You can buy them. You can borrow them. You can download them. But are all those books out there really worth your while?
Herewith some brief assessments.
With Dreams of Rivers and Seas, Tim Parks takes his novelistic gaze away from decadent Europe and brings us a story of overseas visitors in India. Fortunately, it’s one that’s far more nuanced and complex than Paul Theroux’s recent The Elephanta Suite.
The central -- though absent -- presence here is that of Albert James, a discipline-crossing anthropologist, loosely based on Gregory Bateson. Albert dies of prostate cancer while in New Delhi and, following a phone call from his wife, Helen, their son John arrives from London for the funeral. Also in the mix is journalist Paul Roberts, long-time admirer of Albert, who hopes to persuade Helen to assent to his plan of writing a biography of her late husband. The pas de troix that now ensues is complicated a while later with the arrival of John’s girlfriend, Elaine.
The plot arises organically out of John’s tortured thoughts, Helen’s helpless bravado and Paul’s self-serving curiosity. Parks has a keen eye for Delhi’s crowds, traffic and chaos, efficiently delineating his characters’ complex responses to them. He spins a spider’s web of ideas to do with the commonalities and differences in the ways which we interact and, as such, the novel also deals with more modern modes of communication such as text messages and e-mail.
Grace, despair, patterns of relationships, the inability to recognise one’s ambitions and the strength to endure are what fill these pages. Dreams of Rivers and Seas is at times dense, at times unnecessarily drawn out, at times unnerving – and always absorbing.
It was the 18th century philosopher Joseph Priestley who once said, “Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.” Well, anyone observing the teenagers of mofussil Bihar in the Seventies would know exactly what sort of society they were a part of: hidebound, repressed, anarchic and casually violent. This, then, is the subject of Avijit Ghosh’s debut novel, Bandicoots in the Moonlight.
The book tells of the exploits of young teenager Anirban Das, who appears to be a thinly-disguised stand-in for the author himself. Anirban’s father, a police officer in charge of containing the Naxalites in the area, is transferred from Wilsonganj to Ganeshnagar and it is in this latter town that Anirban attends the ironically-named HolyChildSchool. Here, we encounter Anirban’s friends: landlord’s sons, school bullies, overage pupils, incipient politicians and more. Others introduced into the narrative are his father’s driver as well as some colourful neighbourhood characters.
The structure of the novel is episodic, with each chapter describing a separate incident. And though the town of Ganeshnagar is fictional, the milieu is all too real. Ghosh speaks of the pleasures and passions of street cricket; of listening to Binaca Geet Mala on the radio; of surreptitiously scanning outré film magazines; of discovering and devouring pornographic publications; of attending ramshackle movie halls to watch the latest releases; of devising ingenious ways to cheat during school exams; and of finding willing and unwilling prospects to expend one’s libido on. On a more sombre note, he writes of the teenagers’ awakening to caste affiliations, of honour killings, of female infanticide and of the palpable presence of the Naxalites and their depredations.
The prose style is breezy, unassuming and cheerfully amoral, with the unfortunate inclusion of solecisms such as “booby” in place of “busty” and “lusty” instead of “lustful”. One would think that much of the material would lend itself to a satirical or even a trenchant tone; instead, Ghosh indulges in nostalgic asides as well as banal generalisations such as: “What you don’t know, you don’t crave,” and “Sometimes, we enjoy overestimating dread”. The author’s attempt, then, is simply to impose a structure on and relive Anirban’s wonder years.
The ending seems to be not of a piece with the rest, unexpectedly detailing Anirban’s present circumstances and introducing a character or two at the very last minute for inexplicable reasons. As such, the novel on many occasions resembles nothing more than a collection of diary entries, making the whole unpretentious and pleasant, but also unremarkable.
The central characters of Everyman and Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s two previous books, were both in their seventies and all too aware of their waning mortality. Those yearning for the feisty Roth of old may well perk up to find that the protagonist of his new novel, Indignation, is a 19-year-old college student. However, Roth reveals soon enough that the narrator has died an untimely death; this, then, is a recollection from the afterlife. He could well have called it Enter Ghost.
