Anya in Wonderland

Found on the Net, this is from the 1923 Russian-language edition of Alice in Wonderland--this version was translated by Vladimir Nabokov, who was paid about 5 dollars for his work.

(Leigh Kimmel has a lengthy essay about Nabokov's translation here:
"Nabokov also sought to "translate" the situation of the novel into one familiar to the Russian child. Thus he renamed Alice "Anya", which is a common Russian girl's name, rather than simply transliterating it into the essentially foriegn Alisa. He also transformed other characters so that they would better fit into a Russian milleu. For instance, he made the French mouse, which in the English original had come to England with William the Conquorer, into a forgotten companion of Napoleon's invasion force who had been left in Russia by mistake.")

Victor Sonkin has a marvellous piece in The Moscow Times about how Alice got to Russia:

"Alice" first came out in Russian nearly 130 years ago, but back then, it seemed the book would not fare well here. The anonymously translated version of 1879 was met with confusion and bewilderment. "Tiring, most boring, most confused sick delusions of a little girl"; "absurd dreams may be recounted in a family circle for fun, but they are not published, illustrated and presented to the general public"; "one can hardly imagine anything less sensible and more absurd than this fairy tale; all mothers are urged to disregard this worthless fantasy" -- such was the critical consensus in Russia at the time.

It wasn't till the 1960s that Alice really found its audience, he writes.

Writing in Korea? Don't quit the day job

From The Korea Times: "For writers, things could not be more grim. Ninety-four percent of the 200 respondents said they earn 500,000 won or less per month on average from activities related to their original job _ writing _ with 37 percent earning nothing."

Poor souls. They're members of a very distinguished club.

According to this 2005 story, children's authors in England earn peanuts too:

"J K Rowling's fellow children's authors..a third of whom earn less than the national minimum wage of £8,827 a year. And yesterday they published a survey of their own, claiming that some work for about 2p an hour."

SF writers don't do much better, according to this oft-cited survey on Tobias Buckell's blog.

And a new survey of UK writers is deeply discouraging:

The latest research reveals that the typical UK author earns 33% less than the national average wage. If this trend in earnings continues will creators be able to continue contributing 8% of GDP in the UK? If we value our creative industries so highly, can the nation afford to let this decline in authors' earnings continue?

W H Auden would have been less sympathetic. The Sunday Times reprinted his views on people who wanted to be writers:

"[When asked what they want to be in life]....an astonishing number reply “a writer”, and by writing they mean — dreadful word — “creative” writing. Even if they say: “I want to go into journalism”, this is only because they are under the illusion that in that profession they will be able to create. Even if their most genuine desire is really to make money, they will still make for some highly paid sub-literary pursuit like Advertising.
Among this host of would-be writers, the majority have no literary gift. This is not surprising in itself. A marked gift for anything is not very common.
What is surprising is that such a high percentage of those without a marked talent for any particular profession should think of writing as the solution."

Might have made the old curmudgeon happier if he knew they were suffering for their art.

No classics, thanks

Several secondary schools in England have turned down the offer of free classics for their libraries, according to this story:

"The harsh reality of our secondary schools is that children just don't have the skills to tackle such complex ideas in the written format."

Much handwringing ensues, but spare a thought for the librarian who argued that kids today are much more likely to read if they're offered Eragon, Harry Potter, or Charlie Higson's Young Bond series.

Rushdie ka baap

The Jabberwock has lunch with Amitava Kumar--lovely piece:

Does he think of the Rushdie of today as more a P3 celebrity than a serious writer? “I do, yes,” says Amitava, “and that’s the short answer. The long answer is: he’s a very important figure for us (contemporary Indian authors working in English). Baap hai woh. Aur baap ko gaali dena buri baat hai.” A meaningful pause, and I can anticipate what’s coming next. “Lekin chutiya baap hai. Baap agar roz daaru peeke ghar aayega toh aap usko kitna respect denge?”

Wainaina on Kapuscinski

Binyavanga Wainaina:

I have tried, just once in my life, to be an Angry Black Man. I planned a picket in New York City against a man I love to hate -- Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was going to speak at a conference organised by American PEN. Nobody seemed to want to join me. There were better things to do in New York, like drinking -- I do not lie -- a hibiscus juice and chilli margarita. So I got drunk.

I like Wainaina's work a lot, but for all his sweeping generalisations about Africa (read the rest of Wainaina's piece, he makes a serious point), Kapuscinski remains one of my favourite writers. It's not just the "quality of the prose" thing, with writers who are controversial in this particular way--Kapuscinski, Naipaul.

