Tower and Roland for three decades; what happens when a writer finally writes 'The End' to a magnificent obsession on that scale? His publisher, however, says that reports of his retirement are greatly exaggerated.

One word of advice: stay addicted

Maud does the definitive piece on blogging:
At a Manhattan bar a week and a half later, bloggers were still mocking the article. "“Oh, yeah, I’m gonna go home and blog,” a friend said. “I’ll post about being here with you guys.” Everyone laughed, and I pretended to join in.
I bought a round of drinks and tried to stop thinking about the twelve links I’d emailed myself earlier but hadn’t posted. After all, we were at a bar. Our songs had started to play on the jukebox. We were carefree and intoxicated and could not have cared less about blogging. Except that, unlike my friends, I went home at midnight and posted about books until 5 am. I might have stayed up longer, but my husband emerged from the bedroom and gave me the raised-eyebrow look that means, “Maybe you really should consider that Paxil prescription your therapist keeps recommending."
I awoke three hours later and hustled off to my day job. Scanning the news sites and Web logs to see what I’d missed, I slapped up three more posts and read through sixty new email messages before my boss appeared at the door.
“Do you have that article for me yet?” she asked.
In a single motion, I minimized Internet Explorer, opened the appropriate database and rooted around for the case she’d assigned me the previous afternoon. I hadn’t even looked at it. “Almost,” I said, “but not quite. It’s more complicated than I thought.”"

Dear Editor, I'll bet you're sorry now...

From Ursula K LeGuin's website (courtesy M J Rose):
"The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable." Go read the rest of the letter rejecting The Left Hand of Darkness here.

Desi deals

From the Publisher's Lunch newsletter:
Anu Garg's ANOTHER WORD A DAY, a second collection
of unusual, obscure, and exotic English words to delight
writers, scholars, crossword puzzlers, and word buffs of
every ilk, by the founder of the A WORD A DAY website.
Thrity Umrigar's second novel THICKER THAN WATER,
the story of an upper-middle class Parsi housewife and
Bhima and the woman who works in her home as a
domestic servant, to Claire Wachtel at Morrow, in a good
deal.

Hell and heaven

Blogging's been low for the best of all reasons: the Babu's been working like all seven of the dwarves rolled into one as he sings the Hi Ho song, and he's been reading Really Good Stuff.
Suketu Mehta's Maximum City derailed his work schedule for the week; at roughly 600 pages, it's apparently a third of the original manuscript. If this is true, someone give me the first draft; even emasculated, Maximum City rocks. This Village Voice review offers a glimpse:
"In Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Mehta, a New York–based writer and journalist, digs deep into the bursting metropolis's many layers, wading mucker-like through its netherworld... He drinks cognac with Sunil, a Shiv Sena member who boasts of killing Muslims in the riots, then does business with the surviving ones; and he gains the trust of Satish and Mohsin, rival Hindu and Muslim "shooters," remorseless hit men steeped in religious zeal and patriotic fervor. He becomes confidant to Monalisa, a "ladies bar" nautch girl who dances for gangsters and businessmen who literally shower her with money as she writhes seductively on the dancefloor. He bonds with Ajay Lal, a senior police officer celebrated as much for his unwavering honesty as his ruthlessness in interrogating suspects (torture is routine), and eats sweetmeats with Inspector Vijay Salaskar, Bombay's most celebrated specialist in "encounter" killings, where gangsters are bumped off in setups—the police department's casual circumvention of an inept judiciary. He communes with fellow Gujarati Sevantibhai Ladhani, a multimillionaire diamond merchant who resolves to take diksha, the renunciation of all material things, weaning himself and his family from the trappings of wealth, culminating in a lavish ceremony of hurling cold currency toward the frantic grasps of eager villagers before finally embarking—nearly bald, barely covered, with strange new names—on their monastic paths to salvation."
There's an excerpt here and another bit here.
Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers was a revelation in a completely different way: very stylised, almost baroque, but I love the manner in which he transfers subcontinental opulence to the terrain of England, with Dasht-e-Tanhaii bringing moths and peacocks into the land of legendarily bad weather. "Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose a season, because, in the part of Pakistan that he is from, there are five seasons in a year, not four, the schoolchildren learning their names and sequence through classroom chants: Mausam-e-Sarma, Bahar, Mausam-e-Garma, Barsat, Khizan. Winter, Spring, Summer, Monsoon, Autumn."
The book's about a honour killing and it's a fierce questioning of a faith Aslam no longer believes is his own. But my eye keeps skittering away from the main story, caught by details like this one:
"Around her wrist there is a gold bracelet composed as though of a series of semicolons--"
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Yup, I thought, I know those; my mother wears one round her wrist.