Indignation – the emotion, not the book – has of course fuelled Roth’s 29-novel career, with most of his work railing against sanctimony, hypocrisy and the smugness of the established order. Indeed, echoes of earlier books resound in the pages of this one: from the condition of the young narrator of Goodbye Columbus to the masturbatory high jinks of Portnoy’s Complaint to the Celine-like rants of Sabbath’s Theatre to the self-serving claustrophobia of campus life in The Human Stain -- among others. If Indignation, despite its strengths, isn’t as stirring a work, it’s because the writing comes across as whimsical and even odd in places. Not to mention the structure, which tends to totter.
The novel is set in the early Fifties, the time of America’s Korean War. This isn’t an alternative-history scenario as in The Plot Against America, but rooted in the reality of the time. It relates the tale of Marcus Messner, who escapes from his overprotective father’s butcher shop in Newark, New Jersey, to study at a college in Winesburg, Ohio. (Winesburg, that site of stunted American emotion in Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 novel.) Marcus is, as he modestly puts it, a “prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student,” and soon finds himself standing out because of his Jewishness and being at odds with the “constricting rectitude”, compulsory chapel attendance and arrogance of his room-mates.
Marcus’ indignation at the state of affairs peaks during an interview with the college dean, during which he’s moved to quote from large sections of Russell’s ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’. Matters reach a head with the insurrection of a section of the male students who conduct an enthusiastic ‘panty raid’ during a snowstorm, creating an atmosphere that will lead to Marcus’ expulsion. (As should be clear by now, the book has more light-hearted moments than the grim Everyman and elegiac Exit Ghost.)
“All that is solid melts into air” was how the Communist manifesto described the contradictions of capitalism; in Indignation, all that is solid melts into liquid. The novel is full of human stains: the blood in a butcher’s shop as well as in the trenches of war; the vomit spewed by the queasy protagonist as a stand-in for bile when interrogated by the college dean; and, of course, the semen swallowed by Olivia, Marcus’ neurotic almost-girlfriend and fellow student, as well as ejaculated by the high-spirited undergraduates.
Those who look for it will probably find a connection between America’s war then and America’s war now, although Indignation doesn’t belabour the issue. The point driven home instead is that Marcus’ controlling father was right all along: in life, “the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences”. Leaving poor Marcus “replete with frustration, buffeted by the merciless encounter between the no-longers and the not-yets,” as Roth wrote of Nathan Zuckerman in his alter ego’s swan song.
There’s no gainsaying, however, that Indignation doesn’t feel complete as a novel; there’s a definite sketchiness about some parts, while others seem forced. Despite this, there are powerful passages: the descriptions of working in a butcher’s shop and bartending in a local inn, or the college president’s holier-than-thou oration, for example. It’s these, coupled with Roth’s intermittently vigorous sentences, that see the book through to the finish line.
Is writing a form of archaeology? The metaphor is a seductive one, bringing to mind the excavation of buried moments, the enshrining of past activity and the assigning of a structure to the movement of memory. Such activities do, in fact, play an important role in Anuradha Roy’s debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing. There are other fitting tropes in the book, too: the mining of the earth’s seams and the reclaiming of ancestral houses, for instance.
The novel is a triple-decker, with the first part introducing us to Amulya and his wife Kananbala who move to the hamlet of Sonagarh near Calcutta at the turn of the last century. As the years pass, their mansion is witness to family tragedies, from Kananbala’s mental deterioration to the collapse of their son Nirmal’s marriage. The action of the second part, based in the same location, takes place 11 years later. We learn of Nirmal’s fate and of his daughter Bakul’s association with orphaned tribal Mukunda, in the context of relationships with other family members. Part three segues into a first-person narration by Mukunda, speaking of his life in Calcutta and elsewhere, of his struggle to make something of himself, and of his meeting Bakul once again so that both can reclaim their lives.
Clearly, one thing the author isn’t short of is ambition: the chronological and point of view shifts apart, the novel covers roughly the first fifty years of the 20th century (historical events resound offstage like muffled echoes) and there are quite a few characters and locales whose development she pays close attention to.
