Kafka's overworked...

...these days.
In Turkey, a local administrator sends all state libraries a diktat: seize Orhan Pamuk's books! Get them off the shelves! Except that, er, the libraries never carried any copies of Pamuk's works anyway.
And Ian McEwan may be persona non grata in the US:
"McEwan's diplomatic woes began a year ago when U.S. officials turned him away from entering the country in error. But that error has remained on the books to haunt him still.
'Once you have been refused entry to the States, you go into the computer and you are regarded with suspicion,' McEwan told Reuters in an interview. 'It is a matter of enormous irritation.'" He's said pretty trenchant things about conspiracies and paranoid imperial powers in Saturday. It ain't paranoia, Ian, they are out to get you after all...

(Hail, comrade, and all that)

The New York Times gives Husband of a Fanatic two thumbs-up and a faint caveat:
"At its best, [Amitava] Kumar's reportage has the immediacy and respectful attention to detail of a well-turned Granta essay (it is no surprise to see Ian Jack, Granta's editor, cited in the acknowledgments). Picking his way through lives distorted or destroyed by hatred, Kumar alleviates his own -- and the reader's -- gloom by drawing attention to the fanatics' mordant eccentricities. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu nationalist cadres called kar-sevaks destroyed the Babri mosque in 1992, Kumar discovers that children now learn math by answering questions like, ''If it takes four kar-sevaks to demolish one mosque, how many does it take to demolish 20?'' He is dismayed that the nationalists have succeeded in making millions of Hindus feel embattled in a country where they form an overwhelming majority. But he is painfully aware that he himself is the anachronism, one of a dwindling band clinging to the secular ideals of India's first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru."

Dished up

"There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment."
That's Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Dig in.

Indo-Pak zindabad

Suketu Mehta and Nadeem Aslam share the Kiriyama Prize. I'm happy because Maximum City and Maps For Lost Lovers were both brilliant books; headline writers are happy because they get to do the sub-editor's equivalent of waving national flags in joyous tandem across the Wagah border.

The Legends of Khasak

It's hard to describe the impact of The Legends of Khasak to someone who hasn't read it: the novel took O V Vijayan approximately 19 years to write, according to one reckoning, it has been in print for over thirty years, and it is often regarded as the indispensable Malayalam contemporary novel.
Vijayan died in Hyderabad this week after a prolonged illness; thousands turned out for his funeral.
Here's a heartfelt obituary--and from V K Madhavan Kutty, the ultimate tribute:
"His best friends were cats, the Siamese cats at his Chanakyapuri residence. He would ask me to speak to his cat first whenever I called, and was in deep mourning when a cat died."

Back, sort of

The Babu apologises for the long silence, but he was struck down in his prime by foul fevers etcetera. He's not going to describe the illness, following the example set by Paul Theroux:
"Illness is nearly always dramatic in imaginative literature...so much of fiction is a fever chart. But illness is very tedious in a travel book." Or a blog.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had more to say about "the uses of medicine in popular fiction", in one of his short stories:
"...[of] what diseases are made most use of in novels. Some are worn to pieces, and others, which are equally common in real life, are never mentioned. Typhoid is fairly frequent, but scarlet fever is unknown. Heart disease is common, but then heart disease, as we know it, is usually the sequel of some foregoing disease, of which we never hear anything in the romance. Then there is the mysterious malady called brain fever, which always attacks the heroine after a crisis, but which is unknown under that name to the textbooks. People when they are overexcited in novels fall down in a fit. In a fairly large experience I have never known anyone to do so in real life. The small complaints simply don't exist. Nobody ever gets shingles or quinsy, or mumps in a novel. All the diseases, too, belong to the upper part of the body. The novelist never strikes below the belt."

In more modern times, cancer and AIDS took over from heart disease and one disease Conan Doyle didn't mention, though it was very popular in fictional terms--consumption or TB. And of late, I've noticed a plethora of syndromes: synaesthesia, the strange neurological disease that Baxter suffers from in McEwan's Saturday, the aneroxics all over the place, of course, a rise in autistic children... Any more?

Orange longlist

The Orange longlist is out, and the biker chick's getting lots of attention.