Grisham's damp squib

Shortly after he announced he's going to write about politicians, John Grisham received a bomb that wasn't a bomb in the mail. Interesting, the things that turn up in writer's mailboxes: most get manuscripts they don't want, one writer I know was sent a pair of sandals, another was most irritated when he came back after a long holiday, stuck his hand in the mailbox and found that someone had sent him prasad from Tirupati. Holy or not, the relics had rotted. Some writers are reputed to actually get cheques in the mail, the lucky sods.

Something rotten this way comes

From The Guardian:
"Smell being the most evocative of the senses, it is not surprising that literature is full of aromas. Now an Italian perfumière, Laura Tonnato, has tried to do justice to the olfactory imagination of some of her favourite authors, concocting five scents to match five odorous moments in classic novels." She chooses the good bits, for the most part: Proust's madeleine, Oscar Wilde's "violets that woke the memory of dead romances", with only one truly nasty surprise: the "stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women" from Patrick Susskind's Perfume.

Ha. If Tonnato wants a real challenge, she should try replicating this scent, from Rushdie's Midnight's Children:

"Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal faeces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odours of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betelnut and the bitter-sweet commingling of betel and opium: 'rocket paans' were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphinstone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and 'black money', the competitive effluvia of the city's bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers... Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made."

The Hijab and Beyond

C M Naim has a lengthy essay on the hijab as symbol and smokescreen:
"One does not hear about Afghan women now from Washington, nor about the Iraqi women, who had been doing very well in terms of health, education and professionalism, before the earlier sanctions and the recent war. Needless to say, while the lives of Saudi women are of no concern to the mandarins in Washington -- not a peep was heard when 15 Saudi girls died in a fire in 2002 only because the Saudi religious police did not let them come out bare-headed -- they seldom fail to mention Iranian women when expanding upon the ‘evils’ of the next country they just might target."
In Time magazine, Asra Nomani looks at the bigger picture:
"Those of us pushing for reforms are not seeking to change Islam. We are questioning defective doctrine from an intellectual and theological position, using the Koran, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and ijtihad, or critical reasoning, as ideological weapons in the war over how Muslim communities define themselves. Islamic scholar Amina Wadud notes that we are emboldened to take public action to reject the way extremists have defined Islam since 9/11. We are in the midst of jihad li tajdid al-ruh al-Islami, a struggle for the soul of Islam."

Ghettoblasters Killed the Alien Star?

Mark at The Elegant Variation and Maud* have been linking like there's no tomorrow, so go to them for the Real News.
(*She sent a flood of visitors over yesterday when she linked to us. Thanks, Maudie; you do know you have the same effect on increasing traffic at my 'umble blog that a VIP's visit has in Delhi? We're talking wall-to-wall rickshaws and traffic jams here, not to mention elephants backed up trunk-to-tail!)
This article, on the Death of Science Fiction, is stolen from Maud.
"Now science fiction appears on the verge of getting beamed up to the great Enterprise in the sky, with sci-fi writers concerned that they are facing the unique irony of looking at a future where their writing could be a thing of the past."
It's an irritating piece; Rebecca Caldwell makes the classic error of equating good science fiction with good soothsaying fiction. For the last time, this is not what SF is about. It's like reading yet another piece on fantasy written by a reviewer guilt-ridden at the idea that, heavens, she might actually enjoy the stuff.
At Worldcon, where the Hugos were announced yesterday, they're used to it. Wired spoke to Neil Gaiman, who's won his third Hugo:
'There is a long tradition of the science-fiction author disowning his roots when he becomes a popular success,' said Gaiman.
Gaiman suggested that his early, hard-bitten experiences in the comic book business are a source of his dark artistic vision.
'I come from comic books,' said Gaiman. 'If sci-fi is the gutter of literature, comics are the place that the gutter flows into.'"
Anyway. So if SF and fantasy are dead, the novel's writing its last will and testament, and crime fiction can't keep pace with the headlines, what's left? The New York Times has the answer:
"At a time when the National Endowment for the Arts warns that book readership is declining, 'hip-hop lit' is finding a larger audience. There are no hard sales figures on the books because most are self-published and marketed the same way as hip-hop music was a generation ago: out of cars, in the streets, through flyers, in beauty salons and car washes in African-American neighborhoods. But now, as it did with hip-hop, the mainstream is beginning to notice."