It's that even when you disagree with the lens they focus on a country, a place, an idea--I have a lot of trouble with Naipaul's refusal to admit that his view of history in say, Vijayanagar, might not represent the truth of what happened, for instance-that disagreement forces you to think harder about what they're trying to get you to look at. I can see some of Wainaina's anguish--how could Kapuscinski, who wrote "Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality" be accepted as the Voice of Africa now, for instance. But the same man wrote with brutal honesty about being an outsider, a white man in Africa. And anguish can become obsession. Some of Wainaina's best writing has come from writing against the grain--against the vision that he accuses Kapuscinski of putting forward.

I like Wainaina's travel writing and his food writing, both in danger of being obscured by his classic essay, How To Write About Africa ("some tips: sunsets and starvation are good"). Some of his work is here: "Everything around me is a memory of water. The dry riverbeds, the millions of dried petrified trees, the camels taunting us all. The hot dry wind, the water carved gullies, the large flat depressions that become marshland when it rains."

Why to say no to literary conversations

Invitations to dinner that promise "an evening of literary conversation" make me faintly uneasy, though I haven't been able to articulate why.

Now, thanks to a random Google search for "unusual literary lists", I know. In two words: Issei Sagawa.

I'd never heard of him before, but Sagawa's interest in literature emerged fairly early, when he was a literature student at Paris University. Attracted to one of his teachers, he wondered whether he could eat her. The opportunity never arose, but in 1981, he invited a student of avant garde literature, Renee Harteveldt, back to his house for an evening of literary conversation:

From Sagawa's confession:

"I am amazed. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. Tall, blonde, with pure white skin, she astonishes me with her grace. I invited her to my home for a Japanese dinner. She accepts. After the meal I asked her to read my favorite German Expressionist poem. As she reads i can't keep my eyes off her. After she leaves I can still smell her body on the bed sheet where she sat reading the poem. I lick the chopsticks and dishes she used. I can taste her lips. My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire.
I arrange for her to read the poem for me once more. I lie to her. I tell her I want to record the poem on tape for my Japanese teacher. She believes. I prepare everything. The cassette recorder for the poem, the rifle for the sacrifice."

He recorded her reading the poem; he shot her; then he ate several parts of her body, then roasted some meat off her hip, and ate it while listening to her recording of the German poem.

This happened in 1981; Sagawa is free, and has not, apparently, eaten anyone else since. All the same, if you want me over for an evening of literary conversation? I'll pass.

From Leaf Storm

Just because it was his 80th birthday last week, this brief excerpt from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Leaf Storm. It's a passage I think of every time someone speaks of India Shining/ Rising:

--Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns, the chaff of a civil war that seemed ever more remote and unlikely. The whirlwind was implacable. It contaminated everything with its swirling crowd smell, the smell of skin secretion and hidden death. In less than a year it sowed over the town the rubble of many catastrophes that had come before it, scattering its mixed cargo of rubbish in the streets. And all of a sudden that rubbish, in time to the mad and unpredicted rhythm of the storm, was being sorted out, individualized, until what had been a narrow street with a river at one end and a corral for the dead at the other was changed into a different and more complex town, created out of the rubbish of other towns.

Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

Salil Tripathi speaks to Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, whose second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is just out:

From Tehelka:

When Hamid saw the planes crashing into the towers, he knew it would change the way we look at our world. “My mother, who loves America, was deeply upset. But I was struck when I saw images of children dancing; I heard people, and not just Muslims, say that the US had it coming. How do you divorce the symbolic appreciation of that act as a form of response, from the catastrophe it caused?”
The world as he understood it, and his own reality — of being a Pakistani in the West — altered profoundly. He returned to Pakistan when tensions rose along the Indian border after the attack on the Indian Parliament. He went back to the West, only to return once more, to pursue the novel, and, as he puts it, “the woman who became my wife”.

The Guardian has a brief review, calling the book "an elegant and sharp indictment of the clouds of suspicion that now shroud our world".

I'm catching up with this February piece by Hamid in The Independent on the test that qualified him for British citizenship:

"I am reading from pages 24 and 26 of the British Citizenship Test Study Guide. This, for those who are unfamiliar with the foundational text of our common culture, is "A comprehensive study guide containing official material, study advice and sample questions". So far, each of my colleagues has on average been able to answer only about one in three questions correctly. None, for example, could describe the intricately choreographed tribal ritual with which one year gives way to another in Wales.

Q: If you were visiting a Welsh home during the New Year, what tradition might be observed?

A: In Wales, on the stroke of midnight, the back door is opened to release the Old Year. It is then locked to keep the luck in, and at the last stroke, the front door opened to let in the New Year.