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories (British, 4th novel)

Clare Clark: The Great Stink (British, 1st novel)

Kira Cochrane: Escape Routes For Beginners (British, 2nd novel)

Joolz Denby: Billie Morgan (British, 3rd novel)

Anita Desai: The Zigzag Way (Indian, 14th novel)

Christine Dwyer: Hickey Tatty (Irish, 4th novel)

Patricia Ferguson: It So Happens (British, 4th novel)

Melanie Finn: Away From You (British, 1st novel)

Jane Gardam: Old Filth (British, 15th novel)

Sue Gee: The Mysteries Of Glass (British, 9th novel)

Miranda Hearn: Nelson's Daughter (British, 2nd novel)

Ingrid Hill: Ursula, Under (American, 1st novel)

Sheri Holman: The Mammoth Cheese (American, 3rd novel)

Marina Lewycka: A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian (British, 1st novel)

Nell Leyshon: Black Dirt (British, 1st novel)

Michelle Lovric: The Remedy (British, 3rd novel)

Maile Meloy: Liars and Saints (American, 1st novel)

Joyce Carol Oates: The Falls (American, 5th novel)

Lionel Shriver: We Need To Talk About Kevin (American, 7th novel)

Tricia Wastvedt: The River (British, 1st novel)

The Hoot on Mediaah!

Trust Sevanti Ninan to put the debate over Mediaah! into perspective:
"In the blogosphere the theme song is that a brave, independent blog is being snuffed out by Big Media. Come on! Make a noise! Save it! Freedom of speech is under threat.
The thing about free speech though, is that it does not come for free. Its price, at the very least is a lawyer's fees. Pradyuman Maheshwari was offering no holds barred commentary on the media. If you are no holds barred, it stands to reason does it not, that the guy you are targeting will also be no holds barred? You have to be prepared for that, and cover your flanks. Or you have to duck and become subversive. The online world has a dozen methods of attack without being traced or pinned down. He should have tried some of them."
Point one: Pradyuman has to be prepared to stand and fight for his blog. I understand how demoralising it can be to be attacked, but if you check out the lawyer's letter, you begin to think that he should have replied rather than folded.
Point two: Sevanti also says, "So was Mediaah! defamatory? Well, it carried language and insinuation that mainstream publications would not."
This is kind of interesting, because she's put her finger on what makes blogs different: both more challenging and more open than mainstream media, because they're unfiltered, but also sometimes less responsible, more vulnerable. The whole point of running a mediawatch blog rather than a column in the papers was presumably to take the gloves off and run things that mainstream publications would not. But then that brings us back to point one; if you punch that hard, someone's going to punch back. You need to be willing to fish a few other moves out of the old arsenal.

One size fits all

Alex Beam on another kind of one-book-wonder:
"A new microgenre of what passes for literature has appeared on the scene: the omnididact's tale. Perhaps because everyone feels so stupid, we witness the impulse to get smarter, preferably by reading one book."
Before Bill Bryson and company offered to downsize all that you needed to know, there were always zealots who insisted that you only needed to read one book, ever, for all your life. (The Book in question varied. The Koran, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita were often mentioned; atheists advocated The Prophet, The Fountainhead, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; today's One Book to Rule them all is well, The Da Vinci Code; and the most offbeat in this category was Green Eggs and Ham. Recommended by a friend who swore Dr Seuss had ALL the answers.)

I'm guessing they rotted, very slowly

The Scotsman has a decent profile of Kazuo Ishiguro.
And, from The Independent:
"Kazuo Ishiguro's first memories of England are of double-decker buses and squashed hedgehogs. "These were the exotic things," he tells me. "I remember the branches scraping against the roof of the bus and looking down at the puddles and the squashed hedgehogs and feeling that they were all in some way connected. What", he asks suddenly, "happened to the hedgehogs?"

Insert De Pun here

I know this seems unlikely, but trust me. Ruchir Joshi managed to segue from this to... Hunter Thompson. Probably the first time in their lives (and afterlives) that De and the good doctor found themselves in close proximity.
"Soon, the bar was closed temporarily and people were listening, spellbound, to Shobhaa and a dozen of her best friends, six Über-Glitt Capital-Couples who had graciously agreed to have a little symposium about their happy espousalations. “Marriage is an idea,” Shobhaa expounded, “but the vidhi and the paperwork is just a moment. After that it’s the two of you who have to make the idea work.” One by one the happy hub-wife teams developed on this theme. “What about sex?” “Well, it’s important of course, but young people today have to be told it’s not the only thing.” “No,” I found myself muttering, shielding my eyes from all the massed diamondery, “There’s money. That matters too.”"
The Guardian was a lot gushier about De. If they keep this sort of thing up, they could replace our local Page 3 journos. No, really.