Tinkerers vs Probers

Sarah Weinman has two excellent posts up on the subject of Tinkerers versus Probers:
"...if I take a sampling of the crime and thriller writers I read,
and try to put them in either category, the “tinkerers” will be
made up primarily of men, while the “probers” are more likely to
be women. “Tinkerers”, I would say, write big standalone thrillers, military novels, espionage, techno-thrillers, gangster-themed books, and so on and so forth. These books are heavy on action, very plot-driven, and laden with details—the more arcane, the better. They aren’t likely to be terribly introspective either, because they are too busy trying to advance the plot, even if they are character-driven.
The best examples I can come up with this are
some of my favorite male writers, like Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake,
Thomas Perry, and Lee Child (never mind a lot of the bestselling
male writers of the Grisham/Patterson/Clancy ilk, but as I generally
don’t read them, I won’t talk about them here.) All wrote—or still
write—great characters that grab the reader from the first, but they
never sacrifice the advancement of plot and don’t have too many
resting points for introspection. Thomas’s books are the archetype
because the plots are so damned twisty and the characters so
distinctive, but the blend is almost perfectly balanced.
“Probers” write the kind of books you might expect them to write—character-driven, psychologically inclined, strong sense of place and atmosphere, and while there can be a very strong plot, it’s not imperative for the story to work.
People that immediately come to mind are the Psychological thriller
queens like Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, Minette Walters, PD James, and Laura Wilson, more hardboiled-esque types like Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, and Val McDermid, and in the US, Laura Lippman and S.J. Rozan. The men that come to mind that could be
included in this category—people like Peter Robinson, T. Jefferson
Parker, and Stephen Booth—are those that at least to my knowledge,
are read far more and appeal more to women and men. They have all
the requisite plot-driven devices and their stories move, but
perhaps at a more leisurely pace than would authors who
could be more tinkerer-esque."

Back in India, we don't have enough of a crime/thriller genre yet to offer a discussion of gender stereotypes--though the little that's come out so far is very Boy's Own. But mainstream fiction's gone through the usual debate, with male authors being seen as more prone to producing the "loose, baggy monsters" that Henry James and later, Amit Chaudhuri complained about. Shashi Deshpande wrote an essay on what it meant to be a "woman writer" quite a while ago, and her recent novel, Moving On, carries
this defiant epigraph:
"All the stories that have ever been told are the stories of families--from Adam and Eve onward." (Erica Jong, Inventing Memory.)

Why is it never "Mweheheheheheh"?

Gmail invites all gone, but if you'd like to send in more opening lines featuring the terms "Gmail" and "cat porn/ used cat litter", be my guest. If you're a disappointed soul for whom nothing but a Gmail account will do, Peter Griffin over at Zigzackly has invites on offer, and a contest with a twist.
Re this from Putu: "Muhahahahhaa.
And this sudden spurt in pageviews... marks the beginning of Putu's evil plan to Take Over The World.....", I have a smidgeon of advice.

This is from Peter Anspach's classic How To Be An Evil Overlord:

"As the Corrupt Evil Overlord here at Evil Overlord Inc., I'd like to take a moment to welcome you to our website. I hope that as you look around, you find the scheming, oppression, and ruthlessness you are looking for. But I think you will also find something else: caring and commitment.
We realize that today Evil Overlords are more prevalent than ever before. With so many out there vying for global domination, it takes something special for one to emerge as an industry leader. Here at Evil Overlord Inc, we care about the individual. Other Overlords have shown a tendency to make broad sweeping plans and think only in terms of vast armies. But we believe that this is a mistake; every individual is different and has different strengths and weaknesses. If we don't take the time to learn about them and adjust our plans, then we're not doing our jobs. It is somewhat of a cliche these days, but we are proud to say that we "think global and act local". You have my promise that each and every one of you will be carefully scrutinized, assessed, and dealt with accordingly.
Now, you might not put a lot of stock in such promises. We've all seen Overlords shout out grandiose statements about future plans, only to subsequently fail in them. But that's not how we work at Evil Overlord Inc. I assure you that I have the dedication and commitment to carry out all my plans. And this philosophy extends down the chain. I feel that if I have commitment, all my henchmen should definitely be committed. Whenever you have occasion to deal with them, I'm confident you'll agree.
We realize that we're not the only provider of misery and repression. But we think we're one of the best. We look both to the future and to the individual. Here at Evil Overlord Inc, we're planning your future -- one step at a time."

Getcha Gmail here (sigh)

If you want a Gmail account, you don't have to do this or this or this. I have six more to give away. Since it feels like I've already dumped about fifty of these mothers on family, friends and an unsuspecting world, I'm taking it that the Gmail craze is over. All the same, if you'd like one, follow these simple rules:

1) Write to me at hurreeATgmailDOTcom, or post your request in the Comments section; please include an email ID, since Blogger comments don't automatically record or display your email ID.

2) Do not spam my blog, post ads on my blog, or send me links to dirty pictures. None of these will get you a Gmail account; all of these will get you a lot of grief, unless you're sending me cat porn. (That was a joke. Do not send me cat porn unless you want me to respond by mashing your face into used cat litter, of which I have plenty.)