Roy’s prose is atmospheric and attuned to nuance, and while there’s always the danger of such writing becoming nothing more than a warm bath of generalisations, she steers clear of this by her attention to detail and by making the action progress through powerful scenes. Thus, river water seeps into the crevices of an old mansion, the feeling of a sari on a mannequin is both unusual and tempting; Bakul rips apart some of Nirmal’s books in frenzy; a building contractor’s hands are studded with rings; and Mukunda struggles with the chaos of Calcutta’s streets.
In its delineation of flowers, skies, rain and their emotionally-charged effect on human beings, the prose is almost Lawrentian. There are other literary resonances to be found here, two obvious examples being the Mrs Rochester-like state of Kananbala and the Miss Havisham-like battiness of the family’s Anglo-Indian neighbour.
Though much of the plot satisfyingly emerges from the interactions between characters, the childhood ties between Mukunda and Bakul come across as insubstantial, which robs their later relationship of impact. In addition, events speed up towards the end through some all-too convenient coincidences. Such reservations apart, An Atlas of Impossible Longing is a well-etched map of a world in which the past has to be dealt with before the present can be set free.
The Victorian era’s reputation for conservatism and Puritanism may be well-deserved, but the other side of the coin is that it was an era of much scientific and geographical enquiry, one that spawned a league of extraordinary gentlemen passionate about their pursuits.
Among these was Sir Richard Francis Burton, who undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise, ‘discovered’ the source of the Nile along with John Speke, fought in the Crimean War, traveled across the United States, studied the tribes of the Cameroon, undertook a gold-mining expedition in Egypt and explored Brazil and Damascus. No doubt having much free time on his hands, he also wrote books on travel and ethnography as well as translated the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights into English.
It is this formidable figure that Iliya Troyanov takes as the subject of his novel Der Weltensammler, now translated into English by William Hobson as The Collector of Worlds.
Troyanov makes it clear from the start that his character of Burton is more of a fictional exploration than an accurate historical reconstruction. The Collector of Worlds comprises three sections, each one dealing with one aspect of Burton’s colourful career. The first tells of his arrival in India as an officer of the East India Company, his dalliances in Bombay and his later intrigues in Sind. The second is an account of Burton’s trip to Mecca, disguised as Sheikh Abdullah, and of his pilgrimage to Islam’s holy places. Finally, we see Burton in east Africa, accompanied by John Speke, on a grim and arduous journey to trace the Nile’s origins.
What’s unusual and appealing about the novel is the manner in which Troyanov builds his recreation. He intersperses a straightforward third person narration with accounts of Burton refracted through the eyes of others. His manservant relates his exploits to a letter-writer, testimonies of those who accompanied him to Mecca are presented, and other letters and official reports fill in the gaps. This may sound like postcolonial decentring – which was probably the aim – but Troyanov doesn’t let it come in the way of a good story. There are some howlers (such as the repeated use of ‘bubukhana’ instead of ‘bibikhana’), some scenes skirt uneasily close to Orientalist fantasy and many passages contain stilted dialogue, but overall, the account is vivid and compelling.
There is another aspect to the book, though, and it’s one that’s not so easily overlooked. Quite simply, Burton never satisfactorily comes to life as a living, breathing flesh-and-blood character, with motivations and impulses common to the rest of us. He remains enigmatic and mythical, a person whose exploits on the page have the power to fascinate, but not one whom we come to know.
In his brief introduction, Troyanov states that his is “a personal approach to a mystery rather than an attempt at definitive revelation”. Perhaps it’s just that Burton’s inner demons have the cunning to escape all of the nets that writers set for him.
This is from today's Hindustan Times. Do also see McSweeney's for a "thread of memories" by those who knew, met and studied with David Foster Wallace, including Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith.
By now, the most-read piece by David Foster Wallace must be the text of the speech he delivered to the graduates of KenyonCollege in 2005, where he stressed the importance of staying “conscious and alive in the adult world”. Alluding to the cliché of the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master, he went on, “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.”
It’s a sad and a cruel irony, then, that the talented, Pynchon-inspired and footnote-obsessed 46-year-old author succumbed to his own terrible master last week.