An awfully big adventure

Linda Goodman ruined Peter Pan for me; too many kids in school thought Love Signs was the word of God, and she had a knack for picking out the most twee bits of Barrie to go with Virgo Man, Libra Woman or Gemini Woman, Pisces Man or whatever. (Has anyone done a Love Signs for the gay and lesbian community, incidentally? Or are the planets irredeemably politically incorrect?)
The copyright holders to J M Barrie's Peter Pan have just commissioned Geraldine McCaughrean to write the sequel; she's pretty talented, so this might be the last chance I get to read about Wendy and Captain Hook (would've been kind of nice if those two had got it on) without fwowing up.

Afghanistan, the unromantic view

Pankaj Mishra reports from Afghanistan:
"Much of Kabul is built of mud. And when it rained before last Christmas— relieving a long and severe drought— the whole city seemed to melt. The piles of sludge on its unpaved lanes rose, as though in a slow-moving tide, until it spattered everything: the big white Land Cruisers of aid agencies and Afghan ministers, the beat-up yellow taxis, the bombed-out palaces of western Kabul and the bullet-pocked huts on steep hills, the fortified foreign embassies and UN offices, and even the high billboards exhorting Afghans, in idiosyncratic English, to 'national reconciliation and peace.'"

Staying in the same place

The Babu has considered migrating several times, in the same way he's considered dieting, because everyone does it. He did neither, and now he can claim that Orhan Pamuk was his inspiration. (Now he's worrying about whether Pamuk ever dieted, in which case we will be forced to bring on the lettuce leaves. It's a question of solidarity.)
Here's Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul:
"Here we come to the heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul - never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood. Although I've lived in other districts from time to time, 50 years on I find myself back where my first photographs were taken and where my mother first held me in her arms to show me the world. I know this persistence owes something to my imaginary friend, and to the solace I took from the bond between us.
But we live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, and so I am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I've stayed not only in the same place, but the same building. My mother's sorrowful voice comes back to me, "Why don't you go outside for a while, why don't you try a change of scene, do some travelling ...?"
Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am."

Orange, juiced

The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, open to women writers only, will be announced on March 14. The usual debates over whether the prize is necessary or just an example of reverse sexism continue to flourish.
Geraldine Bedell sums up the history of the Prize:
"The 2003 winner, Valerie Martin, says that as far as she can make out, the prize 'was founded in a fit of pique, which seems like a very good reason to start something'. The plan for a women's fiction prize emerged out of a series of meetings between publishers, authors, agents, booksellers and journalists in the wake of the 1991 Booker shortlist, which featured no women. (Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter were among the eligible females.) No statistics existed, but this omission was felt to be something of a habit.
Where women did appear, as Michele Roberts did on the Booker shortlist and Kate Atkinson on the Whitbread, both in 1992, they were seen as the female contender, their chances discussed in terms of their gender - as if, says the novelist Kate Mosse - who would become the force behind the Orange Prize - 'they were somehow representative of the entire sex.'
Mosse says the women at those early meetings (who included the literary agents Jane Gregory and Anne McDermott and publishers Liz Calder and Lennie Goodings) reached the conclusion that 'paradoxically, the way to take gender out of the equation was for all the entrants to be women'. Prizes are known to sell books, 'so was there an issue about readers not getting to hear about a lot of books? We saw the prize as something that would benefit male and female readers.'"

Ten years down the line, the last word on the Orange should come from the shortlists. Every single year, the Orange highlights writers who either don't get attention in the mainstream and (admit it) reasonably sexist world of reviews and book prizes or who're part of the mainstream as the Token Woman or who're undeservedly overlooked. Or to put it more simply, every year the Orange offers me a new list of books to read that I would have been hard put to compile on my own if I'd culled mainstream sources for these authors' names. The other thing that sometimes gets lost about the Orange in the middle of the gender debate is that it's unusual among literary prizes: it found its feet within a year or two, its shortlists have always been value for the reader's money, and it has never had a problem finding enough writers to nominate. It should be interesting to see, over the next few decades, whether mainstream media catches up enough with the Orange to render it redundant--I suspect it'll still be needed some twenty years down the line, though.