3) The last time I did this, there were more hopefuls than Gmail invites available. If there are too many claimants, I'm going to give the last two Gmail accounts to whoever writes The Best First Line For A Novel Which Contains The Terms Gmail and Cat Porn. (Alternatively, The Best First Line For A Novel Which Contains The Terms Gmail and Used Cat Litter.) Extra points to anyone who can parody an already famous first line, such as: "Mother died today, but I was too busy sending cat porn to strangers I couldn't care less about from my new and unwanted Gmail account to notice."

In which the Babu goes gaga/ Over Putu's rhyming saga

Over at The Not-So-Secret-Diary-of-Putu-the-Cat, one man's dream of literary fame, Indian-ishtyle, shines like a beacon. (Putu with patriotic passion disdains glossaries, now out of fashion; so if there are terms you don't understand, just ask the Babu for a helping hand.)

"Putu finish classic novel
Agent publisher all grovel
Banging door of Putu’s house
Running like the three blind mouse

Putu is craze song and dance
Has mosto foreign advance
Putu is sure shot for Booker
All say Putu sexy looker

All reviewer, one by one
Saying Putu son of gun
Mixing Dan Brown mass appeal
With G. Marquez magic real."

(No permalinks on the blog; scroll down to the entry for September 5.)

So I'm standing on my head, staring at this screen...

It works, is all I have to say.
From Matthew Baldwin's 'Tricks of the Trade' article:
Proofreader
If you’re reading too fast, your brain can “correct” typos, preventing you from catching them. That’s why it’s sometimes a good idea to read a page upside-down. It forces you to pay closer attention to individual words out of context, and you can’t race through pages too fast.
At his blog, Defective Yeti, Matthew has more to say on the subject.

The Booker blog and The Guardian awards

If you're at Kitabkhana because you're looking for Booker news, go away. The good folks over at 3am have started a Booker Blog, because they can. And they're doing a thorough job, which is Babu-speak for "I'm going to put my feet up, dirty socks and all, and leave the hard work to them".

The longlist for the Guardian first book award was announced while the Babu was catching up with his sock-washing.
Ground Water by Matthew Hollis (Bloodaxe)
A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen (Cape)
Natasha by David Bezmozgis (Cape)
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart (Picador)
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
High Tide: News from a Warming World by Mark Lynas (Flamingo)
Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean (Scribner)
Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi (HarperCollins)
The Flood by David Maine (Canongate)

And the shortlist for the Guardian children's book award is also out. I haven't read any of the books on this list, but the descriptions sound scary: you've got one about a missing mother and the problems of funny money; one about death, destruction and love between two cousins; one on the struggle of the Quakers; and one about kids trying to survive in the Germany of 1945. Tales from the Brothers Grimm, what?

Get in the Ring

The Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction Competition, 2004
"This time, the topic is ‘Journeys’. It could be a journey you made—on the road, on a train, by plane or boat, or just in your head. You can, for instance, give vent to your ire at the loss of the Railways’ steel thalis, speak out against the public address systems, confess to sins committed in unlikely places or describe the surf at Goa. We will accept essays but we strongly encourage you to also tell us how your piece could evolve into a book. Pieces must be limited to 5,000 words. Closing date for entries is November 30, 2004. The prizes will be presented in February 2005."
Sins committed in unlikely places? Hmm. We've got a lot of those. Including one that involves steel thalis, a train and pa systems. But no surf.

Heads Up

Shashi Deshpande's new book, an interview with Arun Kolatkar, Pradeep Sebastian on the joys of bookshop browsing, reviews of Amitava Kumar's Husband of a Fanatic, Stephen Alter's Elephas Maximus, Kolatkar and Deshpande...this month's Literary Review from The Hindu is out.

Questions Writers Love To Hear

From Sonali Kolhatkar's interview with Arundhati Roy:
Sonali Kolhatkar:
"It’s very refreshing for me to see a South Asian woman, a woman who looks like me, be the new superstar of the left. And you may reject that term, “superstar” but unfortunately, or fortunately, whether you like it or not, when you walk into a room today, you command an audience. And it’s the Noam Chomsky effect – when he walks into a room, he gets a standing ovation before he even says a few words. So on the one hand I’m ecstatic that it’s not just another straight white male with a fancy education. How do you deal with that and is it healthy for the left?"
You can almost hear Roy squirming.
The rest of the interview's pretty decent, though it's a jumbled version of her speech. It's fashionable these days in India to condemn Arundhati Roy without reading her, to dismiss her as just a demagogue, to sneer at the large audiences she commands. I'm no member of the Canonise Arundhati brigade, but I find that knee-jerk dismissal very revealing; she makes people uncomfortable, and that in my book means she's doing the job a writer's meant to do. Read her; then vent your disagreement, or your spleen, or whatever. But, hell, read her.
Here she is on 'Public Power in the Age of Empire':
"The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own. Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.
So when we speak of 'Public Power in the Age of Empire,' I hope it’s not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public which disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public which has set itself against incumbent power--international, national, regional or provincial governments and institutions that support and service empire."
And on the media:
"While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance movements are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis production, seeking to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. Every self-respecting peoples’ movement, every 'issue' is expected to have its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and purpose. For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements for impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don’t quite make the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation they wreak makes good television (and by then, it’s too late)."
And on NGOs:
"In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They’re what botanists would call an indicator species. It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context. Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese...in need of the white man’s help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and reaffirm the achievements, the comforts and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They’re the secular missionaries of the modern world."

