The Tennis Partner: Larry Collins (d 2005)

Larry Collins, who co-wrote Is Paris Burning? (and a terrible follow-up many years later called, inevitably, Is New York Burning?) with Dominique Lapierre, died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 75.

"Collins had lived in France for several decades. He and Lapierre played tennis together on a court they built beside their homes from their book earnings, Lapierre said.
"This tennis court played a big role in our career," Lapierre said. "Every time we had a disagreement - and it was rare - we turned to the tennis court. Whoever won the game won the argument."

Ever read Maus?

According to this report, some members of the Jewish community are nervous about two new comic books on the Holocaust, intended to "introduce young Germans to the tragic fate of the Jews".

"German officers are shown screaming at prisoners as they pile up corpses retrieved from the gas chambers. “All this has to be converted into cinders and ashes by the evening!” says the speech bubble in the story Auschwitz by the French artist Pascal Croci.
A second comic book, Yossel, by the American artist Joe Kubert, shows a boy being electrocuted as he tries to escape beneath the wires of a concentration camp fence. No concession is made to the sensibilities of the young readers; the dead bodies are portrayed as graphically as if they were the fictional victims of Batman or some other superhero.

But it's not the content that's causing the objections--it's apparently the form.

“A comic strip is not the appropriate form,” said Ezra Cohn, 64, of the Jewish community in Düsseldorf. “The subject is too serious to portray in this way.”

I can just see the disconnect here, between a generation that thinks of a "comic strip" in terms of "the funnies", space fillers in a newspaper--and a generation that cut its teeth on the Sandman saga, on Maus, on dark tales of superheroes who suffered existential crises. The graphic novel grew up a long, long time ago, and it's more than a little absurd to suggest that the graphic form might somehow diminish the experience of the Holocaust.
I haven't read Yossel, but Auschwitz is a gripping, grim and terrifyingly powerful work. It begins in Bosnia, in 1993, where an old couple have sought shelter in a damaged building. As they huddle together, Kazic brings up their past in the camps at Auschwitz. He and his wife survived the horros of that time; they lost their daughter to the camps, lost their humanity, their faith, but somehow, they emerged alive. Now, 52 years later, they are hunted again by another group of righteous zealots bent on ethnic cleansing. Croci sets the narrative up so that we look for the redemptive ending; surely the next panel will give us a happy ending, surely these two, who have been through so much, will survive this too. But in Croci's merciless vision, the couple who came out of Auschwitz and struggled to lead a meaningful life after what they saw in the camps aren't subject to the pretty, reassuring conventions of fiction.
To see something as powerful as Auschwitz as somehow less meaningful because it's in "comic strip" form is to misunderstand the nature of writing and story-telling horribly.

Creative Writhing Course

At MobyLives, Elizabeth Clementson cuts MFAs down to size:

"Many of the world's greatest novels would have never made it through the workshop process. Picture James Joyce being told that Ulysses is "too ambitious." Or Harper Lee being told that that Boo Radley character needs further development. Or Gertrude Stein being told, "Gertrude, The Making of Americans, is inaccessible. You need to cut the fat out and rework these sentences."

Read any good books lately? Tell Big Brother.

From The New York Times:

"[US] Law enforcement officials have made at least 200 formal and informal inquiries to libraries for information on reading material and other internal matters since October 2001, according to a new study that adds grist to the growing debate in Congress over the government's counterterrorism powers...

In a slightly surreal passage, the report explains that the provisions of the Patriot Act limits the scope of the survey:

"The study does not directly answer how or whether the Patriot Act has been used to search libraries. The association said it decided it was constrained from asking direct questions on the law because of secrecy provisions that could make it a crime for a librarian to respond. Federal intelligence law bans those who receive certain types of demands for records from challenging the order or even telling anyone they have received it.