More IMPAC for the buck

Give the folks behind the IMPAC this; they tried. They worked hard at branding the prize as "truly international"; they pointed out that it's compiled by librarians; they have been genuinely open to including works in translation; and they're still stuck with being known as the "world's richest prize". Never mind. The winner's not going to be complaining, trust me.
For the 2005 award, the IMPAC whittled down a truly loooooong longlist to a total of ten on the shortlist:

Gardening at Night by Diane Awerbuck
The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen
(translated from the Norwegian by Kenneth Steven)
The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut
Elle by Douglas Glover
Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg
(translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett)
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Willenbrock by Christoph Hein
(translated from the German by Philip Boehm)
Deafening by Frances Itani
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

Among the authors who didn't make the cut: T C Boyle, Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, J M Coetzee, Peter Carey, Gunter Grass, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa (tut tut), M G Vassanji...Dan Brown and John Grisham. At least the last two can't complain that they really, really needed the hundred thousand euros.

Mediaah and the Men in Black

This is how the story goes. Once upon a time, there was a little website that could, called Mediaah!, which was one of the very, very few Indian media watchdog sites/ blogs around. It had two lives; the first time around, Mediaah's owner, Pradyuman Maheshwari, had to pull the plug on it because of extraneous factors. But Mediaah! came back, and we duly rejoiced, and flocked to it in the mornings for gossip, and cheered every time it offered the little guy's point of view vis-a-vis the mainstream, though of course we hit Alt + Tab PDQ if our bosses were watching. Now one of the papers Mediaah! routinely went after is a Very Big Indian Daily whose name we are all so scared to speak that we might just hint it rhymes with this.
There are several reasons Mediaah! took on the Awfully Scary Paper, including some of the issues discussed in this book.
But then the Awfully Scary Paper got to hear about Mediaah! or possibly it hires minions to surf the Net for criticism in a paranoid sort of way. We have no idea; all the journalists we know who work at the ToI are sweeties, oddly enough, but they follow Fight Club rules, the first rule being, you do not bite the hand of ASPs that feed you by talking about them.
So it sent Mediaah! a dry letter beginning with "Whereas" and containing terms such as "the party of the first part" and "hereinafter" and suchlike.
Mediaah! had three choices, and Pradyuman lists them here:
"This is to inform all our readers that Mediaah! has chosen to cease publication. I received a legal notice from the esteemed lawyers retained by a leading Indian media group who asked me to delete 19 posts from the Mediaah! weblog and also refrain from writing anything similar and defamatory.
There were three options available to me:

1. Delete the 19 posts, and get on with life
2. Don’t delete them, ignore the notice, and go on as if nothing happened
3. Don’t delete the posts, just delete the blog (or ALL that has been published earlir)

I have chosen the third. I have not deleted the 19 posts. I have not apologised for what has been written."

Now as far as ASPs are concerned, that's where the story's supposed to end. You hiss, you show your fangs, and it's The End. They know that Mediaah! doesn't have a hope in hell of fighting the case; even if Pradyuman can pull in legal muscle and cover his costs, he'll end up in court--and Mediaah! will end up in limbo--for eons while their lordships debate whether freedom of speech extends to blogs. They also know that while online petitions like this one are a good idea, the CEO ain't going to be moved an inch. Even the nineteen posts that they objected to have been removed from the site, as have the archives. As far as the ASP is concerned, game's over.
Or maybe not. (And yes, if you're interested in free speech issues, I do suggest you click on all three links.)

Heyer, lowered

Mukul Kesavan discovers prejudice lurking unexpectedly
within the covers of Georgette Heyer's The Grand Sophy:
"Heyer died in 1974 and since I had so many of her novels at hand, I spent a while turning to the copyright page of each one, just to date them, to see when she had written the good ones. The Grand Sophy, without doubt one of her best, had been first published by William Heinemann in 1950.
The date stayed in my mind and when I revisited The Grand Sophy and read my way through the Goldhanger scene it occurred to me that it had been written at the end of the decade of Hitler and the Holocaust. Heyer had invented her greasy, servile, hook-nosed, hooded-eyed, sinister, blood-sucking Jew inside a few years of Hitler killing six million men, women and children for being hook-nosed, hooded-eyed, sinister, blood-sucking Jews."

Needs a bit of salt...