Napalm bombs

This is what I like about VS Naipaul: he's such a master of the art of the deliberately inflammatory quote.
"While condemning terrorism, Naipaul, 72, blames Saudi Arabia for funding it. 'All this comes from Saudi Arabian money. I don't know who we are kidding. Here is the war on terror and it is being subsidised by an ally.'
He further adds: 'It (Saudi Arabia) has contributed nothing to the world - it has just filled the gambling dens and brothels. They are not fine people actually.'"
Anita Sethi gives Magic Seeds a respectful review:
"Magic Seeds is a novel about broken communication, as in the many half- written letters Chandran composes to his sister. In their failure to cross the void, they carry a tragic message that there are more worlds, more words, in our shared world, than we can ever know. But it is in depicting so lucidly the half-built dreams which haunt the liminal spaces of forest, hotel room, prison cell and airport lounge, that Naipaul finds his peculiar kind of artistic completion and achieves a startlingly desolate eloquence."
The Scotland on Sunday review is less ecstatic:
"The London chapters form a sustained and depressing meditation on a civilisation that has apparently unravelled itself. Mapping the decline of England, a country which has become 'the most horrible kind of socialist parody', the novel seeks to place the blame entirely on the pernicious effects of council housing and state benefits. Naipaul reaches for a surprisingly ugly and hate-filled rhetoric to make his case against the rise of barbarism (although these opinions are presented as Roger’s rather than the author’s)."

Snort this and weep

Ah, rats. Not only did the Old Hag get to this way before I did, she's got the infinitely better headline.
Here's Alex Beam on performance-enhancers for writers.
"I reached Buckley on the phone just as he was about to inhale.
'Right now I'm taking Thackeray, a great performance enhancer. I've been taking Balzac for some years, although you do have to be wary of the French products -- they can be very exotic. And you want to be careful with the generic Canadian performance enhancers, like Robertson Davies. You just don't know where they've been.'"

How Not To Read How Not To Write

I'd forgotten to link to this piece, How Not To Write, but two things reminded me today. One was Beautiful Stuff, which is a great place to drop by and rummage around for links you can steal, and the other was this bloke called Rajesh. He asked for writing advice (why me? Go bother some real writers next time) and didn't stop asking till he got it. (We were as polite as possible, honest, given that he emailed us an eight-hundred-page manuscript.) Unfortunately, he didn't like the feedback. He didn't like it so much that he's sent Kitabkhana five emails in the two hours since we emailed him. I'm kind of tired of writing back, so...

Dear Rajesh,

Thank you for pointing out that according to this article, everything we told you is wrong, wrong, wrong. Two things.
One, read this disclaimer first:
"Warning: Only follow these guidelines if you have no ambition of completing the novel or of ever being published. Otherwise, think of them as what not to do."
Leon Bambrick put that in right under the heading so that everybody would know he's being humorous and ironic. Everybody except you, at any rate.
Two, scroll down to the section titled 'The Greatest Books Are Never Finished'. Read point 2. Remind yourself again that Bambrick is being a) funny b) ironic.

Enjoy your writing career. I have. And please, stop emailing me.

Cheers,

Hurree Babu

Ka in Kars

I'm late coming to Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which I've been reading over the last two weeks. The reviews say it better than I could, but I was struck by one of Pamuk's more playful notes: at the end of Snow, a brief appendix sets out 'The order in which Ka wrote his poems', indexed by name ('Snow', 'All Humanity and the Stars', 'The Place Where the World Ends', etc), chapter and page number. The poems are never actually shared with the reader; you're left to imagine them for yourself. Pamuk may have been wise to do this: the most jarring section in Jane Eyre included descriptions of her paintings. It was all deeply symbolic, and many learned essays have been written on the subject, but I knew instantly that I never wanted to see the cormorant, the Evening Star and the kingly head hanging on my walls. Sometimes less is more.

