Open source: Deep Throat revealed

Former FBI official Mark Felt, now 91, tells Vanity Fair that he was Deep Throat. The full story is here.
John D. O'Connor writes: "I believe that Mark Felt is one of America's greatest secret heroes. Deep in his psyche, it is clear to me, he still has qualms about his actions, but he also knows that historic events compelled him to behave as he did: standing up to an executive branch intent on obstructing his agency's pursuit of the truth."

Life's a beach and then...

Peter Walker profiles Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of Sightseeing:
"Sightseeing carries the publisher’s tagline “The Beach bites back,” a reference to the novel by Alex Garland about Western backpackers in Thailand, later made into a film in 2000 starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Rattawut dismisses the slogan as “literary marketing,” but admits that while he enjoyed The Beach as a novel, he was aware that its few Thai characters were little more than “background chatter.”
If Sightseeing has a riposte to this, it is in its first story, titled Farang, a derogatory Thai term for foreigners."

Granta carried 'Farangs' a while back, and it was pretty impressive:

"This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island—football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues—speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans. The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti. They like light fabrics, sunglasses, leather sandals. The French like plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts. The British are here to work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish. Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They're also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American. August brings the Japanese. Stay close to them. Never underestimate the power of the yen. Everything's cheap with imperial monies in hand and they're too polite to bargain. By the end of August, when the monsoon starts to blow, they're all consorting, slapping each other's backs, slipping each other drugs, sleeping with each other, sipping their liquor under the pink lights of the Island's bars. By September they've all deserted, leaving the Island to the Aussies and the Chinese, who are so omnipresent one need not mention them at all."

Priya Jain reviewed Sightseeing for Salon:

"In seven stories we get the most unparadisaical glimpse of gangs and cockfights, whores and shantytowns, thrust up against sandy beaches and mango trees. It's the distance between that outsider's paradise and the native's often grim reality that Lapcharoensap shows us in his tales, so tenderly crafted and beautifully realized that they'll snuggle up behind your heart and stay there for a long time."

Nootka, very briefly

From The Guardian:

"Also known as Nuuchahnulth, which means "along the mountains" - a reference to the speakers' homeland - Nootka's telescoping of words is unparalleled in other languages. The range of alternatives means that a sentence as long as "to wipe the tears from one's eyes with the back of one's hand" is rendered simply "fib"."

There was a slight Hitch...

Christopher Hitchens wins friends and influences people at Hay-on-Wye:
"Female audience member Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.
CH (smoking heavily): Well, you don't have to stay, do you darling. I'm working here and I'm your guest. OK . This is what I like.
Ian Katz (moderator) Would you just stub that one out?
CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.
(Woman walks out)."

She should've stayed around long enough to see Christopher and his brother, Peter, bond:

"Ian Katz: Are you two friends?
Peter Hitchens: No. There was an old joke in East Germany that went, Are the Russians our friends or our brothers? And the answer is, they must be our brothers because you can choose your friends.
Christopher Hitchens: The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet.
IK: One last question from the audience.
Audience member: You've been casting furtive glances at each other throughout the whole event but you've never yet made eye contact. Would you for this final moment, look each other in the eye?
CH You don't know what we've just been through. We were asked by James Naughtie to do an on-radio handshake, [and] I thought it was a handshake made for radio.
Audience member So will you do it?
[CH and PH look briefly at each other]
PH They want everything to be all right.
CH They want a happy ending - that's their problem."

Re-reading history

Mukul Kesavan disentangles the real story of the
Congress from the official version:

"A hundred and twenty years after it was founded, the history of Congress nationalism as taught in classrooms and written in textbooks remains an implausible story.... Far from imposing order on the press of events, narratives of nationalism often endorse exotic, unlikely explanations that seem rooted in teleologies of one sort or another, rather than an empirical, materialist understanding of history.

Hatchets, burying of

Manjula Padmanabhan and er, the Babu in her real-world avatar did a jugalbandi on book reviewing in India for the Indian Express.

Here's Manjula Padmanabhan on 'sadistic reviewers, angry authors':

Getting a book published is an emotionally and financially draining enterprise, with no guaranteed reward at the end of it. Given this reality, it is no surprise that reviewers must seem, at times, to be unfeeling sadists who squeeze their salaries directly out of the crushed egos of young novelists. Yet the publishing industry is a business, like any other. Critics, literary journals and literary agents are caught up in a game of money-spinning, with authors running like frantic squirrels on exercise-wheels, at the heart of the machine. Praise is the grease that makes all the cogs whirr smoothly. As Kiran Nagarkar, award-winning author of Cuckold says, "Internationally, most reviewers have forgotten the meaning of scale – like advertising people, they can now deal only with superlatives." To call a book merely "good" is, in today's inflated currency of praise, almost an insult. It has to be "the best book of its generation", a "tour de force", a "masterwork" or else it's rat-feed in the distributor's godown.
Against this backdrop, negative reviews are almost a sign of vigour. It means that critics are free to express their honest opinions, and that their main concern is for the readers who, presumably, buy books for pleasure and not just to inflate the expenditure account on their income tax returns. While it's no more realistic to expect authors to welcome criticism of their books than to expect any of us to enjoy going under a dentist's drill, I think most of us recognize that it's better to have vigorous dentists than bad teeth."