Pradeep Sebastian writes in The Hindu:
"There are really only two kinds of readers — those who write in books, and those who don't. I myself have never been able to scribble in the margins but several of my friends never begin a book without a soft pencil in hand. Coleridge, a compulsive book scribbler, called it marginalia."
Make that "three kinds of readers". The Babu never writes in books--blame his stern Bengali Brahmo upbringing for that, we internalised the idea that books were sacred objects not to be desecrated by pen, pencil or snot at a very early age. On the other hand, he used to be a bibliophage. Books from an earlier period of typesetting, when it was considered correct to leave a great deal of space in the margins, were all too literally devoured; never the text, just the great wide open spaces to left and right. Some notes from that period: onionskin paper does not taste of onions, more like communion wafers. Old books taste of silverfish, or perhaps I actually ingested a few silverfish along with the odd torn-off bit of paper--can't remember. Bengali books tasted of ants--slightly peppery. Glossy paper leaves an aftertaste, like bad wine, that lingers forever. Really good books taste slightly biscuity. The paper that contemporary books are printed on doesn't taste of anything much but often smells like toilet paper, which might explain why the Babu lost his taste for eating off the margins about a decade or so ago. And the most savoury of all the books I've ever tasted was a copy of Lolita printed on really fine, creamy paper. Reminded me of runny Brie.

The Indian Fiction Top 25

Jerry Pinto, poet, journalist Who Actually Reads, and author, recently put together a list of the 25 Best Books in Indian fiction (English language, no translations):

1. Vikram Chandra: Love and Longing in Bombay
2. Aubrey Menen: The Fig Tree
3. Rohinton Mistry: Tales from Firozhsha Baug
4. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Interpreter of Maladies
5. Hari Kunzru: The Impressionist
6. G V Desani: All About H Hatterr
7. Vikram Seth: The Golden Gate
8. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
9. R K Narayan: Swami and Friends
10. Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie
11. Kamala Markandaya: Nectar in a Sieve
12. Anita Desai: Baumgartner’s Bombay
13. Amitav Ghosh: The Shadow Lines
14. I Allan Sealy: The Trotternama
15. Shashi Tharoor: The Great Indian Novel
16. Githa Hariharan: When Dreams Travel
17. Kiran Nagarkar: Raavan & Eddie
18. Shashi Deshpande: That Long Silence
19. Arundhathi Roy: The God of Small Things
20. Raja Rao: Kanthapura
21. Khushwant Singh: Delhi
22. Nisha Da Cunha: Old Cypress
23. Ruskin Bond: The Room on the Roof
24. Gita Mehta: The River Sutra
25. Indi Rana: The Devil in the Dustbin

Pretty eclectic, there, and much room for debate--but it's a fun list. Suggestions, anybody?

Arre O Sambo!

Somewhere in the dim recesses of the Babu's (brown) unconscious lurks a white supremacist, clearly. As a child, I read Little Black Sambo and the Brer Rabbit books with sublime indifference to their clearly racist overtones, accepting Little Black Sambo and his Mumbo and his Jumbo in the same spirit as I accepted Beatrix Potter's waistcoat-wearing rabbits. It was only as an adult, when good white critics pointed out just how politically incorrect these books were, that I began looking for scars on my psyche and someone to sue.
Now a Tokyo publisher is reissuing Little Black Sambo, which I have no problem with--let the next generation take its chances with psychic scars, forsooth.
But this defence is no defence:
"Zuiunsha President Tomio Inoue has said he believes it is worthwhile to pass on the book to the next generation, adding, 'I think it's necessary to think deeply about what constitutes discrimination. In India, 'sambo' generally refers to a child's name.' [emphasis mine]"
I hate to contradict Tomio Inoue, but he's dead wrong; sambo isn't even a slang term for child and Sambo certainly isn't a common child's name in India.
Here's one definition of sambo:
"stereotypical name for male black person (now only derogatory), 1818, Amer.Eng., probably a different word from sambo (1); like many such words (Cuffy, Rastus, etc.) a common personal name among U.S. blacks in the slavery days (first attested 1704 in Boston), probably from an African source, cf. Foulah sambo "uncle," or a similar Hausa word meaning "second son." Used without conscious racism or contempt until circa World War II. When the word fell from polite usage, collateral casualties included the enormously popular children's book "The Story of Little Black Sambo" (by Helen Bannerman), which actually is about an East Indian child, and the Sambo's Restaurant chain, a U.S. pancake-specialty joint originally opened in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1957 (the name supposedly from a merging of the names of the founders, Sam Battistone and Newell "Bo" Bohnett, but the chain's decor and advertising leaned heavily on the book), which once counted 1,200 units coast-to-coast. Civil rights agitation against it began in 1970s and the chain collapsed, though the original restaurant still is open. Many of the defunct restaurants were taken over by rival Denny's."
There's a 1996 discussion archived on the Net, where a defence of Helen Bannerman provoked fairly heated responses.
"Posterity has not been kind to Helen Bannerman. She was an educated woman. She was well aware of what she was doing in placing a black boy in India. She was creating fantasy.
It is ironic that there has been a thread on the list about fantasy and the resistance of children to it, and yet, for so long it has gone unrecognized that "Little Black Sambo" is fantasy, set neither in Africa or India. Let me quote a couple of passages from Elizabeth Hay's now out-of-print biography, "Sambo Sahib: The Story of Little Black Sambo and Helen Bannerman", (Barnes & Noble, 1981).
The first is from a review which appeared in The Spectator on 12/2/1899, the time of the original publication of LBS. The review indicates that at the time of publication the book was perceived as fantasy, a perception that was lost fairly quickly:
[The book] "was not written with one eye on parents and guardians, or the inconsistency of mixing up the African type of black with delightful adventures with tigers in an Indian jungle would never have been allowed to pass. As it is, Little Black Sambo makes his simple and direct appeal in the great realm of make-believe without paying the slightest attention to the unities or caring in the least about anything but the amusement of the little boys and girls for whom he was so obviously created." (p. 28)"