The reviews:

Tom Payne in The Telegraph:
"In Snow, Pamuk uses his powers to show us the critical dilemmas of modern Turkey. How European a country is it? How can it respond to fundamentalist Islam? And how can an artist deal with these issues?
The novel is set in Kars, in the far east of Turkey, close to Armenia - the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1908 remains in the characters' minds. For the three days of the story's main action, the town is cut off by snow, so, when a coup takes place, the world cannot intervene. The local paper, the Border City News, has a circulation of 320, and prints news before it happens. The residents watch TV constantly, even when there's nothing on, and most are paid to spy on one another. There is a high rate of suicide among the town's young women.
Ka, a poet, wants to know why. Some say it's because the women are beaten at home; others say they are protesting because they can't wear headscarves in school. 'Why did your daughter decide to uncover herself?' an Islamist asks Kars's director of education, before shooting him. 'Does she want to become a film star?' The Islamists don't know what to make of the suicides, since the Koran forbids the faithful to take their own lives."

Maureen Freely, who translated the book, has also reviewed it:
"...[It] also sets out to confound and offend in a way that is as reckless as it is heroically even-handed. Although the military return to restore order at the end of the show, no Kemalist will be proud of Osman Nuri Çolak, the officer who lets the coup happen. No one in Ankara will be pleased by the accounts of torture at the hands of the police or the team led by Z Demirkol. Westernised readers will be offended by the space Pamuk gives to Islamist characters and ideas. Islamists will be offended by his less than respectful portrayal of Islamist leaders. None of these parties is likely to find comfort in the fact that those who come out worst in this story are the left-wing bourgeois intellectuals who are just passing through."

Margaret Atwood in the NYT: "A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, García Márquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would."

John Updike reviews it for The New Yorker:
"If at times “Snow” seems attenuated and opaque, we should not forget that in Turkey, insofar as it partakes of the Islamic world’s present murderous war of censorious fanaticism versus free speech and truth-seeking, to write with honest complexity about such matters as head scarves and religious belief takes courage. Pamuk, relatively young as he is, at the age of fifty-two, qualifies as that country’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize, and the near-assassination of Islam’s last winner must cross his mind."

Dead on Arrival

Siddhartha Deb on Naipaul's Magic Seeds:
"This theme, of rebellions that always turn sour, will be familiar to readers of Naipaul's previous novels. It comes with the territory, and is sometimes made worthwhile by other elements of his writing: the interest in characters disfigured by social change; an instinct for the jagged detail that captures character or place; the use of simple, specific words (and a corresponding hostility towards abstraction); the deft expositions. These are the qualities that have made Naipaul one of the finest social novelists of our time; yet none of these is enough to rescue Magic Seeds.
Naipaul's gift for social observation has always had to struggle against the current of his political sensibility, his unwillingness to register the full implications of what his novelist's eye has sought out. In this book, where the idea being confronted is the rationale behind mass political movements, his characteristic feeling for form, language and character is swamped by a tide of distaste for Maoists, Indian peasants, British workers, white liberals and women. The failures of radical armed movements and the welfare state may be worth examining, but Naipaul's idea of critique consists of placing pebbles in a dead man's mouth."

Down Mexico Way

Anita Desai spoke to The Guardian about her new book, set in Mexico:
"It's such an ancient country, you feel every stone has a history to tell. Mexico and India share a history of colonialism - 300 years of Spanish and British rule - along with this much, much longer past that goes back into myth. Physically, we're alike, too: I am constantly taken for a Mexican."
I like the way she defines her present relationship with India: with clarity, without apology or nostalgia.
"On her annual visits to India, to see her husband and eldest son, Desai feels more and more a stranger. 'One likes to imagine that things have stood still, but so much happens. I have become an observer, and not a participant. And so much has happened to me that to them, my friends and family in India, I am becoming a ghost.'"

They said it

Other blogs. I love 'em.
Bond Girl links to a great piece by Wilton Barnhardt on the worst piece of garbage masquerading as theatre he ever saw, over at Return of the Reluctant:
"A teetering Prospero summons forth a banquet... and a slide, a picture cut out from Good Housekeeping and blurrily photographed (this is all pre-digital), miraculously appears on the ceiling (in a defined slide-rectangle) to hoots of derision from the audience, particulary as the cast goes on to praise such magic, such wonder! It was horrendous from start to finish and NO ONE left at intermission; everyone stayed to see how they would mess up the second half--it was that good!"
(He'd have fun in India. I once caught a production of South Pacific (it was the only entertainment in town) where a guy in white shirt and white pants floated back and forth across the stage waving a white napkin while the lead romantic pair sang Some Enchanted Evening. We thought he was a waiter gone astray; turned out he was supposed to represent the Spirit of Romance.
Then there was the Merchant of Venice production where Shylock rendered his big speech as "Hath not a Juice ice? Hath not a Juice hads, morgans"--then there was a long pause while he sized up "dimensions" and decided to omit it--"sexes, affections, passives?" (He got affections right. The audience gave him points for trying.)
And there was the college production of Blood Wedding which had the male leads galloping around on horses, the only problem being that the director used actual actors dressed in humorous horse costumes for the horses, and one of them rebelled on the first night, unhorsed his rider and forced him to carry the "horse" around for a change.)