And here's me:

"How good does Indian writing have to be? In the last few months, we saw really brilliant work from writers as disparate as Haruki Murakami, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and Andrea Levy, to name a scant handful. In the increasingly eclectic world of Indian reviewing, these books are also up for review; if you're a reviewer who reads in another Indian language aside from English, as many of us do, you're looking at another 10-15 potentially great books to be read every month.
There isn't space any more for kindness. There isn't the room to make allowances for the Indian writer working in English. And from what I've seen of young Indian writers at home and elsewhere, there'll be no need for grace marks in another few years. Until then, though, if you're an author in search of adulation and you don't get it, follow the advice that V S Naipaul famously offered a fellow writer: take it on the chin and move on."

Pramod Kapoor on Ismail Merchant

This came in on email today, from Roli Books, marked "We deeply mourn the sad passing away of our author Ismail Merchant".

A tribute from the publisher

The man who as a child dared to confront ghosts in Karla caves, whose friends organized a star-studded show to buy him a passage to America to study, who bartered his home, made pickles for a free taxi ride in Paris, hitch-hiked with Paul Newman as a pillion rider in New York posing as a budding Indian film maker when he had not even touched a camera, who could get Utpal Dutt on loan from a Bengal jail for a day’s shoot, could not strike a bargain with fate in the end. He died of a bleeding ulcer in a leading London hospital with the best of medical help available.
Ismail Merchant was in the end too drowsy to charm the angels who came to take him away. He died before noon on Wednesday, 25 May before I could fix a dinner date with him in New York next week.
Born after six sisters, Ismail was patriarch to his family. The family looked upon him as a hero, the world saw him as a star. To his mother, he was a gift from Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, a man who became a Khadim. On occasions he would sweep the floor in Ajmer Sharif, give alms to the poor and cover the sacred shrine with yards of clothes with the reverence that only the devout can have. Why then, was He in such a hurry to take him away. Ismail was only 68.
I came late into his life. Five years ago he called me on my mobile: “Hi Pramod, this is Ismail Merchant.” Being used to prank calls I said, “If you are Ismail Merchant, I am Shashi Kapoor.” Little did I know that that real life call and my prankster-like reply would lead to an enduring friendship that went much beyond an author-publisher relationship.
"Come and have lunch with me in The Ivy in Soho. I have invited Greta Scacchi. Just the three of us. She wants to meet you, my publisher.” Could I refuse the invitation? “Tina (Turner) wants to go to Benaras, can we stay in your house?” How could I say no? “Let’s do a book on Merchant Ivory India, covering all those locations we have shot for various films.” How could I refuse? A charmer on the prowl, always on the move. A septuagenarian living in his teens. That was Ismail routinely.
My phone line was choked with calls from all over the world the moment TV channels announced his passing away. Instinctively, I called Shashi Kapoor, James Ivory and Wahid, his brother-in-law. They were too shocked to respond. Shashiji almost broke down on the phone. Grief has no boundaries and Ismail’s charm had a magnetic field that stretched well beyond the seven seas.
We all live on borrowed time from the moment we are born. On a grim London afternoon in January, when the mood was as grey as the skies, a junky looking at my stressed face remarked “ Don’t be so gloomy. It may never happen again. Keep smiling.” His stoned wisdom often makes me reflect. If only if I had gone to London a week earlier as planned.
The last time we were in London, Ismail had organized a private viewing of his film “In Custody” at a preview theatre in Soho for my family and our close friends.
Much like Alfred Hitchcock, Ismail would make an appearance however small, in almost all the films he made. In a moving scene in “In Custody” he appeared for a few minutes as a pall bearer carrying poet Nur’s coffin. Going by his past record I wouldn’t be surprised, if he came alive and made an appearance, however small at his own burial in Mumbai next week.

Pramod Kapoor

Publisher

Roli Books

What's white and white...

...and red all over? Penguin.

