April: Month of the Kitab

Just a quick note to remind everyone that April isn't always the cruellest month.

Kiran Nagarkar's God's Little Soldier will be launched on April 7 in Delhi at The Park; he's also giving a talk the next day at Crossword's bookshop in Gurgaon.

Irwin Allan Sealy's Red will also be launched later this month.

The Kitab festival is on from 6th to 9th April in Delhi; they've promised readings, more fun panels and less Whithering (whither the novel, whither Indian writing etc) than most literary festivals, so do drop by. I particularly like 'Woman's writing: what is it and do women want it?'

And if you're travelling to New York, hang around from April 25 to 30 for the PEN festival. Achebe, Atwood, Akunin down to Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Huang Xiang, everyone's going to be there.

Needed: Martyn Goff

It's a terrible confession to make, but the judging--at least in the English fiction section of the Crosswords--went off smoothly. Geeta Doctor, bless her heart, wanted more squirmishes, but much to our dismay, Mukund, Geeta and I ended up agreeing on most things. I do think there'd have been much more debate if more books had been included; this year, Crossword closed the publication deadline at September 2005, which gave us about 40 books to read. I know, I know, you have to shut the gate some time: but some of the most interesting novels of the year came out in October and November (which is why Altaf Tyrewala, Siddharth Chowdhury, Kalpana Swaminathan and Nilita Vachani, among others, weren't eligible--they'll be up for the 2006 list, already looking strong with new novels by Kiran Desai, Kiran Nagarkar, Irwin Allan Sealy and Vikram Chandra.)
That made our shortlist easy to assemble, but pretty predictable: Rushdie, Naipaul, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Siddhartha Deb, Rana Dasgupta, Cyrus Mistry.
And there were few disagreements because in every case, there was a two-out-of-three consensus at the very least. One of us hated Naipaul's Magic Seeds; the other two argued for the Ould Master. (Who is back in the news, grumping that England doesn't appreciate him, and pissing from a great height to use his own phrase on Messieurs Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Dickens, Austen and Hemingway this time. Last time it was Flaubert and company.)
One of us thought Baldwin's Tiger Claw was basically nautanki clapped between the covers of a novel; the other two pleaded its case. One couldn't get into Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled; the other two were big fans. One couldn't see any merit in Cyrus Mistry; the other two thought it was a pretty good Bombay book.
So there you are. No dramatic walk-outs, no offers to commit ritual hara-kiri.
Nothing at all like this.
The funny thing was that everyone outside the judging room assumed the contest would be between Naipaul and Rushdie, but it was nowhere near that clear-cut. The three novels that came up most often in our discussions were Surface, Shalimar the Clown and Tokyo Cancelled; and Shalimar was the book that sparked off the most passionate arguments, the most fun debates.

So there really was none of this:

Then the whole question of how the judging panel picks the winner. The year that the Oxford professor John Bayley was chair, voting reached a third round on the final day. One of the panel, exasperated beyond endurance, pointed out to Bayley that their task was to reach a decision by narrowing the field, but in each of the three rounds the Prof had voted for a different book. “Oh yes I know but you see they’re all so good. “
Contrast that with Labour shadow minister Gerald Kaufmann, who brought his party committee-room skills to the task of chairing the panel and carefully planned the whole final meeting in advance. When Kaufmann left the room for a minute, the rest of the panel rounded on Goff (he attends every meeting, though in silence) in a chorus of complaint. When Kaufmann returned, however, there wasn’t a word: which only goes to show, Goff pointed out with his narrow, pussycat smile, that writers may talk the talk but a battle-hardened politician can run rings around them any time.

All the same, the Crossword could do with Martyn Goff's machiavellian skills; six months of reading books and no blood on the auditorium floor? Tut.