Wallace’s father has said that his son had been bedevilled by depression for a few months before the end. In fact, study after study indicates that it’s those in creative professions, notably writers, who are more susceptible to mental illnesses such as depression and bipolar disorder. William Styron, who described his own battle with the mind’s savage gods in Darkness Visible, once wrote, “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.”
The neurosis that creates art is also the affliction that leads to suicide. Some, such as Graham Greene, play Russian roulette and survive; others, more determined, go ahead and write their own premature final chapters.
Age doesn’t play a role here. Sylvia Plath was 30 when she placed her head in a gas oven; Virginia Woolf was 59 when she walked into the River Ouse; Ernest Hemingway was 61 when he aimed a shotgun at his head; Hunter S. Thompson was 67 when he yielded to his fear and loathing; and Sandor Marai was 88 when he doused the embers.
If it was Albert Camus who commented that there was but one truly serious philosophical problem and that was suicide, it was Japanese writer Yukio Mishima who contemplated this problem more than most. Reports suggest that he planned his ritual disembowelment for a year before he performed the act, but not before delivering a prepared speech exhorting the primacy of the Japanese emperor from a balcony to a troop of soldiers below.
One would imagine that writers taking their own lives would pay careful attention to the wording of their suicide notes; but such notes aren’t all that common. Understandably so, come to think of it, because those acting on impulse and in the grip of hopeless melancholy clearly have other things on their minds.
Yet, parts of Virginia Woolf’s last missive to her husband Leonard are heartbreaking: “I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time.”The poet Hart Crane, more terse, was heard to yell, “Goodbye, everybody!” as he jumped off a cruise ship. Another American poet, Vachel Lindsay, proved to be as laconic by writing, “They tried to get me – I got them first!” before swallowing a bottle of disinfectant.
Mental illness and dire circumstances apart, one of the reasons writers are driven to terminal despair could well be because of their struggle to make sense of the world by using the inadequate medium of words. As Gustave Flaubert – also possessed of an unstable temperament -- wrote, “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
Those among you who imagined that writing was a safe, non-threatening pastime involving lounging about in pyjamas all day will simply have to take up an alternative occupation.
By their metaphors ye shall know them. Try these on for size: a policeman has a face like “an El Greco martyr”. A woman’s gaze is “as blank as the face of her son’s expensive watch, with a myriad unseen, infinitely intricate movements going on behind it”. And shelves of unread books are – how nice – “a battalion of rebukes”.
Yes, it’s the return of John Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, with this slender novella that was serialized in The New York Timesearlier this year. Unlike ChristineFalls and The Silver Swan, The Lemur doesn’t feature the dour Quirke, but instead dwells on John Glass, a one-time intrepid, passionate journalist, now burnt-out, living in Manhattan, and commencing work on the authorized biography of his father-in-law, William Mulholland. (With a name like that, Mulholland is, of course, a billionaire entrepreneur and former CIA agent.) Glass ropes in researcher Dylan Riley to help him and it’s when the latter is found dead with a bullet in his eye that a Pandora ’s Box of family secrets is unlocked.
Though there isn’t as much depth as in the other Black novels, the prose is crisp and elegant, and things move at a fast clip -- interspersed by apt (and sometimes wry) descriptions of people’s appearances, their motivations and the geography of Manhattan and its environs. It seems clear that Banville had fun writing this one, and reading it affords the same pleasure.
“The literary essay,” wrote American essayist Arthur Krystal, “though it may begin by addressing books, always ends up being about the interaction of society and culture.” An observation that’s exemplified yet again by Amit Chaudhuri’s pieces in Clearing A Space, comprising articles earlier published in The London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, among other places.
A common thread running through many of the essays here is Chaudhuri’s concern with tracing an alternative version of Indian writing, one that steers a course between the idea of India as a mystical, exotic land and the postcolonial, polyphonic torrents of Salman Rushdie and those who followed him. This is the space that Chaudhuri tries to clear, one that exists in “the elisions that direct the binaries (East, West; high; low, native; foreign, fantasy; reality, elite; democratic)”.