From The Guardian:

"To celebrate [its 70th] birthday, Penguin is issuing 70 new short titles, or Pocket Penguins, drawn from its back catalogue or new work. Now, unexpectedly, the titles have provoked outrage and surprise because they include work by only two authors who are not white...
Although Penguin has published two of the most important figures in modern black literature, James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe, neither is included on a list that finds room for popular modern names such as Jamie Oliver, Marian Keyes, Gervase Phinn and India Knight, as well as paying tribute to significant white landmarks of world literature such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Theroux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigmund Freud and even Homer, a segment of whose Odyssey gets a look in.
The only two black authors included are Zadie Smith, the young Briton who made her name with the award-winning novel White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru, who is best known for The Impressionist and Transmission, and has a worldwide following."

Sarayu on Dom

Sarayu Ahuja, writer and companion of the late Dom Moraes (they co-authored two books before he died), writes in Mid-Day Mumbai:
"The last image that I remember of him is of his hands crossed over his body as he lay in a tapered coffin, too small not for his body but for who he was; and his eyes shut, his face death-pale, yet peaceful and even thankful perhaps for the final journey. Yes, I remember those hands; they were porcelain white and glowing as though the moon had lent them its skin for the day."

I want Eco's house(s)

From a profile of Umberto Eco in The Telegraph:
"We pass through a labyrinthine library containing 30,000 books - he has a further 20,000 at his 17th-century palazzo near Urbino - and into a drawing-room full of curiosities: a glass cabinet containing seashells, rare comics and illustrated children's books, a classical sculpture of a nude man with his arms missing, a jar containing a pair of dog's testicles, a lute, a banjo, a collection of recorders, and a collage of paintbrushes by his friend the Pop artist Arman."

Why we isspeak Inglis

Jerry Rao offers a revisionist view of Macaulay's infamous minute:
"At one stroke, he became the most important founding father of modern India. Irrespective of one’s views, to think of India without the English language is pretty much like thinking of India without the monsoons. It may not touch everyone, but its influence touches everyone...."
"...Neither Macaulay nor the Raj was perfect. I would argue that 58 years after the British departure, we need to get beyond our sense of grievance. There is a case for balance and selective praise. In short, a revisionist view of our British imperial legacy is overdue. Indira Gandhi can be our Dalhousie-putri (they both impoverished maharajas and nawabs); Jaswant Singh can be our Curzon-putra (they both worried about our security in a dangerous neighbourhood); and we can all be proud Macaulay-putras!"
Plenty of room for argument there, and I see that the games have already begun.

Yehoshua: a profile

Before I slope off to drink the best iced coffee in the world--take a long, tall, heatproof glass, pour in a bit of condensed milk and a ton of crushed ice,
add strong, freshly brewed black coffee, stir, enjoy--here's a link to
this profile of A B Yehoshua in The Independent, (via Moorish Girl):

Yehoshua's most recent novel, not yet published in English, is The Mission of the Human-Resource Man. It's set in the dark context of the Israel- Palestinian conflict and centres on the death of a foreign woman worker in a suicide bombing. He wanted to confront a specific problem, familiar to anyone who has watched the amazingly rapid clean-up operation after a suicide attack. That is the tendency to find it difficult, almost to the point of "suppression", to commemorate the civilians killed in such attacks.
"We have a tradition of honouring the soldiers who are victims," he says. "But the people killed in the first [suicide] attacks sitting in a café or in a bus or going to the supermarket - they were not heroes." Israelis as well as Palestinians became "almost indifferent. The slogan was to return to normality, and it is even death without a possibility of revenge because the terrorist was killed with his victim."

Writers 101: crash course

A while back, Mad Max Perkins opened the space up to writers who wanted to share their experiences in the big bad world of publishing. Some of the Rants were pretty thoughtprovoking, but I gather he got plenty mail that wasn't.
"Recently I received a number of "Rants"--replies to the Mad Max “Rant this Space” Invitational--and virtually every one of them, to one degree or another, was both self-promotional and self-pitying..."
So Max decided to reply to two of the recent Rants.

"Sorry, but this is self-pitying crap. Yes, you're right: I did shy away from your subject line--because (even before there was a Mad Max Perkins) I get dozens of unsolicited emails a day from writers wanting me to read their masterpieces. I recognize you're just trying to get through to somebody--but this ain't the way to do it. And it's not because you don't have an MFA or took "classes from nobodies": trust me on this, I delete them all without prejudice. [And--personally?--I'll be much less inclined to give you a open-hearted read if you've got an MFA than if you don't. Not a big fan of the production-line industry responsible for so many More Fucking Artistes...]
If you're not getting published, it sure ain't because you're not part of the "In Crowd." This conspiracy-theory gobblety-gook is a favored excuse for people who haven't got the talent or haven't got the drive, or both. The world is lousy with literary agents; and literary agents only get paid when they make a sale; so they're a competitive and fast-acting group. From my perspective, there are basically two reasons why a writer doesn't have an agent: either the writing's not quite good enough, or the writer hasn't applied himself seriously--doggedly--to finding one."