Or, in plain English:

"Carol Brey-Casiano, who runs the library system in El Paso and is president of the library association, said she, too, sensed a public unease.
"We're concerned about protecting people's privacy," she said. "People will say to me, 'I've read about the Patriot Act, and does that mean the government can come in and ask you what I'm reading?' And my answer to them has to be, 'Yes, they can,' and quite frankly, I can't even tell anyone if that happened, because there's a gag order."

According to Bloomberg:

"When the American Library Association surveyed U.S. libraries for a report on the impact of the USA Patriot Act, it went out of its way -- far out of its way -- to house the information.
The choice: a computer server in Canada, beyond the reach of U.S. authorities. ``Not that I'm paranoid or anything,'' said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Chicago-based library association's Washington office."

Ken Saro Wiwa and the oil wars

From Ken Saro-Wiwa's closing statement at his trial:

"I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief. The Company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the Company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished....
We all stand on trial, my lord, for by our actions we have denigrated our country and jeopardized the future of our children. As we subscribe to the sub-normal and accept double standards, as we lie and cheat openly, as we protect injustice and oppression, we empty our classrooms, denigrate our hospitals, fill our stomachs with hunger and elect to make ourselves the slaves of those who ascribe to higher standards, pursue the truth, and honour justice, freedom, and hard work. I predict that the scene here will be played and replayed by generations yet unborn. Some have already cast themselves in the role of villains, some are tragic victims, some still have a chance to redeem themselves. The choice is for each individual.

On 10th November 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists (collectively known as the Ogoni Nine today) were executed. Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa has the complete history, and is setting up a Living Memorial.
Over the years, Ken Saro-Wiwa has not been forgotten: his struggle and the struggle of the Ogoni people has been carried forward by hundreds of others. But Dr Owens Wiwa, Ken Saro-Wiwa's younger brother, is asking for justice to be done, however belatedly: he wants Ken Saro-Wiwa formally exonerated.
"But when you kill an innocent person and brand him a murderer, (and) then tell the people that time has gone, let's move forward, that is not only wrong, but they are taking us as less than human."
The Nigerian government could make a big difference by acknowledging that the Ogoni Nine were not criminals, by admitting that Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other activists were casualties of the oil war. As for Shell, the company's had ten years to think about the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa: I know it's a bit late, but this might be a good time for them to say they're sorry.

Sign my book! Now!

How to ask an author to autograph your copy of his book: get shit-faced, tackle him, and as you press your knee into the small of his back, say, "That's two s'es in 'Chrissy'". (Link found on Prufrock.)

Oh, just take the whole pigeon

Elizabeth Day does a tongue-in-cheek interview with Paulo Coelho, the man who converted fortune cookie wisdom into a very profitable career. Read the whole thing here, especially this bit, which made me think that perhaps someone should tip Coelho off about the significance of white feathers:

"Coelho himself pays great attention to omens - he will start writing a new book only after finding a white feather.
'The white feather thing started before my first book, The Pilgrimage. I asked myself, shall I write that book? I was not sure and I said if I see a feather today, I'm going to write; if I don't see it it's not in my destiny. I found it so I said I have to write. And the next book, I followed the same ritual and then it became a tradition and now I cannot write unless I find a white feather.'
Did he find one yesterday, I wonder, when he became London? There are, after all, lots of stray pigeon feathers in Trafalgar Square.
'It's easy to find the white feather, this is not the problem,' he says, sternly. 'The problem is to find a white feather in the January of an odd year. That is the challenge that I put to myself. That is what I must do every time.'"

How to do The Interview

Start like this, and take it from the top (link courtesy Amitava Kumar):

Robert Birnbaum: Talking to Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Like the number four.

RB: OK. Anything you want to say—do you have any opportunities to extemporize?

JSF: Yeah. When I am writing. [chuckles] That’s the only chance in life, when I extemporaneously say whatever it is I want to say. In the way that I want to say it. Otherwise I feel like I am always responding. Writing is the one thing in life when you are not responding.

RB: Well, say something.

JSF: Say something that isn’t responding?