But unlike my colleagues, I, a 35-year-old, brown-skinned, Pakistani-born, US college- and law-school-educated, sometimes bearded, innately peripatetic, and rather obviously immigrated man can answer virtually all of the 175 sample questions correctly, because I spent much of the previous two days committing them to memory. I have, to borrow an expression from an illustrious group of navigators, The Knowledge."

America, Apocalypse Now

Courtesy Prufrock's Page, this is Siddhartha Deb on recent "post-apocalyptic" America novels by Jim Crace and Cormac McCarthy:

Reversing America's manifest destiny of endless expansion, people are abandoning the country, making their way past ruined machines and highways, past roving bands of slavers, to take a ship to a better future. America has become the Old World, and Crace's protagonists Franklin Lopez and Margaret are sustained in their hard trek largely by visions of a land of plenty beyond the ocean.
It is a remarkably imaginative rendering, especially because Crace's novel joins a small but distinct body of works about an America that has fallen off the map of modernity.
In the 1980s, J G Ballard wrote Hello America, a characteristically quirky account of an abandoned continent that plays host to only a few rustic tribes with names such as Executives, Bureaucrats, Astronauts and Divorcees. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a more recent attempt in this category, depicting a bleak, ravaged land where a father and son attempt to make their way past feral gangs and contamination, the stripped-down language of the novel demonstrating perfectly how this is a place shorn, finally, of all superfluity.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "post apocalyptic India novels". All I came up with was, on the first search page, a heartfelt reference on someone's blog to the menace of "f***ing maudlin Indian male drunks!" Not quite what I was looking for, but close, I suppose.

Apna Amitava

Amitava Kumar's Home Products, a first novel from this critic, teacher and author of several non-fiction books, is out.

From his essay in The Hindu on writing a first novel:

When I began to get more time to write, maybe an hour or two each day, I'd start by reading a few pages of A House for Mr. Biswas. I wanted to be reminded again and again of the comedy that informs V.S. Naipaul's writing about failure. And every time I finished work, I'd be conscious only of the ways in which I had failed. There is very little doubt in my mind that one of the hardest things a serious writer must do is write with humour. It was easy to forget this demand because I was anxious to get the words on the page. I was always afraid that the book would run aground. I'd be stranded in the sand. The journal's pages are full of notes recording scenes and snatches of imagined dialogue. Much of it was never used. But reading those pages now, I can very easily recall the panic and dread that dogged me during that time.

And here's V S Naipaul on writing:

I thought when I began to write that I would do fiction alone. To be a writer of the imagination seemed to me the noblest thing. But after a few books I saw that my material - the matter in my head, the matter in the end given me by my background - would not support that ambition.
The ambition itself had been given me by what I knew of the great 19th-century novels of Europe, or what I thought I knew of them. I put it in that cautious way because, before I began to write, I actually hadn't read a great deal. I saw now - something I suppose I had always sensed but never worked out as an idea - that those novels had come out of societies more compartmented, more intellectually ordered and full of conviction than the one I found myself in. To pretend that I came out of a society as complete and ordered would in some ways have made writing easier.

Here's a brief excerpt from Home Products; Amitava read this at the Delhi launch:

"[Binod] began to read on his own when he got older. He read his mother's books. Till he was fifteen, the only book in English that he had read was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was a book that Ma had received as a wedding gift from her distant cousin Vijay, who later became a senior member of the Communist Party and prided himself on having read all the major works in modern English and American literature. Hemingway's story was simply told and the plot had been easy for Binod to understand.

Unaccountably, he had held the idea till then that all the books that were written in English had sex in them, and that was the only reason why it was just the grown-ups who read books in that language. But there was no sex in The Old Man and the Sea."

Though Binod and I don't have a background in common--he's a small town boy, I'm a big city person--this particular passage took me back to the wedding gifts from my marriage, 11 years ago. We had two receptions, one in Delhi, where the gifts ran to 'lemon sets', art and silver nut bowls; and one in Calcutta, where we were gifted hand-stitched tablecloths, handloom saris--and books.

It was years before I looked at the books, especially those in Bengali, and recognised the level of tact that had gone into their selection. My husband reads and speaks Bangla; I read and write fluently, but speak with some hesitation. The books that we were given sought to introduce me to what might well be an alien literary world, for all the gift-givers knew, but with tact and grace. The simple, more lucid works of obscure poets; short story collections by major writers, presumably easier for a beginner to read than novels; wonderful Bengali cookbooks, though much later I realised that I had received the ones written in less complex prose.
There were also two English books, gifted by the same person: Wuthering Heights and a Nancy Drew mystery. My husband and I puzzled over these for a long time: was this a subtle insult, Japanese-fashion, a delicate putdown of our intellectual pretensions? Was it an honest error? Years later, I learned that the gift-giver read chiefly in Bengali, was uncomfortable with English, but knew that both of us read "Ingrej" books. She had taken the time and trouble to visit an English bookstore and ask the sales person for two books: "One classic, and one fun read."
Those books are still on my shelf. They might not be appropriate reading, but I'm reluctant to let go of them.