His Whine/Rant II is here.

For all of us confuzzled lingweenies

I'm a sucker for word lists. Especially when you can't look them up in the dictionary. Here's the results of Merriam-Webster's poll on...

Top Ten Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary)


1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous

2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time

3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement

4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends

5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you're on the highway

6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."

7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number

8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy

9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed

10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

There's a list of previous favourite words. I like "pregreening", that popular Delhi pastime, and "stealth geek", which describes half my friends. (I'd love to describe the other half, but this is a decent, no-profanity site.)

'Swot we call a Eureka moment

From The Stanford Report:

"The palimpsest is a 1,000-year-old parchment made of goatskin containing Archimedes' work as laboriously copied down by a 10th century scribe. Two centuries later, with parchment harder to come by, the ink was erased with a weak acid (like lemon juice) and scraped off with a pumice stone, and the parchment was written on again to make a prayer book.
One of the most intractable problems was seeing the original ink on four pages that had been painted over with Byzantine religious images, which turned out to be 20th century forgeries intended to increase the value of the prayer book.
An X-ray system recently showed it was possible to penetrate the paintings. At SSRL, the assembled team practically jumped with excitement as the original writing beneath one painting was unveiled on the computer screens. Archimedes' hidden text deals with floating bodies and the equilibrium of planes.

Shalimar the Clown...

...is coming out in September 2005, and what I want to know is, did The Book Standard really scoop everyone else by getting a review copy of Rushdie's ninth novel ahead of time, or is this just a very long blurb with a few comments chucked in?

"It begins in 1993, when former U.S. Ambassador to India Maximilian Ophuls is murdered and nearly beheaded outside his Los Angeles home by his Muslim driver, who, the world will soon learn, is Kashmiri native Noman Sher Noman, a former traveling player and amateur acrobat known as "Shalimar the Clown." In a masterly deployment of interconnected narratives spanning six decades, we learn of Noman's youthful marriage to beautiful dancer "Boonyi" Kaul and her calculated dalliance with visiting diplomat Ophuls, who takes her (willingly) away, fathers her daughter and sorrowfully permits her disgraced return to Kashmir as Boonyi. Now grossly fat and guilt-ridden, she anticipates either her husband's forgiveness or his righteous vengeance."

Samuel Johnson shortlist

From The Independent:

"Three first-time authors have found themselves on the shortlist of Britain's richest non-fiction prize. The new talent, half of the six-person shortlist for the £30,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, includes an Indian-born writer's journey through Bombay and topics from addiction to 19th-century grave robbery."

Suketu's on a roll, hmmm? Last month, the Pulitzer shortlist, this month, the Samuel Johnson.
Here's the complete list of authors:

Jonathan Coe: Like a Fiery Elephant
Alexander Masters: Stuart: A Life Backwards
Suketu Mehta: Maximum City
Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul
Hilary Spurling: Matisse the Master
Sarah Wise: The Italian Boy

Deb, Shamshie, Hussein: recent reviews

The Sunday Times runs a review of Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses and Siddhartha Deb's Surface. I suppose there's a tenuous connection between the two books; Aasmani in Broken Verses is obsessed with the disappearance of her mother some 14 years previously, Deb's cynical journalist in Surface sets out in search of a woman identified only by a photograph, but having read both, the Babu can't see much in the way of similarity. Perhaps it's just geographic reviewing: take two books from roughly the same region, lump them together, never mind whether they're at all similar.
Tabish Khair did a better job of connecting the dots in The Guardian when he reviewed Deb and Aamer Hussein together:
"What is significant is that they often write about people, regions, affiliations or texts that might not always be visible in the west or in English. They are cosmopolitan writers with many regional interests, but these supposed opposites - the cosmopolitan and the regional - meet so easily in these two books that one almost fails to find the meeting remarkable."
Jai Arjun Singh explores the connections between Deb and Joseph Conrad in his review of Surface:
"And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth": Marlow, speaking on the banks of the river Thames, in the opening pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)
"The ghost of a 100-year-old novella shifts beneath the surface of Siddhartha Deb’s new book, which is why it’s remarkable that Surface is itself such a fresh read."
And Anita Roy gives the book a thumbs-up in The Indian Express:
"In a land where no one is quite what they seem, where cameras lie and currency is counterfeit, where young boys take up arms in desperate causes, where curfews are frequent and electricity rare, where beneath a surface there is another — and yet another — Deb’s elegant, restrained writing discerns harsh truths about the nation state and the human soul in equal measure. Unlike so many new Indian writers who, like shooting stars, burst onto the scene amidst much razzle-dazzle and vanish as fast, Deb is clearly a writer with staying power, and Surface is a novel that lingers in the mind, disturbingly, long after the final page is closed."
Rana Dasgupta praised the "wit and liveliness" of Broken Verses, but also found:
"Given its grand themes of nation, politics and art, however, this book's philosophical arc is disappointingly constrained."

