How To Make Sure You Never Write a Novel

Just found this funny article in Guardian Unlimited titled How not to write a novel: A step by step guide to failure, by Anita Sethi. Besides being funny it is scary too. There are many suggestions in the list she has chronicled in the article, that I sedulously follow.

About Re-reading Books

Do you read books multiple times? I don’t do it often, but I’ve done my share of re-readings. There are tons of Hindi comics I must have read two or three times. Then there was this pocket book for teens that had the two detective protagonists joining a team of explorers visiting a dark part of Africa. This is perhaps the book I have re-read the most because I simply fell in love with the way different relationships developed and how different group members who were hostile to each other in the beginning of the expeditions, faced death together again and again and saved each other. It was partly like that The Lost serial that comes on TV (is it still coming?).

Another 52 Books has a post about the joys of rereading and I got the idea of writing this quick post from this.

After growing up my re-reading has revolved around Garcia, Rushdie, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Dostoyevski, Kafka and Agatha Christie and in the same order, their books are:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude — 4 times
• Love In The Time Of Cholera — twice
• Midnight’s Children — twice
• The Moor’s Last Sigh — twice
• Great Expectations — thrice
• Jude the Obscure — twice
• Crime and Punishment — twice
• The Metamorphosis — more than 4 times
• The Nemesis — twice

I’m sure there are some other books too that I must have read more than once but I cannot recall the names of those books. I’ll write more about this topic some day soon.

Just Started Reading The Last Mughal

The Naipaul book — Literary Occasions — that I was reading mysteriously disappeared from my table just when I had set a rhythm. It was the first time I had read VS Naipaul and I really liked the way he writes, or at least the way he has written Literary Occasions. I think my 17-month-old daughter threw the book from our balcony and from there someone took it.

Anyway, consequently I’ve started reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal. I read his previous book too — The White Mughals — and I think he does a brilliant job chronicling the history of India in the middle ages. It’s just that, he focuses more on melancholic romanticism of the Mughals and sidesteps the unparalleled brutality the Mughals unleashed upon the Indian sub-continent. This could be because both the books deal with the times when the influence of the Mughals was whittling away under the strong winds of the European imperialism, mainly the British.

My Current Reading

I just started reading Amrita Pritam’s Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp) — it’s her autobiography. I’m reading regional literature after years. The original was written in Punjabi and I know some of the intrinsic beauty was lost in translation. I haven’t read much yet, but I think it’s more poetry than prose, and it is understandable as Amrita Pritam was a renowned Punjabi poetess.

The last autobiography I read was two years ago and it was Gabríel Garcia Márquez’s Living To Tell The Tale and there is a big difference how both the writers have traversed through the lanes of their past lives. Garcia was more real, and then surreal and then again real. Amrita Pritam is philosophical in her book more often than not. She gets lost in her own thoughts and then somewhere she forgets that someone is reading the book. Garcia, on the other hand, as he is known to do, mixed magical surrealism with the actual events. He was more interesting, I must confess. But this could be because I’ve been more exposed to western literature (I’m not sure if Garcia is western, but his style, sort of, is). Indian writers bore me because one, they focus more on kismet and two, they relish in defeatism. I’m not saying all of them do it, but this is the style somehow I’ve been exposed too. But I plan to read the entire autobiography because even her prose sound like verses, though, logorrheic at some places.

Oh, I forgot. Living To Tell The Tale was not the last autobiography I read. Recently I read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. If you can somehow get hold of this book, I insist you read it. You’ll love it. I’ll write more about Rasidi Ticket when I’m done reading it.

My current reading

Right now I’m reading Literary Occasions: a collection of literary essays by V. S. Naipaul. I started reading the book with a bias. The Indian media is not very fond of Naipaul — he is considered snobbish and defamatory, especially his attitude towards the Indian hypocrisy. Till now I’ve enjoyed reading him. He is candid, of course, but fortunately I don’t suffer from the prevalent ostrich mentality. He doesn’t mince words when he rues over how the Muslim invaders and rulers destroyed the ancient Hindu culture and society. I guess this is something the “secular” India cannot digest.

I’ll write more about the book once I’ve finished reading it.

Turkish author gets the Nobel for literature

A few months ago I had written about a Turkish novelist being hounded by her government for insulting the country, another Turkish writer with a similar reputation has won this year’s Nobel prize for literature.

Protests against Brick Lane

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane almost got her a Booker back in 2003. The book is about a Bangladeshi woman sent to London for an arranged marriage. The book somehow slipped out of my mind even though I had made a mental note of reading it. There’s been a controversy going on regarding the filming of the novel and two writers — Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer — are exchanging heated notes against and for the protests.

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Case against bestselling Turkish author for insulting Turkishness

According to this Guardian report an old case has been reopened against the best selling Turkish novelist Elif Shafak for one of her characters in her novel uttering “the bastards of Istanbul”. Punishing a novelist for a character’s remark is ridiculous. In this sense Nabokov could have been punished for indulging in raping a minor in his novel Lolita. I remember Rushdie naming a dog “Jawaharlal” in one of his novels.

Conventional books or digital books

Give me conventional books any day. Some time back Kevin Kelly of Wired News had published a long article in New York Times titled Scan This Book. Although very lengthy, I really found the article fascinating and the philosophy it represented appealed to me. John Updike has come out with a counter article titled The End of Author, explaining how the scheme elucidated in Kevin Kelly’s article could sound the death knell for genuine authorship. I agree with him.

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Eminent historians…

Right now I’m reading this interesting book (facts-wise, not literature-wise) called Eminent Historians: their technology, their line, their fraud by Arun Shourie. I started reading the book with a bias; I’ve admired him since childhood.

The book explains, with full documentary evidence, how “prominent” historians like Romila Thapar and Bipin Chandra have been swindling the nation in the name of compiling historical archives. They have most of the times either not delivered, or have completely twisted the facts if they’ve delivered at all. This is a break in my fiction reading. I’m not enjoying the writing style though.