RB: Here’s your chance. Otherwise, I’m just going to ask you the same tedious questions that everyone has asked you ad nauseam.

Thingies we like

The Marginalien introduces us to words with three meanings. Go on, take a look:

THINGY (thing-ee) n.
Female...... Any part under a car's hood.
Male..... The strap fastener on a woman's bra.
Me..... Being senile means never having to remember the names of anything. Or thingy.

COMMUNICATION (ko-myoo-ni-kay-shon) n.
Female.... The open sharing of thoughts and feelings with one's partner.
Male... Leaving a note before taking off on a fishing trip with theboys.
Me..... Updating my blog.

Reading in Ranchi

Nalin Verma reports, in slightly old-world fashion, on Ranchi's, er, bookshops:

"The Book Zone in Hari Om Tower in Ranchi, boasts to be the storehouse of literary books. Believe it or not, the salespeople expressed utter ignorance about Ghosh and his books, when I had the fortune to visit the shop, one Saturday evening. In fact, the Book Zone is no exception. Famous Indian authors, who write in English — Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Suketu Mehta, Anurag Mathur and Ashok Banker are also prominently missing.
There are two other book shops of “repute” in Ranchi-Book World and Good Books. Let us delve deeper into their secret chambers. Good Books contains mostly biblical stuff. If at all it has some abridged versions of famous classics by Emily Bronte, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, published by Madhuban Publication, with grammatical and spelling errors. A literature lover will find the famed classics abridged by Madhuban Publications, simply revolting. The Book World, too, is bereft of books by Ruskin Bond, Amit Choudhary [sic], Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri. Wonder how does one qualify for Ranchi shelves?
Of course, the motivational books authored by our scientist President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Shiv Khera adorn the racks of the Ranchi bookshops. “The books you are mentioning have no market in Ranchi” is the oft repeated refrain that one gets to hear if one dares to enquire into the near drought of books.

Bookshops outside the metros are strange beasts. Places like Dehradun and Pune don't count; their bookshops are often run by enthusiasts and have very varied and interesting stock. I'm assuming South India doesn't count, either, though I still remember how nice it was to get off sleepily at Erode station and discover Bronte and Borges instead of The Da Vinci Code at the station bookshop. The hills are alive with backpacker wisdom and secondhand travel books; Uttar Pradesh used to have some of the crappiest "English bookshops" I've ever seen, but made up with Hindi bookshops that ran the gamut from the greats of Hindi and Urdu literature to Inspector Vinod's adventures and an apparently endless supply of lurid porn books (called "porndies", which made them sound so cuddly) featuring overly beloved Bhabhijis. I never figured out why Gangtok's readers eschewed most of the world of European novelists but had an obsession with Gunter Grass, though it was easier to understand why you might stumble across a bookshop in rural Bengal that had a comprehensive selection of Russian authors. If you ran a Great Bookshop Survey in India, I wonder what trends you'd find--would there be more dismal shrines to biblio abiblia, as in Ranchi, or would you find nuggets of literary gold in the oddest of places?

Wish I was there

Rushdie, Andrea Levy, Dario Fo and deep-fried Mars Bars. This year's Edinburgh book festival sounds like so much fun and of course I'm not jealous of anyone who's going this year, of course I won't take a meat cleaver to any of my friends who comes back with wonderful stories of schmoozing with Margaret Atwood, 'course not.
Oh, and the deep-fried Mars Bars? They're pretty good. No, really. Especially if the other choice on the menu is haggis.
The Herald has a profile of Catherine Lockerbie, who's been running the show for the last five years:

"There are two basic modes to get people I really want," she says, conspiratorially. "The first is a flash of inspiration to lure them here – I ask myself what would turn the key in the door to Edinburgh for them, what in all the world would make them think they want to go to Scotland in August for this festival, for the same small fee that anyone else would get."
She adds: "The other mode is sheer bloodymindedness and perseverance – and I won't tell you which author required which method."