To chart this, Chaudhuri attempts to define a separate Indian modernity through the actions of its literate middle class over the years, particularly that of the Bengal Renaissance; to reevaluate Indian writing in the vernacular; and to look at the texts of those who pre-date the “boom” in Indian-English writing. Thus, there are essays that offer perspectives on writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, R.K. Narayan, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Jibananda Das and, of course, arch Bengali humanist Rabindranath Tagore.
In expressing unease with triumphalist narratives of India’s rise, and glib theories of what Indians ought to be writing about, Chaudhuri favours delicacy, nuance and the minutiae of the everyday – which, of course, are the qualities that distinguish his own novels and stories. These are reminders that the house of fiction, with its foundations in India or elsewhere, ought to contain many rooms, and not just one great hall for the majority.
It ought to be pointed out though that many of the essays, thought-provoking though they may be, are couched in concepts borrowed from poststructural and postcolonial studies which make them heavy going for the lay person. (Never mind the irony of using postcolonial tools to dismantle postcolonial conceits.) These are offset by a few others that offer autobiographical vignettes, such as his move to Bombay with his parents when he was a child, his life in Oxford and his return to Calcutta. (Readers of Chaudhuri’s earlier work will find themselves on familiar ground.) Also of note is a piece on the stasis of what’s called fusion music as well as some astute observations on the commonalities and differences between Bollywood and Hollywood.
Despite the insights on offer, one can’t help but sense a feeling of datedness about the collection. The earliest of these essays was written 14 years ago, and when it comes to Indian writing in English, much has changed. Yes, Midnight’s Children did cast a gigantic – and well-deserved – shadow, but those that came after Rushdie have by now have emerged into their own light, with Vikram Chandra and Amitav Ghosh being merely two examples.
However, the triumphalism referred to earlier clearly is on the ascendant, not just in the discourse of fiction but in every other sphere, be it economic performance or Olympic medals. It’s in this context, then, that Clearing A Space is a necessary reminder of the worth of alternative ways of seeing and relating.
An edited e-mail interview with Preeta Samarasan, author ofEvening Is The Whole Day, portions of which appear in a piece in the latestTimeOut Mumbai. Though I had some reservations about the book -- chiefly pertaining to the sprawls and shifts alluded to below -- it's certainly a striking debut. Samarasan, who moved from Malaysia to attend high school in the United States, is a sometime student of musicology who's attended the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan.
You were studying for a doctorate in musicology before you switched to writing. What made this happen? In this context, did your interest in folk music influence the structure of Evening is the Whole Day, in terms of circularity and harmony?
It wasn't so much a switch as a gradual decision -- I had always been writing, but I ended up in graduate school in musicology due to a confluence of random circumstances and the idea that I should have a slightly more stable career in academia.I'd been raised to think that writing as a career was more or less a pipe dream except for people in faraway countries like America and England. I took a long time to realise that sometimes it's worth taking big risks to do the thing you love.
As far as the influence of my study of music: it's a nice idea, and I wish I could say it's accurate, but I really don't think there was any such influence.My interest in musicology was always more anthropological than theoretical -- that is to say, I was always more interested in the issues surrounding music, the historical and anthropological context, than in the structure of music itself.In fact the abstract/theoretical/structural study of music was quite difficult for me, and this was another reason I began to doubt the wisdom of a career as musicologist.
Was the novel initially conceived as a series of interconnected short stories which was then made into a larger whole? This would explain the shifts and subplots in which it abounds.
No, it started and evolved as a novel.I knew it was a novel from the moment the first image of the wrongly accused servant girl came to me.The shifts and subplots are there because the novels I love best and am most influenced by are vast in scope, rambling, and intentionally messy: Bleak House, Midnight's Children, Waterland, Oscar and Lucinda, to name just a few.
To me, one of the striking features of the novel was the extremely well-crafted and resonant sentences. Is this something that required many rewrites? Or, like Arundhati Roy, do you think rewriting is like "breathing the same breath twice"?
I rewrote the novel about five times.In the beginning, I was still learning a huge amount about writing, and my learning curve was so steep that each time I got to the middle of the novel, I would hate every sentence I had written and have to begin again.So no, I wish I could say that I wrote exactly the novel I wanted to write on the first try, but that is nowhere near the truth.I rewrite each sentence dozens of times while I am working on anything -- whether it's a short story, an essay, or a novel -- and then when I'm done I revise the whole thing several times.It makes the whole process very slow, but I can't do it any other way.