Dark sunglasses and a cheap disguise

Ruth Reichl's new book inspired two deep urges in me: I want to read Garlic and Sapphires, and I want to see Vir "Rude Food" Sanghvi in a wig.
From the New Zealand Herald:
"From her perch as the restaurant critic of the New York Times, Ruth Reichl once wrote a review of a famous restaurant, Le Cirque.
Since it was published that review has become, at least in the little hothouse world of foodies, almost as legendary as the restaurant.
This is because Reichl wrote the review in two parts: the first from the perspective of "Molly," a school teacher from Michigan, whose husband had made a killing in malls. Molly Hollis was the first disguise — with wig and the proper clothes appropriate to one of those ladies who lunch — that Reichl donned to fool the restaurants of the city who had her picture stuck up in kitchens."
In Chicago, reporter Debra Pickett was faced with the prospect of taking Reichl out to lunch.
"A normal person would take Ruth Reichl to a fabulous restaurant -- some amazing, undiscovered place with incredible food and easy, flawless service and a wine list full of moderately priced gems."
Pickett took Reichl to an unpretentious vegan cafe. It was a terrible meal, but it makes a great story.
"'If it's good,' she says, surveying the place and its menu full of innumerable varieties of tofu, 'I'll be shocked and amazed.'"

My other blog is a Rolls Royce

As in, it's of some vintage but it's been lying idle in the garage for a while. Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta's agreed to take the wheel, so if she's not around at her usual haunt, it's because she's doing virtuous blogging at Animal Rights India. If I'm not around at Kitabkhana, I'd like to have you all think it's because I'm doing virtuous blogging at Animal Rights India, but there is a chance tequila shots and dancing till 3 am will be involved instead.
If you're wondering why animals (as if authors aren't red enough in the tooth and claw department), it's because this quote, from Barbara Kingsolver, struck an uncomfortable chord a while back. "Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent."

Travelling band

This is what happens when you start reading good writing on the web, you forget to link. Belatedly...here are the winners and runners-up from the Outlook-Picador Nonfiction competition. The theme was travel, and did these guys ever.

Dilip D' Souza: Ride Across the River (winner)

"On the way back, I keep watch out the right window of the Sumo. A large chinar tree between here and Sangrama, they had said, and that was all the description I got. It was only later that it struck me, I don't even know what a chinar looks like.
Ignorant me.
In any case, about two-thirds of the way to Sangrama, we pass a large tree. Chinar or not, I have no idea. But it dominates the landscape hereabouts enough that it might be the correct one. And as a coda to my sighting it, as a reminder of a bloody day in 2001, there is a bicycle there, leaning against the tree. For one long instant, I have the feeling that I've been transported back to that day. That any second now, as we drive past, the bicycle will explode and send sharp bits of metal slicing into my flesh. As it once did to 38-year-old Major Abhimanyu Sikka, famous in these parts even then."

Tishani Doshi, Excerpts From The Journal Of A Delusional Widow (Runner up)

"At the top of a hill, in the Chemry monastery, darkness is becoming light. In a large prayer room where the monks sit on benches and meditate, there’s a single shaft of light coming in through the crack in the ceiling. It is a broad shallow room, full of reconciliation. The light falls into it, hits the boy’s face, spreads outward. He wears prayer beads around the neck of his maroon robes, chants like the rest of them.
The boy monk has been up early, I can tell because there’s still sleep in the corners of his eyes. He looks exactly as he did when he first appeared to me after Cyrus Mazda was found at the bottom of the ocean with the body of a naked girl. I want to tell him that all the light in the room is concentrated on his face, something Cyrus told me the morning after our first night together, at breakfast in a roadside restaurant. But it would mean bringing up the city, and Cyrus, and things that never really belonged to me; things I had come to forget about."

Geralyn Pinto, Re-routing (Runner Up)

"I've often wondered what anyone would find if they took a transverse section of my heart. There’ll be, I suspect, tracks of all kinds webbing together—some partially erased like sketches on old tracing paper and some permanently embossed like seals on a legal document. I am many-journeyed and my heart, I know, is an untidy palimpsest.
How long does a journey have to be before it qualifies as one? I ask because I’ve had some that were four feet long, some 25 feet, others that were the length of India, and yet others that, with a slender needle of a silver plane, tacked together great sheets of ocean and continent. The four-foot journey was the longest."