Once removed, twice translated

Book Coolie has an essay by Tsipi Keller on writing in English rather than the mother tongue (Hebrew, in her case):

"I’m a guest in the House of English, but, for the most part, a welcomed guest, free to roam as she pleases, especially when she writes and doesn’t have to answer to anyone.

And Complete Review has been wondering why Ismail Kadare's works have been translated into English from French instead of Albanian. They found out by asking David Bellos, who has translated Kadare.

"Isolated, isolationist, tyrannical and mad, Enver Hoxha's Albania never signed any copyright convention. (The post-communist Albanian Republic finally signed the Berne Convention on March 6, 1994). For the bulk of Kadare's writing life, therefore, none of his works in Albanian was protected by international copyright, and were thus simultaneously free (anyone could publish a translation, anywhere, just like that) and unavailable (no self-respecting publisher could buy the rights, since there were no rights to be bought). That's why it was simply easier to trade the French versions, which were of course © Librairie Arthème Fayard (or © Éditions Albin Michel, for the first works)...."

He explains something else that's been puzzling me:

Kadare's low profile in the Engish-speaking world is partly due to the fact that he speaks no English and is thus not available for speaking tours, lectures, radio and television interviews -- the kind of author-promotion which seems an essential ingredient for a prominent career as a writer nowadays. (Even an interview with the BBC last week in the wake of the announcement of the Man Booker International Prize was cancelled on grounds that a voice-over translation would make "bad radio".)

Chris Bauman: Not Fade Away

From Identity Theory, Chris Bauman on learning to read, again and again:

"I was twenty-two years old in Somalia, but still a year shy of reading A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. I’d read “Old Man at the Bridge” and "Soldier's Home" in high school but was three months shy of reading them again and understanding....
....I still read mostly for joy, for discovery, but now I also intentionally read to learn, to hone craft, to keep me sharp, yes. And to keep me honest.
I revisit books I haven’t seen since I was fourteen and would crawl through my bedroom window onto the roof over the porch, smoking crumpled, bent cigarettes and reading Penguin and New American Library paperbacks by flashlight. But now I read as a young art student might walk galleries and cathedrals on his first trip to Rome. I've seen these paintings before, fallen in love with them long ago, but now I carefully eye weight, color, brush stroke. I've read—in some cases almost memorized—these books before but now I read them again, slowly, to discover why they worked (and discover, sometimes, the blemishes I’d missed).

Load of crap department?

Alex Beam writes on academia gone loo-ny:

When I first saw the ''Call for Papers -- Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets" posted on an academic website, my beeswax detector went off. There can't really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ''the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division" . . . can there?

Huh. He wouldn't mock if he'd had to battle hordes of, umm, presumably male chauvinist pigs every time he wanted to take a leak.

19th Nervous Breakdown

Robert Love edited the late Hunter S Thompson and lived to tell the tale:

"I came to understand that the word “deadline” was actually Hunter’s code for a two- to three-week red-zone standoff against the exigencies of publishing. My goal was the opposite: to bring in a finished article before fatigue and entropy finished us off."

And:

"Then there was his homemade photocopied stationery, which combined lurid photos, tabloid headlines, and other media detritus that struck his fancy. Where they came from I never found out, and I never asked why, but for weeks at a time all the pages arriving at the office were typed under a letterhead that said:

VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE!

or
CONFIDENTIAL
OPEN AT ONCE
FROZEN SEMEN

or

MAN SUCKED THROUGH 11-INCH WATER PIPE

or

FORGET THE SHRIMP, HONEY,
I’M COMING HOME WITH THE CRABS

Shriver gets the Orange..

For a book that takes on the last great myth of the modern world: motherhood.
The Independent quotes Lionel Shriver on the writing of We Need To Talk About Kevin:

"When I started this book, I was in my early forties and in the reproductive last gasp. I still hadn't had any children and had always been queasy about the idea," she said. The consequence of writing the book was "I scared myself witless and I still don't have any children".