The Mumpsimus is sick of reviewers dumping on the fantasy genre. "As storytellers from the dawn of human history have known, fantasy is a powerful way to make an audience think about their own world and lives while at the same time being entertained. Some people might even suggest that that is the primary accomplishment of most great literature that has survived through the ages. (Other people might accuse such people of reductionary thinking, but so it goes. [Some people might say "reductionary" is a high-falutin', nasty bit o' jargon that belongs only in dumpsters and academies. So there.])"

Michael Bérubé has a great post:
"But then along come the Bush twins, and ooh la la, surrealism is born anew! 'My Dad already had a chief of staff– and his name is Andy!' said Jenna. It is beyond humor, it is beyond your petty-ironic Democrat understanding. 'Our parents' favorite term of endearment for each other is Bushy,' they said, following this with 'we had a hamster too, but our hamster didn't make it.' What does this mean? you ask. Foolish liberal Democrats, fretting about 'what does this mean, this strange talk of bushes and lost hamsters.' It is not about meaning. It is about the irruption of the unconscious into the very fabric of everyday life, where the eye becomes an egg and the hamster disappears into the bushy undergrowth, there to be transformed into the heart and soul of America. Hah!"
He's also celebrating; his blog just crossed 250,000 readers for the year. That makes two things the Babu wants from Bérubé: his talent and his numbers. I'd ask for his film star looks, too, if I wasn't blessed in that department--Michael might look like he's auditioning for the next Bond movie, but I have a horrendous cold and I just got stung by a wasp, which means that the boys who're making Shrek III are queuing outside my door, baby.

Crap jobs and bidets

Courtesy Swapan Dasgupta, this utterly corrupt example of how to review an author--Amitava Kumar, in this case--whose views you disagree with:
1) Call him names. "Poseur" will do just fine, because that makes people laugh without you having to justify it.
2) Hide your own bigotry by taking refuge in denial:
From Swapan's review: "The India Kumar explores is riddled with hate, intolerance, petrified Muslims and provincial Hindus reeking of bigotry. Take this as a sample of his post-riot Gujarat: 'There was now not even one Muslim business left in Gujarat. Men with beards were not being served in the restaurants as well as shops in the entire state.' His conclusion is stark: 'For any ordinary Muslim in India, the difficulty of ever crossing over into a larger community of the nation is a challenge.'
This is not Gujarat; this is not ‘secular’ India; this is a caricature."
I wish I could be as sanguine as Swapan about the fallout of the Gujarat riots. But unfortunately, I read. Things like this: "...[F]ormer Intelligence chief R B Sreekumar that senior BJP leaders pressured policemen not to take action against VHP leaders named in post-Godhra riot cases." And I wonder why we're not allowed to see films like this.
3) Stress Kumar's outsider status by mentioning that he was part of the "September influx" to US universities, even if it means ignoring his frequent visits to and journeys in the country he grew up in.
(Anoothi Vishal has a distinctly different perspective--she writes:
"[Kumar] now views issues such as the Hindu–Muslim relations within India not from safe academic distances, a 'pseudo-secularist' viewpoint as many would say, but through the prism of personal experience."
4) And if all else fails, call him a traitor: draw a comparison, apparently in all seriousness, between the Patna boy who became an academic and a writer, and Dhiren Barot aka Abu Eissa al-Hindi, who was arrested recently for planning a terrorist strike in New York.

I have only two more things to add. The first is that Swapan Dasgupta's opinions are in line with his beliefs--you might disagree strongly with his erudite bigotry, but it's only what you'd expect from him. By commissioning him to review Kumar's Husband of a Fanatic, Outlook's looking not for an honest review, but for cheap controversy. (Yes, I'm rising to the bait, but I'm trying to quit smoking. It makes me even tetchier than usual.)
And two is that faced with a book called Husband of a Fanatic and a review titled 'A Pilgrimage of Denial', Google's automatic ad-supplying software worked wonders. The legend says: "Washing with Water: Hand held bidets for wudhu and istinja from POUNDS 19.99 delivered."* This is where the Google ad on the page led to at the time I signed in, and never has my warped sense of humour been so adeptly tickled.

* The ad may change over time, depending on what the bright boys in the Google backroom dream up.

Where's my free decoder?