Crossword, Salam, Man Asian

So the Crosswords ceremony was a finer, shorter, better thing this year than before, though I'd still say they're missing out on the opportunity to turn the writing awards into a mini-literary festival. Suketu Mehta (Maximum City won in the English non-fiction category) gave good speech and was duly Page 3'ed by everyone. Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown won in the English fiction category) was there in spirit, his voice channelled to the audience via a slightly shaky cellphone connection. And Krishna Sobti stole hearts and minds by braving the optical-illusion steps to the stage (from step one, it looks as though steps two and three have disappeared) and delivering an excellent speech in which she basically asked for an end to the divisions and contentiousness between "other Indian languages" and "English".
Back in Delhi, Little Magazine turned their new awards for South Asian writing--one set of awards honours established writers, one set is for new writing--into a mini-festival. Little Mag organised readings, discussions and free-flowing conversations in the run-up to the final awards ceremony, which was held on Monday. Sounded like fun.
And this week, the Man Booker announced a new prize: the Man Asian. Five years ago, we had few ways beyond the purely sarkari of saying thank you to our authors; now there's three major awards and counting.

Marilyn, waffles and writing

I want to meet Lawrence Biemiller. Any man who can find inspiration for a piece on writing and memory in a Waffle House is welcome to come down and do a theory of semiotics derived from Delhi's dhabas.

When I gave the waitress my order — Fiesta omelet, hash browns instead of grits — she repeated it to the kid, and he said "Got it" without looking up. Then he added another plate to the long line waiting on a wooden shelf that separated him from the grill, tossing on a tiny plastic container of jelly. I realized that he had coded the plates so he could keep track of what he was working on with just a glance. Plates with two slices of cheese ended up with double cheeseburgers, which the Russians were apparently big on. Plates marked with containers of syrup got waffles. Right away I thought of the ancient Sumerians and the invention of writing.

Lobster Quadrille

How pleasant to see a departure from the Brown Man Review Brown Book rule; here, Pankaj Mishra gets to review David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster for The NYT:

Writing in the late 1920's, Musil recalled a recently superseded culture in which greatness "was exemplified by a person whose courage was moral courage, whose strength was the strength of a conviction, whose steadfastness was of heart and virtue, and who regarded speed as childish . . . and agility and verve as contrary to dignity."
Wallace does not have this sense of history, which was indispensable to a moralist like Musil — or, indeed, Mencken, Wallace's precursor in the distinguished American tradition of boisterous iconoclasm. What he has instead is nostalgia, for a time when writers possessed moral courage and conviction, and it is no less affecting. Still, it doesn't seem to liberate him entirely from the prejudices and assumptions of his own historical moment — and class. Something of the graduate-school seminar room still clings to his worldview.

God's Little Soldier: Kiran Nagarkar

Kiran Nagarkar tells The Hindu about his new book, God's Little Soldier:

The premise of the book, he says, is to challenge the public perception that terrorists are "madrassa boys", who are depicted sitting, swaying back and forth learning the Koran or the Hadith. "My premise is that some of them don't come from that background as I discovered much later after I'd done a lot of writing. Some of them are not just highly educated but absolutely brilliant guys. We find it so much easier to stereotype them and to see them monochromatically. You might disagree violently with extremism and the appalling carnage that comes in its wake. But that doesn't mean that we can't try and understand them", he says.

And here he is in a far more rewarding conversation with Another Subcontinent's Arnab Chakladhar (read the whole interview here):