Ankush Saikia, Spotting Veron (shortlisted)

"It is raining on the morning he leaves Shillong. It has rained for the past three days, alternating between drizzle and downpour. He looks out of the bathroom window as he brushes his teeth--grey skies, rain, pine trees on the far hills, red tin roofs--and feels an indefinable sadness in his heart. He quickly bids farewell to his mother and brother and walks through the rain with his bag to the car where his father waits.
He is dropped off at Police Bazar where a long line of Guwahati-bound Tata Sumos wait for passengers, their engines idling. A swarm of young touts encircle him as he gets down from the car; he allows one of them to lead him to the second Sumo in the line. He clambers into the last row where there is just one person at the moment."

Samanth Subramanian, In Search of the Razor's Edge (shortlisted)

"When I was 18, I read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, and reading that impressive book at that impressionable age is a bit like setting a particularly ferocious cat amongst pigeons with particularly severe hypertension afflictions. Larry Darrell’s peripatetic quest for the Meaning of Life influenced me enormously, but less its spiritual goal than its nomadic nature. I had always been a travel junkie, but at age 18, The Razor’s Edge put the lust back into my wanderlust.
And a very specific species of lust at that. Darrell’s travels were borne of - and set in - the spontaneous spirit of the Jazz Age, when carefree souls like our Larry could pack a couple of toothbrushes, wander the planet at will, and chalk it all up as life experience, to come in handy later when they settled down to that office job midway through their thirties. That was my ideal vision of youth - to hop about the globe, spend months at a place to soak it in, take an odd job that would just enable me to survive and save enough for the next leg, a passage on a steamer to Yokohama. (Why Yokohama? It’s a mystery. I know little about the place except that steamers possibly dock there. But it’s always been Yokohama.)"

Author soundbyte of the week

“I was lying in a pool of blood. I could see it because I was lying face down. I thought I was going to drown in my own blood,” Gregory David Roberts [author of Shantaram] says, smiling. “Then I thought it was wonderful material! Only if I survived.”
Notice the absence of the terms "writerly" and "limned"? Now ask me why Shantaram was one of my favourite books in 2004.

The Lady and the Monk

Sonia Jabbar summed up my attitude to Mishi Saran's Chasing the Monk's Shadow at the launch when she spoke at length of what an awesome journey it must have been, travelling between the seventh century and the 21st, following the Silk Road, landing in Kabul under the Taliban just before 9/11 etc etc and finished with the only "review" a book like this needs: "I am so JEALOUS!"
Yeah, Jabbar and the rest of us who stared greedily at that map and counted off the names of the places Mishi's been to and we haven't, which is most of them. Samarkand. Tashkent. Bishkek. Turfan. Xian.
Consoled myself by muttering variations on the pronounciation of Hieun Tsang/ Xuanzang (Shwen zang. Hue-en Saang. Shwanzang.) and hoping I'd get one of them right entirely by accident, which explain why an old friend asked me after the launch whether my toothache was very bad and if not, why I'd been doing jaw exercises. I explained I'd just been trying to get Xuanzang's name right. "Why didn't you," she said, "simply refer to him as That Monk?"
See now, that's my problem with enlightenment. It always dawns too bloody late.
And you might want to read Jabbar's review of the book:
"Mishi Saran has done what the most adventurous traveller can at best only dream about as she retraces the monk’s long and arduous route. Travelling from dusty Xinjiang through enchanting Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, she loops around India as smoothly as one would on an evening stroll around a park, entering Pakistan before finally floundering at the harsh shores of Taliban-controlled Kabul two years later. The result of this remarkable journey is a remarkable, multi-dimensional book. Chasing... oscillates smoothly between the past and present, illuminating both via rigorous historical research and inspired prose. This isn’t just a competent travelogue. It’s touchingly human, funny and sad as we follow her into her inner journey, her own, specifically, female vulnerability."

A strange unsublime exoticisation

The third and concluding part of Amit Chaudhuri's essay is out (click here for parts one and two).Amardeep has a brief commentary on the first two parts here.

"We’ve inherited the Saidian asymmetry along with the Saidian critique; it leads us to believe that Oriental and, for our purposes, Indian history was a bucolic zone untouched by the market until, probably, the Indian novelist in English came along; that the Orient has been in a state of nature in the last two hundred years, translated into the realm of production and consumption only by Western writers and entrepreneurs. And in this way, we exoticize exocitization itself, making it impossibly foreign to, and distant from, ourselves.
A glance at the cultural history of our modernity, however, tells us that we’ve been “producing” the Orient, and exoticizing it, for a very long time; that the exotic has been a necessary, perhaps indispensable, constituent of our self-expression and political identity, as given voice to in popular culture, in calendar prints, oleographs, the “mythologicals” of early Hindi cinema, as well as the lavish visions of Indian history in the latter — these are the signatures of the cultural and political world of the anonymous; a “production” of the East more challenging or significant than anything the word, “Orientalism” can hope to encapsulate, and part of whose inheritance, as seen in the core of kitsch in the BJP’s version of Hindutva, is ambiguous."