When asked whether universities stifled writers, Flannery O'Connor famously remarked, "My view is that they don't stifle enough of them". How helpful was your experience at the creative writing program at MichiganUniversity in terms of your development as a novelist?
First of all, I think creative writing programs have changed radically since Flannery O'Connor made that statement in the 1950s.The programs I know about do not even try to “teach” people how to write; they select students who already can write, who have strong, distinct voices and a demonstrated commitment to their art.They merely help you do the best writing you want to do, as you define it, and they do this primarily by asking questions and getting you to think deeply about your own writing.Getting my MFA was immensely helpful in three ways: 1) it gave me the time and money to concentrate on my writing for two years, and this, when you think about it, is a pretty substantial statement of validation for an emerging writer: We think you’re good enough to make it, so we’re going to pay you to come here and write for two years; 2) It introduced me to some amazing, generous mentors who had been writing for longer than I had, and who therefore gave me lots of new ways to think about writing and the writing life; 3) It introduced me to some truly gifted writers of my own generation.The connections I made in the MFA program will last my whole life; we still read each other’s drafts, discuss what we’re reading, and encourage each other.This kind of community of writers is possible to forge outside an MFA program, of course, but it’s more difficult.
I do love the Flannery O'Connor quote, though, because I think it's a clever, endearingly curmudgeonly way of saying something that is still true: that it's important for writers (for artists in any field, really) and for their mentors to have a realistic idea of their talents.Not everyone who tries hard is going to make it.
Clearly, the Malaysia of your novel is a world apart from that of earlier writers such as Anthony Burgess and Somerset Maugham. Have you read their Malaysian fictions, and was there, at the back of your mind, any intention of "writing back" to them?
I read Maugham a long time ago, and hadn't read the Burgess until this year, after my novel came out (I think the Burgess, in particular is magnificent in its insight and honesty -- not at all a blinkered colonialist rendition of the country).So neither one was really present in my mind as I wrote this novel; I know that postcolonial writers often talk about their mission to tell their country's own story, finally, after decades or even centuries of that story being told by outsiders, but because of Malaysia's particular circumstances, I think my intentions have more to do with "writing back" to those who have written Malaysia's history for the past 50 years since independence -- those who have drawn the lines of race and racial identity in ways that continue to destroy the nation and its people.In this novel and in everything I write, I think about telling the many national stories that have been suppressed, twisted, or simply erased.As John Berger famously said: Never again will a single story be told as if it's the only one.
Would the book have been different had you stayed on in Malaysia instead of spending years overseas? How important is the perspective provided by distance? (Come to think of it, even other novels in English set in Malaysia -- such as those by Tash Aw and Rani Manicka -- have been written by those who've been out of the country for years.)
The easy answer would be: Of course, of course one has to leave to be a writer, of course people who never leave don’t see the same things about their country.But I actually believe the reality is slightly different.I think writers are people who identify as outsiders whether or not they have the opportunity to leave physically.Frequently, they identify as outsiders from childhood, though they are not always sure why -- sometimes it’s simply a matter of temperament.Perhaps those who feel they’re outsiders are more likely to leave, and that’s why so many writers -- not just Malaysian writers -- have been expatriates at some point.But they don’t have to leave to feel like outsiders.Conversely, plenty of people leave but never give up their unquestioning patriotism.
I think I would have still written, and I think I would have made many of the same observations about Malaysia if I hadn’t left.But one thing would probably been different: I don’t think I would’ve been brave enough to say these things as loudly as I’m saying them now.Like most Malaysians, I had lots of unexamined fears when I lived in the country.Fears of the government, fears of What People Will Think -- between those two, it’s hard to say which is the greater set of fears!I think of my expatriate status as a luxury that allows me to say what I want without these fears.At the same time, I think it's important for me to maintain my connection with the country; I go back at least once a year for at least a month at a time.
Would you agree that the book shows the influence of two very disparate authors, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie? Were you conscious of this stylistic blend?