And two moments from the Delhi reading:

Amitava spoke about his first job as a teacher at an American university. At the first meeting, someone suggested a course in 'Latino-Latina lit'; another professor, seeing his cue, asked why literature in a US university had to be so broad, what would happen to 'indigenous' American literature. Amitava: "In my village near Patna in Bihar, there's a mural of Mickey Mouse. He's selling a brand of toothpaste. Robert, I'll tell you what Latino-Latina lit is doing in a US university if you can tell me what Mickey Mouse is doing in my village." (Not an exact quote--I wasn't taking notes, so this is from memory.)

The second was when Jeet Thayil suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that Pankaj Mishra, Siddhartha Deb and Amitava Kumar were part of a new Cult of Authenticity:
"Amitava owns Patna. Siddhartha owns the North-East. And Pankaj owns a very large chunk of North India."

Garcia Marquez turns 80...

...he celebrates by going for a walk with old pal Fidel Castro, while the rest of the world finally gets the story behind his feud with former friend Mario Vargas Llosa.

From The Independent story:

"..But Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.
Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband's best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took..."

Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez met a few months later, which was when Llosa socked Gabo:

"As the cinema house-lights rose, Garcia Marquez saw Vargas Llosa a few rows behind. He moved to embrace his old friend, as is the Latin American way. But as he neared, he received a tremendous blow to the left eye.
"How you dare to want to embrace to me - after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona," the white-faced Peruvian said."

And not entirely unrelated: a primatologist speculates that humans gossip as a way of replacing the primate grooming function. In other words, if we weren't gossiping, we'd be picking lice out of each other's hair (an excellent definition of gossip, btw).

"Now Barabbas was a publisher"

And so am I, which is one of the reasons why Kitabkhana's been so silent the last month.

By convention, publishers don't comment on other publishers' books/ authors, and there's excellent reason for that:

1. Write something nice, and you'll be accused of trying to steal the other guy's author.
2. Write something nasty, and the other guy's author will spit on the shiny new contract you're trying so hard to get him to sign.

So when I joined EastWest and Westland Books--an imprint associated with the Indian bookshop chain, Landmark--I went away to think about how to handle this. Right from the start, Kitabkhana had three parts to it: the book links, which allowed me, and I hope you, to keep track of book news; the book chat, which was the whole point of setting up a litblog; and the book gossip (admit it--that's why most of you read book blogs, yes)?

I don't think it would be fair to continue with the book gossip, at least the Indian author-industry book gossip--there's a conflict of interest here. But the book news and the book chat? Thought about this one for a while, and figured the best I can do is to try. Any suggestions about how to keep Kitabkhana running, and fun, while continuing to keep it honest, would be most welcome.

And if you're wondering about the post title, here's the story, from anecdotage.com:

"One day Lord Byron gave his publisher, John Murray, a handsomely bound Bible, its cover graced with a flattering inscription. Murray proudly displayed the book on a table where it would be seen by his many guests.
One day a visitor, admiring the book, noticed that at John 18:40, in the line 'Now Barabbas was a robber,' Byron had crossed out the word 'robber' and substituted... 'publisher'."

Tch. Authors.

List of lists

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list.

So says Lev Grossman in Time, writing about The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. He goes on to say

There are several lifetimes' worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own.

He also gives away the punchline, so to speak, with "the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined." Here ya go:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Oh yes. J Peder Zane, the editor of the book, has a website up here, complete with blog and a page where you can go list your personal top ten. As of this post, the people's voice says that the top 10 books most mentioned from all the top 10 lists posted are:

Anna Karenina
The Great Gatsby
Lolita
Crime and Punishment
Ulysses
To Kill a Mockingbird
War and Peace
Moby Dick
All Things, All at Once
The Sound and the Fury
The Brothers Karamazov
Pride and Prejudice

(Yes, yes, 12 books. There was a three-way tie at number ten.)

The list of 544 books is here, by the way, all neatly linked up to Amazon "buy" links. That should pay the hosting bills!

And for the list of writers who contributed their lists, scroll down to the bottom of this page. (Chitra Divakaruni was the only Indian name I could find on the list before the wee type began to blur. No Sir V. No winner of the Booker of Bookers.)