David Mitchell may be a Great Talent and I'm sure he deserves to be the frontrunner in the Booker stakes. But I've been atomised and xinjianged and infinitely jested and Finnegannishly waked to death; after reading this review, I'm going to pass on Cloud Atlas until the publisher issues a free decoder ring with every copy.
Tom Bissell in the New York Times:
"With the exception of Zachry's tale, the book's thematic centerpiece, we visit each of these stories twice, in the following order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Each story is written quite differently -- so much so that ''Cloud Atlas'' feels like a doggedly expert gloss on various writers and modes. The archaic Ewing section, rendered in journal form, becomes Defoe, possibly Melville. The epistolary Frobisher story is, perhaps, Isherwood or some other sturdy English master. The Luisa Rey section, written in breathlessly lousy prose, is some species of sub-Grisham. The urban comedy of Tim Cavendish's antics is well within Martin Amis's city limits. The plight of Sonmi-451 is Huxley (or ''Blade Runner''). And the daymare of Zachry's postapocalyptic world is something out of William S. Burroughs in a ''Cities of the Red Night'' mood. Taken as a whole, ''Cloud Atlas'' seeks to give the novel a steely new rigging of the possible. It is an impressive achievement. Unfortunately, impressive is usually all that it is."

How could I have missed this?

From the Guardian (link courtesy Zigzackly, who, unlike us, wasn't napping at the wheel), a sci-fi special:
An extract from the Iain M Banks sci-fi novel.
The world's best scientists on the world's best science fiction writers: the ABC (Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke) of SF, plus the D's (Philip K Dick) and the W's (Wyndham, Wells) and much more.
The big question behind SF: what does it mean to be human?
Philip Pullman on the why of reading:
"But the best reason to read about science is not to check facts, but to revel in wonder. Part of the impulse behind my longest story lay in the extraordinary poetry of the phrase "dark matter", and my discovery that Milton had anticipated it in Paradise Lost:
Unless the Almighty Maker them ordained
His dark materials to create new worlds..."

Cogito, ego sum

This story is even better if you know who the First-Rank Naavelist in question is. I'm not telling, and neither is an uncharacteristically discreet Ruchir Joshi, who met the man and his monumental ego.
From Ruchir Joshi's Which One Will He Shoot?:
"Within two days I meet an artist who tells me he thinks his work is “pretty smart”, an Ivy League academic who casually slips in the sentence “but I’m a very good teacher and they like that” while describing his current job, and finally, an “Asian Indian” (as Desi Americans are called) writer who explains literature to me thus:
“There is the first rank, the greats you know, Turgenev, Faulkner, James, Bellow, and these guys are forever. Then there is the second rank, you know, the Roths and the Updikes, people like that. And then there’s the rest.” “And where do you place yourself?” I ask, regretting the question even before it’s fully out of my mouth. “Me?” his voice goes to top gear inside his nose. “Oh, my first book was close to the top of the second rank, I’d say. And I’m now writing my second book, which is a kick-ass naavel which should put me right in the first rank, no question.”
My jaw thuds to the ground, not only because everyone I know who’s read this man’s first book has found it excruciatingly bad, but also because of the sheer, shameless, straight-faced, self-pedestalization. So shocked am I that I have no breath left to answer when he asks, “And what do you do?” I mumble something about “films” and columns in newspapers after which the guy pays no more attention to me. Shortly, the great man leaves, presumably to continue his second magnum opus, and the two Indian writer-friends who’ve introduced him to me fall off their chairs screaming with laughter. “Tera to bolna hi bandh kar diye usney! Khatam kar diya tere ko!”

Wanna be a writer? Join the Foreign Legion

Shashi Tharoor on the connection between diplomacy and writing:
"My friend and former United Nations colleague Jayantha Dhanapala...argues that the professional diplomat, like the sensitive writer, has to be able to mix with both elites and masses; be firmly rooted in his own culture while open to the experience of others; have inner resources to fall back upon in coping with the isolation of a foreign posting (what Auden called 'this nightmare of public solitude')."
Tharoor cites the obvious successes--Paz, who was a great diplomat as well as a great poet, Neruda, who was a great poet and let's not discuss his diplomatic skills, and Ivo Andric. He is (diplomatically) silent on the small but determined band of Indian diplomats who produce poetry and prose of a quality that would cause not just riots, but complete regime changes, if you made it compulsory reading for citizens.

In search of the naive and sentimental reader

Reading Michael Dirda on Madame Bovary, I found myself nostalgic for the days of innocent reading, when books were simply books and not part of the daily grind. One of the very few drawbacks of working in a profession where your job consists of reading a lot is that you lose the ability to approach a book without your mental dissection kit in tow. It's a bit like chefs, who never get to eat a real meal once they cross a certain level of expertise, because everything's about whether the basil's fresh and the place settings are just so and the grains of rice have separated as they should.
I pulled down Madame Bovary and tried to read it as though it was something I was discovering for the very first time, which is like trying to pretend that you're a wide-eyed virgin after years of consecrated lust: it can't be done.
Somewhere out there, though, is someone who's coming to Flaubert without any idea of what's in store for him. The lucky stiff. As Michael Dirda says:
"What truly matters is this: Madame Bovary is available in a superb new translation, in a handsome hardback volume, and if you've never read it, or if you've only worked through it in first-year college French, you need to sit down with this book as soon as possible. This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life."