At that Neemrana conference there were about 10 sessions, and all of them essentially became incarnations of the theme of Indianness. All they could think of was this question of being an Indian writer. And it pissed me off no end! For the simple reason that I am not setting out to be an Indian author. But at the same time I cannot for one moment forget that whatever I write comes from an Indian consciousness. Which is why I don't have to give a shit about whether my writing is Indian or not. Even if I want to deny my roots and origins, they are going to show up in some tangential way or another...
...But getting back to the question of lineage, the other stream that I would trace my lineage to is the Tamasha tradition. And that I would say was a predilection that grew stronger as I grew up. I have always veered towards the ribald. Over the years the only Tamasha I saw was called Ghadvacha Lagna (The Donkey's Wedding). It was after Saat Sakkam Trechalis...it was so amazingly rich; its humor was so broadbased; its political commentary was fantastic; its sexuality was completely out there. Now we've knocked the Tamasha out of our cultural life. First we diluted it and then completely wiped it out. But I was lucky. Never mind if it was just once, I had glimpsed it. I had found a kindred soul in Tamasha. Apart from Rabelais, I can also say that I am going back to my own unseen roots. I would like to think that I have inherited something vastly enriching from my own tradition.

Iyer Ground

Pico Iyer on the slow demise of Implication:

As he grew up, Implication found himself running with a not very fast crowd — Irony, Irreverence, Adoration, Poetry. They all got together, though they came from different worlds, in unlit places away from the main streets. Passersby would hear a snatch of music, and then there'd be a silence. It was like a different universe from the marching bands that liked to parade down the avenues; a universe that said that what we couldn't see, or say, had as much a part in life as what we could.
And then one day Implication heard he was on a blacklist. The word came from Rumor, and it said there was no room for either of them in the new dispensation. Question marks were now banned; Cacophony, Simplicity and Outright Confrontation had taken over. Implication had always been the warrior's enemy and the lover's friend. But now mano a mano was more in favor than tête-à-tête.

How to write about Africa

From Granta 92: The View From Africa:

John Ryle:

The mistake is to generalize. The very word Africa—that sonorous trisyllable—seems to invite grandiloquence. Because the continent has a clear geographical unity it is tempting to hold forth about it. Cecil Rhodes wanted to colour everything imperial red from the Cape to Cairo; since then the tendency has been for Westerners—and often Africans too—to seek to impose a single reality, a general explanation, on the whole place. So one newspaper report can say that 'Africa has never been more dangerous, nor more ready to join the rest of the world'; another that 'Africa is coming together, taking its fate into its own hands.' Which Africa is being discussed in each case? Can Botswana, that haven of stability, be more dangerous than ever? Is Equatorial Guinea ready to join the rest of the world? Is the African Union 'taking its fate into its own hands'?

Binyavanga Wainaina: How to write about Africa

some tips: sunsets and starvation are good.
Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

The "non" in "non-fiction"

In the CJR, Samuel G Freedman asks for a little less exercising of the imagination in non-fiction:

Fiction isn’t the spackle you use to fill in the cracks of your research. Fiction and nonfiction make fundamentally different compacts with a reader and are held to fundamentally different standards. In return for the freedom to invent, fiction must reach a benchmark of psychological truth. In return for the allegiance to factuality, nonfiction can present what may seem implausible and tell a reader, But that’s what really happened. When John Berendt confessed to inserting fictional material into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he tried to shrug off the violation by saying he was merely “rounding the corners” of the narrative, to make it as shapely as possible. But writing nonfiction means having to live with corners that refuse to be rounded.
Since the James Frey scandal erupted, I have yet to hear anyone in publishing offer a persuasive explanation for why writing a biography of oneself or one’s family should be held to less of a standard of factuality than, say, Ron Chernow is when he writes a biography of Alexander Hamilton. I have yet to hear a persuasive argument for why conducting scrupulous research for a memoir or family history should be considered antithetical to high literary achievement. The publishing industry has too much money to gain by holding to the debauched status quo, searching for the next Frey-style blockbuster, willfully forgetting the bit of wisdom that says, If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Crash, trash, what's the difference?

Annie Proulx goes to the Oscars:

On the sidewalk stood hordes of the righteous, some leaning forward like wind-bent grasses, the better to deliver their imprecations against gays and fags to the open windows of the limos - the windows open by order of the security people - creeping toward the Kodak Theater for the 78th Academy Awards. Others held up sturdy, professionally crafted signs expressing the same hatred....
...The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before.... We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.