The King of Redonda

When Javier Marias wrote this essay on William Faulkner for The Threepenny Review last year, he may have invented the best brief author bio yet:
"Javier Marías is the author of A Heart So White, All Souls, Dark Back of Time, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction; he is also the reigning king of Redonda."
He speaks to The Guardian here; The Herald has a review of 'Fever and Spear', the first part of his "novel in three volumes", which, he is careful to clarify, is not a trilogy.
I'm told that copies of Fever and Spear will be in the bookshops midweek. Expect blogging to dip sharply.

All aboard the Hogwash Express

Can I bear another two months of Pottermania? Time will tell. Meanwhile...
"Seventy children from around the world are to meet JK Rowling and will be the first people to read the new Harry Potter book.
The youngsters will get to travel to Edinburgh Castle, which will be transformed for a weekend into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, for the launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
And one lucky Evening News reader will be among those going along to meet the author.
JK Rowling herself will appear - as if by magic - from a secret panel in the castle’s Great Hall at the stroke of midnight."

Glass palaces

"The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all." Daniel Mendelsohn on whether Tenessee Williams' plays are too "fragile" for our times. He includes a neat anecdote: "In his introduction to Williams's collected short stories, Gore Vidal recalls the result of his attempts to edit Williams's prose. 'So I reversed backward-running sentences, removed repetitions, simplified the often ponderous images. I was rather proud of the result. He was deeply irritated. 'What you have done is remove my style, which is all that I have.'"

Critical Mass wins Aventis

Philip Ball won this year's Aventis Prize for science writing. As usual, it's a great shortlist--on the have/ want scale, it scores perfectly. (Have three of the books on it currently, want all. Sigh. So many books, so little room.)


Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball (William Heinemann)

The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older by Douwe Draaisma (Cambridge University Press)

Matters Of Substance: Drugs - And Why Everyone's A User by Griffith Edwards (Penguin, Allen Lane)

The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey (HarperCollins)

The Human Mind by Robert Winston (Bantam Press/ Transworld Publishers)

The end of the world is nigh, reprise

Robert McCrum examines, with dry scepticism, the idea that digitisation of texts might lead to the end of publishing as we know it:
"Both Amazon and Google are negotiating with American publishers to develop 'search within the book' programmes. Google already has a deal with several top libraries from around the world, including the Bodleian, to digitise out of copyright texts. Inevitably, some publishers and the Society of Authors are getting quite excited about this innovation.
According to Newton, professionally cautious, mass digitisation is not a 'marketing opportunity'. Rather, he suggests that within a generation 'it may result in no sales', the publishing equivalent of Armageddon. Collaborate with this 'Napsterisation' process, he told the Publishers Association, and the book industry risked 'undermining the cultural and intellectual tradition of the past 600 years'."

Digitisation has pretty interesting uses beyond making books available in a format you can't take to the bathroom with you.
"In a remarkable deal, the Greek Orthodox monks of Sinai and the British Library have agreed to set aside their differences on the question of who is the manuscript’s rightful owner and will now work together to digitally reassemble the Codex Sinaiticus."

This is the point at which you want to tell the EU to grow up: if the British Library and the Greek Orthodox monks of Sinai can set aside their differences, they really don't need to go off and build their own digital library because they're sulking at Google.

What about Yossarian then?

Lee Siegel blames it all on the good doctor:
"In one important sense, Freud's ideas have had an undeniable impact. They've spelled the death of psychology in art. Freud's abstract, impersonal concepts have worn away the specificity of fictional character. By the 1950's, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a character in a novel. His or her behavior was already accounted for by the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of repression, displacement and neurosis.
Thus the postwar rise of the nouveau roman, with its absence of character, and of the postmodern and experimental novels, with their many strategies -- self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like ''cutting'' -- for releasing fiction from its dependence on character. For all the rich work published after the war, there's barely a fictional figure that has the memorableness of a Gatsby, a Nick Adams, a Baron Charlus, a Leopold Bloom, a Settembrini. And that's leaving aside the magnificent 19th century, when authors plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance. Of course, before that, there was Shakespeare. And Cervantes. And Dante. And . . . It seems that the further back you go in time, away from Freud, the deeper the psychological portraits you encounter in literary art. Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life."

Vot, yaar, my book was a masterpiece, yaar

About a week before Tarun Tejpal did the ritual spurned author routine, the Babu met another writer who roundly castigated Indian reviewers...for being unnecessarily kind to books like The Alchemy of Desire. (It's so hard to keep everyone happy, ain't it?) But we sense that now would not be a good time to tell Tejpal that pretty much everyone who reviewed the novel pulled their punches for the worst of reasons: Tarun's a nice guy, even if he does shoot his mouth off, and everyone was on Tehelka's side when they got stomped on by the big, bad government.