Robert Birnbaum ran a great interview with her in 2003, where she says:

"I certainly knew that if I was going to address a subject of a woman who essentially doesn't like her own son—I don't think that's a minefield, I think that it's just a mine— it was an idea that was intrinsically going to make my main character seem unattractive to most readers. I think that bond between mother and son is especially inviolable, I would say even beyond Western culture. That's commonly one of the deepest and least conditional of relationships. And here I was placing conditions on it. A mother who wouldn't have picked this person to be her son and was honest enough to admit that to herself. The main way I got around the unpleasantness of violating that taboo is by channeling my energies through that honesty into her forthrightness; her willingness to look her own unpleasantness in the face."

But it's odd how books are remembered in the public mind, especially by people who haven't read them. A day before Shriver won, I mentioned We Need To Talk About Kevin to a friend who grimaced and said, "Oh, the anti-motherhood book?"
And I had to explain that, from the point of view of the cheerfully childfree, it's not that We Need To Talk About Kevin is anti-motherhood that I find refreshing; it's that it doesn't genuflect at the altar of parenthood. Shriver's novel goes beyond just the mother-child relationship--the mother here looking back at her child after he's shot several of his classmates at school--to examine questions of violence and alienation. What makes her approach different is that she feels free to give voice to the side of motherhood and parenthood that you're not supposed to discuss, even if--perhaps especially if--you love your kids. Shriver says:

"I sense that with my friends that have children and clearly are glad to have children on balance that when you speak to them about the experience of parenthood, they are often doing a kind of a sales pitch. Right? Which clearly involves selling the idea to themselves, not to me. There is a big downside. There are sacrifices. After all parenthood has that reputation and thy are constantly running this patter through their heads convincing themselves that the sacrifices were worth it. That they loved their children, "Oh, the world is made anew." It often sounds a little hollow. I think that parents feel to give voice to what they don't like about parenthood is to betray their children and that is why I found a number of woman, in particular, have been grateful for this book. It's someone giving voice to his or her reservations. And Eva speaks for them about the things that they have never felt they had permission to say."

Bookshopped

This little bookshop has closed down, these pavement bookshops were killed, this Scottish bookshop is haunted, this little bookshop explains why it's all so hard.

And the Babu's thinking, hell, I come from Delhi, only ever visited Lotus Bookshop, the pride of Bandra, twice or thrice in my life--so why am I so sorry it closed down? Because Lotus had books on military history, film and theatre, in particular, that I couldn't get anywhere else in India; because the people who ran the bookshop were Book People whose interests went well beyond the bestseller list; because like the best independent bookshops, Lotus made you feel that you were part of a community. I was terribly disappointed when I went back in February this year: it had the dismal inventory and apathy of a place that was going out of business. (Prufrock has a lovely post on Lotus here.)
Zigzackly wrote a piece on New and Secondhand that explains why even the most hard-headed bookseller isn't entirely about the profit-and-loss column:
"Jamalbhai would frequently told customers who couldn’t afford books, “Go ahead, pay later. Learn, learn!” And his son, Sultanbhai’s uncle loved to say “Saraswati and Lakshmi can’t sit in the same place.”

The Hindu Lit Review

This month's Literary Review from The Hindu is up; highlights include:

An interview with Stephen Greenblatt:
"I am actually quite interested in the range of works from different parts of the world that have now been put in play in literary studies. It is a large world and it is appropriate that there should be many things read and studied. But, there are practical problems in anthology making. The Norton Anthology, for instance, is 6000 pages long and we can't make it longer. The question is, for every Anita Desai, Naipaul or Achebe that we bring in, what is it that we take out? As an editor you have to figure out where the centres of interest might be now. But this is an ongoing problem."

Amitava Kumar on innovation and the Indian novel:
"How is newness to come into the world? In India, didn't all those who found fault with the innovations of, say, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy, or Raj Kamal Jha — didn't those readers and critics show similar impatience with what was new by finding it gimmicky or overwrought or incoherent? How were the detractors able to separate what is merely show-offish and self-indulgent from that which is unanticipated and truly brilliant?"