Kipling (and a Chicklitany)

From Publisher's Weekly, two new deal reports:

"Victoria Vinton's debut novel about the year
Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont with his new bride
and wrote The Jungle Book, and a fictional family
whose son inspires the creation of Mowgli, to Anika
Streitfeld at MacAdam/Cage, for six figures, in a
pre-empt, by Maria Massie at Lippincott Massie
McQuilkin (world).

First-time author and 17-year-old Harvard student
Kaavya Viswanathan's HOW OPAL MEHTA GOT KISSED, GOT
WILD, AND GOT IN, the story of how a beautiful nerd
cracks the popular kids' clique, finds her first
love and figures out who she really is after
learning that the HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into
Harvard) plan she has been faithfully following
since kindergarten has made her the kind of
automaton that a Harvard dean looks down on, to
Michael Pietsch and Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown,
by Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at William Morris Agency."

I'm looking forward to the Vinton, even if she did decide to saddle poor Rudyard with kids. But the Opal Mehta book? The Babu gets enough desi chicklit coming in off the Indian market, thank you, to keep him barfing like a Roman at a particularly demanding orgy. It doesn't raise his spirits to know that there's More Where That Came From, especially with Penguin India releasing branded chicklit--Rupa Gulab's debut novel is the first in a series of special editions endorsed by Shobhaa De. Gulab's actually done a pretty good job, unlike some we could name if we hadn't forgotten their amazingly delible work. On the other hand, if I meet another author peddling Bridget Joneses Cloneses in a world of arranged marriages, I will sally forth and write my own steamy bestseller, starring a yearning, independent, working girl, Mr Right, and the fine, upstanding axe murderer who dispatches them to a version of heaven where they can read the matrimonials together for all eternity. To be called Deranged Marriage (happy ending guaranteed).

Hungry kya?

Jerry Rao's tribute to R K Narayan is not to be read on an empty stomach, as the Babu, now rummaging for the phone number of the nearest Sagar/ Udipi, has just discovered.
"The idea of deliberately restricting one’s scale of operations, but achieving exquisite balance, irony and brilliance has never left me since then. Narayan is the ultimate veena-playing vegetarian. He does not pretend to have an orchestra with hundreds of violins, harps, cellos and horns. He does not pretend to a wide range of sauces and meats. But within his self-imposed limits of a quietly comical Malgudi he plays an exquisite raga, concocts a delectable rasam!"