"I think between incompetence and malice, almost no decent reviewing takes place in India. Mostly it is the clever, collegiate 'quiz competition' kind of notices that pass off for book reviews. Media journeymen -- out of work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers -- these are the ones who are handed out books. Most of them lack the skill, the craft, the heart, the understanding of the tradition, to assess serious books. They lack the ability to inhabit the intent or ambition of a book. They praise bad books, damn good ones -- all without understanding or reason.
At best, some of the more enterprising ones trawl the Internet and acquire some jargon and some familiarity -- the quiz-master kind -- with arcane literary names. And worse, they mostly write for small backslapping coteries -- again the same kind of collegiate sensibility, strongly reflective of half-knowledge mostly acquired through a few books and having nothing to do with adult lived lives.
Unfortunately, literature is neither a college quiz nor a college canteen caucus of precious-clever girls and boys, giggling over their first planned fornication or their last smart quip. Faulkner and Kafka don't live there; nor do Naipaul and Marquez. They move amid lived lives -- its concerns are different from those of quiz books.
However the sweet thing -- and proof of their incompetence -- is the fact that this reviewing makes no difference to the life of a book. Reviewers in India can neither make nor break a book. In the final analysis, the reviewer here is merely another reader, but cursed with the burden of having to make a telling pronouncement. Into all this thrown envy and malice. A very sad potion is what you get."

Just a couple of observations: you don't get paid much for reviewing--indeed, for all its lip service to literature, Tehelka pays pretty badly. You don't get much glory from reviewing books, either--given that the average print run is about 2,000 copies for a book if you're lucky, 5,000 if it's a "bestseller", the conversation around it isn't exactly booming. To anyone who has a Genghis Khan complex and wants to be a reviewer in order to "make or break a book", we say: go off and find a world to conquer instead, it's more fun.
So why do we review books? I'd love to say we do it to pay our dues or because we love literature or even for posterity, but the truth is we review books because we're addicts. We're hooked on to literature and great fiction, we're turned on by good books to the point where we'll shrug our shoulders and live with a mingy 500-word limit in magazines and papers, just so we can tell readers about something that made us fall in love with reading all over again. I know some reviewers who're failed authors and some reviewers who're very successful authors, and I know a lot of reviewers who're happy to be readers. Why "merely a reader", incidentally? Who's a writer writing for if he's not writing for readers--other writers? Daddy Naipaul? His agent? His dog?
We wade through a great deal of garbage and way too many chalta hai books not to be genuinely happy when something good comes our way. But while we might be polite, for all the wrong reasons, about books written by people who're as decent as Tarun and who've gone through as much in the way of harrassment as Tehelka did, don't try to force us to call a book a masterpiece when it's neither original nor particularly brilliant.

Nothing authentic about it

The first two parts of an essay by Amit Chaudhuri are online. You should see his face when he's at the receiving end of the Two Questions; he looks so weary, and answers so politely. Not like another writer I know, who asked me once whether I thought the audience would mind if he took his father's shotgun--loaded--up on stage and offered to shoot the first blighter who asked these two questions or the third dread one: "So is it autobiographical?" Unfortunately, he never got the gun past security or book readings in Delhi would have gained serious TRPs.

Part One: "At readings by Indian writers in English, two related questions, or some version of them, will invariably be asked by a member of the audience, whatever the setting — bookshop, university seminar or literary festival. The first question is, “Which audience do you write for?”; and the second, “Are you exoticizing India for a Western audience?” ...The questions seem to arise from a misplaced idea of a moral custodianship of literature, at a time when no one — neither the reader, nor the person who attends readings because of the free drinks, nor the academic — seems to have a clear or reliable notion of what “literature” is. What is it we’re trying to protect when we ask these questions? What is literature, or, for that matter, 'Indian writing in English', entities largely created by writers, and apparently so susceptible to being sold and peddled like wares by them?"

Part Two: "No writer has a given and recognisable audience, except in our dreams and reconstructions of antiquity or medieval history. A writer, sooner or later, has to come to terms with this, in a much more painful and thoroughgoing way than the questioner in the audience will understand. The reader too needs to come terms with it, if they are to have more than a passing interest in what literature does; for the writer not only speaks to the reader, but interrogates the unbridgeable gap between themselves...It’s not only the reader who takes the decision of rejecting or accepting a writer; the writer, too, depending on what his objective is at that moment, and how he means to achieve it, gives himself to, or withholds himself from, the reader."

Hmmm. Oh, you writers, you're such teases.