Pradeep Sebastian echoes some of my feelings about writing a long-running column on books. There's always the fear that you're repeating yourself:
"An old friend who I had not seen in some time told me he has been reading 'Endpaper' whenever he chances on it, and added as an afterthought, "you seem to be saying the same thing in all of them." Was I really repeating myself? I wondered later."
And there's a sense of privilege at being part of a conversation:
"...Writing about the intellectual life of a reader wasn't some fringe literary subject; that it was long overdue...With "Endpaper", I wanted to speak for book lovers here, and so, apart from writing in a confessional way about my own literary obsessions, I included, from time to time, other book-haunted voices. It has been fun and instructive to look so closely and for so long at this obsession, this gentle madness."

Shooting from the lip

The Babu doesn't think Suketu Mehta is aware of this, but according to Vidhu Vinod Chopra: "Mehta is crazy. His marriage is over, he’s on the street." And this would be because...Chopra is angry about what he thinks Suketu wrote about him in Maximum City--but the film-maker hasn't read the book. Which doesn't stop him from shooting his mouth off in a bizarre interview with Tehelka's Sonia Faleiro:
"He writes, I’m told, (I haven’t read the book) that he came to my house and there were my three wives. [Mehta makes no such statement--Ed.] What is this nonsense? Renu (Saluja) was my ex wife, Shabnam is in Canada. I have had one wife for nine years. I haven’t spoken about this to the press, but talking about it to you makes me think I should sue him. It suits him to project this image of an Indian director, because it fits into the dangerous mind of Americans, who like to feel superior to everyone else. The book should be banned."
Unless there's another way of dealing with the problem, and of course Vidhu Vinod Chopra finds one:
"I’ve slapped a couple of critics, which is why I never get good reviews. But I hven’t slapped anyone for a long time. I have young children so I try very hard. But I get angry with people like Mehta. If he came here now, I would slap him."
That would be so much more mature.

Meme too: Book Tag

Blame Amit Varma for this, he’s the one who hit me with the Book Tag meme—after posting memorably on it himself. I’ve ducked several other memes, but this one was fun to do—and though there’s a special invite out, as the meme requires, to five other bloggers, feel free to add your own lists in the comments section. (This means everyone but the Person who’s been trying to use Kitabkhana as a free message board for his extremely kinky personal problems and who doesn’t seem to realise that there is a very good reason why Blogger provides a delete button with comment posts.)


Total Number of Books I Own:

Umberto Eco has over 20,000 books in just ONE of his homes, the legendary Sham Lal has, literally, walls of books, and there was a collector who bought houses just to store his books in, so compared to those guys, I’m nowhere.
Okay, about 4,000 in hardback and a few more in paperback. Not counting the husband’s collection. Yes, we’ve moved house twice now to bigger places in order to accommodate the books. Yes, we’re aware that sooner or later we’re going to need to move into Buckingham Palace. Yes, we donate books every month to libraries, friends and anyone who’ll take them. And yes, it makes no difference, we suspect that the books do unspeakable things in the dark at night, so that we go to sleep owning one copy of Madame Bovary and one copy of Dracula and wake up with a brand-new shelf of vampire chicklit.

Last Book I Bought:

You can’t buy books in the singular, it’s got to be an armful or nothing. So… Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Mind, which I haven’t read yet; Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries—women telling their stories, funkily done, but a pleasant rather than a challenging read; Manjula Padmanabhan’s Double Talk, for a friend who hasn’t yet come across Suki; Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven—one man, many wolf-birds equals one classic study; Jorge Luis Borges, The Collected Poems, which I bought for a friend and read with such greed that I had to buy another, undrooled-on copy for him.