One book wonders

This evening we dropped in at Karim’s in the Nizamuddin dargah, and as we walked back down those twisting lanes, I found myself thinking of the bookshop in Old Delhi that sells only Korans. I’d dropped in there several months ago to buy a Koran in especially ornate flourishes for a friend who enjoys calligraphy, but left feeling slightly oppressed, slightly unnerved at the idea of an entire shop dedicated to just one book. There was something depressing, despite the beautiful language of the Koran, about knowing that every single book in the shop told the same story; it was like walking into those television shops that have walls of TVs all showing the same channel.
It’s worse with Bible shops, like the one I saw years ago in London that has old Bibles, pop-up Bibles, children’s Bibles, leatherbound Bibles, miniature Bibles—colourful, fascinating, but somehow wrong, like an entire museum of art devoted to just one work.
The third in my list of one-book bookshops had entirely more prosaic stock—this was a small, airless hole-in-the-wall near Delhi University which was taken up, from floor to ceiling, with copies of a huge tome dedicated to aspiring servants of the government of India, takers of the UPSC. The man who ran the shop had, over the years, read the UPSC kunji from end-to-end with a thoroughness born out of monotony. He was much esteemed in the neighbourhood for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the guide as well as of exam papers, and aspiring examinees would often drop in to seek his blessings. Which he delivered in curt asides, seldom bothering to look up as he ascertained, yet again, how many piglets are born to the average sow in the average litter in North India.
Earlier in the day, I’d noticed how many bookshops in Delhi have given over vast quantities of their cramped space to Dan Brown displays. You can now get the Da Vinci Code in large print, with annotations, in deluxe editions, in everything bar the board game version. And there’s something oppressive about the amount of space that book takes up, particularly if you know the statistics about India’s high-turnover market and if you’re aware how short a shelf life books typically have before they disappear into the wilderness of pavement bookshops and remainder bins.
Perhaps bookshops will evolve to a different stage of one-book-worship. Instead of tables littered with cloned copies of one book or walls that look as though the bestseller of the day has pupped, you will enter the local bookstore and find nothing…no racks, no shelves, no classics, no poetry, no crime fiction specials, no translations, no children’s books. Just white curtains, muted music in the background, a Rothko print looming on one wall and in the centre, a black lacquer table bearing a Zen-like arrangement of one perfect rock and a tea rose…and the Da Vinci Code, in the edition with the special afterword by Dan Brown.

Pamuk: "the great lie"

Nouritza Matossian puts the controversy over Orhan Pamuk into perspective:
"Orhan Pamuk, wielder of Turkey's finest pen, has spoken and cut a swath through his country's conscience...His crime was one sentence in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger this month. 'Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that.' All hell broke loose. The press attacked him for dishonouring the Turkish state and incitement to racial violence. He has been called a liar, 'a miserable creature' and a 'black writer' in the daily Hurriyet. Professor Hikmet Ozdemir, head of the Armenian studies department at the Turkish Union of Historians, rejected his statement as a 'great lie'.
A lone voice, Halil Berktay, professor at Sabanci University, supported Pamuk: 'In 1915-16 about 800,000 or one million Armenians were killed for sure.'"
Motassian understands how deep the silence over the Armenian genocide goes:
"I was recently in Istanbul lecturing on my biography of Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, the basis for the controversial genocide movie Ararat. Official permission for my talk required me not to utter the word 'genocide' to refer to the Ottoman empire's systematic deportations, tortures and killings of two million Armenians which Gorky witnessed. I might refer to those 'incidents'. The crime has never been acknowledged by successive Turkish governments, Britain or the United States."
Meanwhile, Pamuk has to bear with rather less coherent 'criticism', as expressed in this article in Turkish Daily News:
"He wants to blurt out all his negativity all at once without a smile, humor or pause that makes a man "human." He is like a fussbudget. He wants the whole world to know all the bad things about Turkey. He wants to tell the world how horrible Turkey and the Turkish people are. That is his one and only message. He gets this message out through his books and speeches. He must write those words with drooling pleasure at his keyboard. He must get so carried away while writing that some nights he probably forgets to sleep. That's how I imagine Pamuk at his keyboard writing his world-famous books."

The Kurban Conundrum

Amardeep has a lovely post up on the mystery of Kurban Said:
"Among other things, I came across two novels by a writer I'd never heard of, Kurban Said. Reading through Paul Theroux's afterword to Ali and Nino, I saw this:
'But how had this Central Asian come to write his book in German and publish it in Berlin? Was he an exile, and if so, was this a pen name? It turns out that it was indeed a pen name, possibly shared by two people, one an Austrian baroness, Elfriede Ehrenfels, and the other an emigre Jew from Azerbaijan, Lev Nussimbaum, who had converted to Islam and taken the name Essad Bey and lived in Berlin and Vienna.'
Ok, wow. Now that's a backstory!"

The winners are...invisible

The Fourth Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction Competition has been held, judged and won...but you're not going to be able to read any of the winning entries until March 7. Dilip D'Souza's Ride Across the River is the winner, while Geralyn Pinto's Re-Routing and Tishani Doshi's Excerpts From the Journal of a Delusional Widow are the runners-up.
Promise to provide links as and when Outlook does.