It would be disingenuous and ungrateful for any postcolonial writer worth his or her salt to deny Rushdie’s influence.Rushdie gave us the permission to speak (though he would probably not phrase it that way himself: I suppose you could say he showed us that we could give ourselves permission to speak), and he gave us the language with which to speak.His impact on postcolonial writing in English is immense.I’ve been inspired by him on many levels: by the energy of his language, by his elevation of Indian English into poetry, by his use of magical realism to depict events and emotions too large for conventional Western realism.I think of Arundhati Roy as someone who inherited these ideas and made them her own instead of simply imitating Rushdie, and I tried my best to do the same: to absorb their influence, digest it, and come up with something entirely my own.Other major influences of which I was very conscious while working on this novel: Waterland by Graham Swift (from which I took one of the novel’s epigraphs); Bleak House by Charles Dickens.I do think it's important to point out, though, that I don't consciously imitate other writers; neither do I consciously seek to erase their influence. Art -- every single field of it, from music to the visual arts to writing -- has always been about absorbing and digesting influence.
The novel's obviously informed by your own childhood days in Malaysia. Now that you've lived in the US and in France for many years, would later works be set against different backgrounds? In other words, do you think you've "used up" your Malaysian material, and how strong is your connection with the country of your birth now?
I grew up in Malaysia as part of an ethnic Indian family.Childhood and adolescence are the most influential parts of many writers' lives; for whatever reason, those experiences really stay with us, especially if they've generated intense emotions. In my case, my anger and frustration with the Malaysian political system is by no means a thing of the past; it will probably fuel the rest of my career as a writer. Malaysia is my country, and its stories -- particularly the stories of its ethnic Indian community -- are the stories I want to tell.There's no question of "using up" material; I get new material every time I talk to my parents or extended family, who still live in Malaysia; every time I read the Malaysian news (which I do every day); every time I read an e-mail from a friend in Malaysia; and of course every time I go back.To some extent, Malaysia is still home; I'm in the process of buying a house there at the moment and would ideally like to divide my time between Malaysia and elsewhere.As long as the political system continues to be a prettified version of apartheid, I cannot see myself living there full-time, but a country and a government are not the same thing; I love the country in ways I will never love any other place.
An inevitable, final question: Were the experiences you portray based on the lives of the members of your own family, or were they entirely "fictional"?
The novel is not based on my life or the lives of my family members. There is a lot of emotional truth in it, as there is in all novels; I relate to each of the characters on some level, most of all with Aasha, the youngest daughter. Some of the minor characters are amalgamations or modifications of people I've encountered in real life, and Malaysian readers will recognise some of the details of the murder trials in the book. But the main plot is not at all autobiographical; our family had a lot less money than the family in the book, and a completely different lifestyle. We had no servants; I had two brothers and awarm, normal relationship with both of them.
Years ago, the venerable Reader’s Digest used to carry a series entitled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met’, featuring first-person accounts of folksy wisdom from and inspiring actions by baseball coaches, college professors, neighbours and the like. Manohar Shyam Joshi’s T’ta Professor -- now translated into English from the original Hindi by Ira Pande -- can almost be read as a parodic inversion of this series.
The narrator here is a cynical author who looks back to the time when, in his early twenties, he worked in a school in Kumaon. The eponymous professor is one Khastivallabh Pant, “dubbul MA”, a teacher at this institution.The eccentric professor’s love for the English language, ability to get embroiled in school politics and lustful appetites are gleefully lampooned to begin with – but it’s when the narrative begins to explore variations of the professor’s life, including some disturbingly salacious exploits, that we slowly realize what Joshi is up to. T’ta Professor is not a mere character-portrait, but a mocking look at realistic modes of literary portrayal. And along the way, it also points out the distance between art and life. For this purpose, the narrator, an aging and rueful author, is perfectly chosen. Quite a long way from Joshi’s work for television, which includes serials such as Hum Log and Buniyaad.
Pande’s translation is competent, barring the unfortunate use of Americanisms that jar – the atmosphere is “pretty loaded”, people donate “slush money” and one location is “a darn sight better” than another, for example. For the rest, this bittersweet tale of a chimerical character is revealingly quirky.