Last Book I Read:

As part of my job? Siddhartha Deb’s Surface and Mole! by Ashokamitran.
Selfish reading? Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga, since we just picked up the complete series; Jan Potocki’s weird little masterpiece The Manuscript found at Saragossa; Tender on the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, the first two parts of food critic Ruth Reichl’s memoirs. Finished them all at about the same time; also Mrs Pirate, but that was for the benefit of my two-year-old niece.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

This question is a professional book reviewer’s definition of hell: only five? I cheated like crazy.

Julio Cortazar, Bestiary; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Because I read both these books the year we had the stodgiest syllabus ever, which seemed determined to reduce literature and reading to a set of bureaucratic rules, and then, well, there were these two. Telling their stories of the fantastic and the unbelievable, breaking every rule but the only one that counts, which is to tell it true, especially when it’s not.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Because these books showed me that you didn’t have to identify with a character in order to believe in her. Literature wasn’t intended to be a comfort zone, where you can point to familiar landmarks and say, oh wow, this confirms everything I think I know; it’s about taking you someplace you’ve never been before. Mrs Dalloway’s England, so recently emerged from a war that it had no term for shellshock, was light years from Delhi; Miss Jean Brodie and her girls, the crème de la crème, and the dangerous lessons they learned had no equivalent in Calcutta. It didn’t matter. These two women became part of my life anyway, and were joined by a third, Jean Rhys whispering throughout The Wide Sargassao Sea that there were a whole bunch of women out there, like Bertha, the mad wife in Jane Eyre, who’d been locked up and silenced and whose stories now really did need to be told.

Sagas (now we’re trying to sneak a whole shelfload of stuff in there—ah well): Because I’d had Richardson’s Pamela stuffed down my throat and I’d had it up to there with The Classics, until an uncle told me that the best battle scenes ever were to be found in The Iliad. (He may have had an ulterior motive, given the speed at which I was raiding his Commando comics.) So I and Homer got on terms of nodding acquaintanceship, and I discovered you can’t beat the Greeks for accuracy of detail when it comes to describing how the jawbone splits and where the blood spurts out from when you shove a fishhook down someone’s throat. Unless you were looking to Beowulf, which provided anatomically correct descriptions of what it meant to cleave a man asunder, or the Norse sagas, which are especially helpful on the subject of why you shouldn’t hit a man on the top of his head with an axe if you want to drink from his skull subsequently. Family against family, wading deep in blood? The Godfather is kidstuff. Try the Mahabharata if you want the real thing.

Fairy tales: Because if sagas make contemporary war stories pale into nothingness, the old fairy tales make contemporary horror seem like nice, sweet stories dreamed up by the boys at Disney. Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood did a brilliant job, in different ways, of pointing out the skull beneath the skin of fairy tales, but think of the original stories. Piscean beauty axes own feet. (The Little Mermaid.) Child-eating grandmother dies in oven tragedy. (Hansel and Gretel.) Foot fetishist to wed masochist; fairy godmother indicted on seven counts of cruelty to animals and one of unauthorized experimentation upon a pumpkin. (Cinderella.) Skeletons found in man-about-town’s cupboard. (Bluebeard.) Wolf indicted in housing collapse scandal. (Three Little Pigs.) You get the picture, and it’s so refreshingly different from Disneyworld.

Pather Panchali, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya: Because this was the book that opened up Bengali literature for me. English had become my default language; and then at 17, someone handed me this book quite casually, never dreaming that I wouldn’t be able to read it. So at first I struggled with the alphabets, which is a very humiliating experience for an adolescent used to speed-reading Dickens; then when they’d settled down on the page, Apu’s story, as he made the journey from the village to the city and then beyond as what he searched for became harder to define, took hold of me. We had nothing in common, Apu and I, but he was my first companion on the road to the language I had forgotten I ever knew.

Tag Five People And Have Them Do This On Their Blogs:

Heh. As you know by now, I can't count:

Amardeep Singh
Ducks Rule
Jabberwock
Known Turf
Marginalien
MoorishGirl
Old Hag
Zigzackly