21st century profile, redux

This Jonathan Safran Foer profile in the New York Times is worth reading, for no other reason than that it might make you wonder whether there is any point left to interviewing a certain kind of writer. This is a six-page profile of a 28-year-old writer who's been hailed as a genius and whose second novel is coming out soon. Deborah Solomon hits the usual marks--explore the writer's physical space, meet his family--and then explains to us why this isn't going to make sense--Foer writes everywhere, in bars, friend's houses, not just in his house, his family can give you cute pictures and anecdotes but no real insight into the writer's development. They're both very aware of the form of the interview:
"To be sure, writing a letter to a journalist and, by implication, to the wide readership of a newspaper, is altogether different from dropping a line to your worried mother. Yet Foer can be surprisingly intimate when he is on the record," writes Solomon, aware perhaps that what wakes this piece up is not her comments and her attempts to find meaning in Foer's life, but the detritus of almost obssessive emails he sends her way. And Foer is aware of the format, too:
"It pains me to think that I have not yet given you enough about me, as a person. Two meetings. What if, by chance -- by mood, by weather, by biochemistry -- I grossly misrepresented myself?"

Twice, I've interviewed authors who really had nothing new to say, and I couldn't blame them. They'd been done to death, over a period of years, decades in one case. Too many road trips. Too many essays explaining The Work. Too many literary festivals. Too many interviews, profiles, three-quotes-and-a-hook quickies. They knew more about their own lives--the Early Inspiration, the Moment of Clarity, the Years of Struggle, the Era of Grappling With Success, the Learning to Grow, the Not Being Straitjacketed, the Elder Statesman Syndrome thingie--to be able to even rework the old material any more.
With one, I gave up eventually and made the best of a bad job. With the other, we tacitly agreed after a point not to talk books and spent a wonderful evening discussing UFOs, the astonishing prevalence of lewd poetry in all cultures, and how to make a really good pasta sauce. Even when interviews have "worked", I'm always aware of how subjective they are. Oh well. Maybe they're like passport photos: they're supposed to be gruesome, and you're just grateful for the ones that come out okay.

TMI

I will probably never meet Ruth David Konigsberg, but thanks to the opening paragraph of this review by her, I feel like I know all the important stuff already:
"Being a parent was an intensely physical state—postpartum fluid was still being flushed out of my body in night sweats, and I was so painfully constipated that on doctor’s orders I had to send my husband down to the corner for a Fleet enema (a household first!)."
Ruth, if you're reading this, come on over some day. You can tell me all about cabbage leaves and their importance in new motherhood so long as I get to bore you with stories about the ant that wandered around inside my plaster cast. Deal?

The Rooster crows

The Tournament of Books is over; it came down to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas versus Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. The winnah? Click here.

Long Pinteresque silence...

...goes here.

Bandit myths

Peter Dailey has an interesting analysis of Hobsbawm and Blok on the subject of bandits as applied to the life (and death) of Veerapan:
"Sometimes, in the forest at night, Veerappan's men would gather around him by the fire as he read to them stories from Tamil versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. These twenty-five-hundred-year-old epics fully encompassed his understanding of the world-Karnataka, after all, is the setting for episodes in both-and he found in these tales ready analogies to their own situation and to most of the practical or moral problems that faced them: 'Fourteen years of vanavas (forest exile) was for Rama," he explained, 'twelve years of vanavas was for the Pandavas. God has fixed twenty-five years of vanavas for me.'....
On one point, though, Hobsbawm and Blok agreed: even if bandits bear little relation to the legends surrounding them, they play a heroic role in the popular imagination because the drama of the lives of the poor requires it. Despite the manifest unsuitability, Hobsbawm acknowledges, of "candidates . . . sometimes cast for the role," the fundamental injustices of day-to-day poverty make brigands and others living outside the law credible and potent symbols of resistance. The formation of bandit myths, Blok concedes, is itself a form of social protest."

If You Can't Stand the Heat...

...temporarily suspend blogging. First there was the cat settling on the Babu's lap, which is pleasant in winter, warm fur heater and all that. Then there was the laptop (computer, not cat), which decided that it was going to deal with the fine new wiring in our fine new house by overheating like no-one's business. And after I'd installed the asbestos mats, discovered the thing about having a broken wrist in a plaster cast: you type for more than half an hour and the damn thing heats up. (But plaster's preferable to fibreglass; used to keep setting my fibreglass cast on fire in absentminded fashion.) Anyway, now that cast's no bar as the matrimonial ads say, we is back.