anuradha roy

THE US EDITION

2012-02-29T22:32:00.001-08:00

I promised the cover of the US edition -- and here it is, absolutely beautiful. It will be published in April. Meanwhile, some advance reviews have begun to come in.

Kirkus said: "Gentle comedy, bitter tragedy and grief intertwine in an affectionately delineated portrait of an Indian hill community.
While ostensibly offering a leisurely exploration of the town of Ranikhet in the foothills of the Himalayas, Roy (An Atlas of Invisible Longing, 2011) has achieved something larger, a poem to the natural world and its relentless displacement by the developed one. ...Roy pulls politics, society, ecological warning and history into her slow, episodic story, but it’s her love for the creatures, landscapes and eternal beauty of this place that inspire it. Finally events gather speed after an act of petty spite against a neighbor and his pet, culminating in death, a terrible discovery and an act of shattering revenge.
Despite an occasional sense of drift, this understated, finely observed book expresses a haunting vision. A writer to watch."

MS Magazine called it a "carefully observed story of separation, loss, and resourcefulness... an elegant marriage of psychology and nature... reminiscent of the great R. K. Narayan's poignant tales of rural India."

Elsewhere: Bookbag, UK, said "There is a steel hand in the velvet glove of Roy's story-telling...There are three great strengths to this book. Firstly, the contrast between the timeless majesty and beauty of the landscape and the all too brief lives of the often rather less noble human residents who live there. This leads to the second reason that this is such a good read: Roy creates some wonderful, often quite eccentric characters. You can always tell when this is done to perfection when even the smallest bit part characters seem to come to life with a few brief idiosyncracies. The final thing that stands out about this book is that, while at times it's not altogether clear where the plot, such as it is, is heading, the final few pages make sense of the whole thing and may surprise you and will probably make you smile".

And DAWN, Pakistan, said: "The novel examines loss, yearning, seemingly inconsequential actions, culpability, rationale and the frailty of human existence, from a refreshingly simple perspective. As we are
introduced to Maya’s microcosm — Diwan Sahib, Charu, Ama, others — there is familiarity and recognition as all of these people exist in our lives as well. They are our friends, confidants, relatives, acquaintances and help. The dynamic the writer weaves between these all-too-real characters is instantly identifiable and at times frighteningly real."

"DESTROYED BY TOO MUCH SMARTNESS"

2012-02-06T22:40:00.000-08:00

On Charles Dickens's birthday, his letter about a prospective author's manuscript.

OFFICE OF "HOUSEHOLD WORDS," _Monday, June 1st, 1857._

MY DEAR STONE,

I know that what I am going to say will not be agreeable; but I rely on
the authoress's good sense; and say it, knowing it to be the truth.
These "Notes" are destroyed by too much smartness. It gives the
appearance of perpetual effort, stabs to the heart the nature that is in
them, and wearies by the manner and not by the matter. It is the
commonest fault in the world (as I have constant occasion to observe
here), but it is a very great one. Just as you couldn't bear to have an
épergne or a candlestick on your table, supported by a light figure
always on tiptoe and evidently in an impossible attitude for the
sustainment of its weight, so all readers would be more or less
oppressed and worried by this presentation of everything in one smart
point of view, when they know it must have other, and weightier, and
more solid properties. Airiness and good spirits are always delightful,
and are inseparable from notes of a cheerful trip; but they should
sympathise with many things as well as see them in a lively way. It is
but a word or a touch that expresses this humanity, but without that
little embellishment of good nature there is no such thing as humour. In
this little MS. everything is too much patronised and condescended to,
whereas the slightest touch of feeling for the rustic who is of the
earth earthy, or of sisterhood with the homely servant who has made her
face shine in her desire to please, would make a difference that the
writer can scarcely imagine without trying it. The only relief in the
twenty-one slips is the little bit about the chimes. It _is_ a relief,
simply because it is an indication of some kind of sentiment. You don't
want any sentiment laboriously made out in such a thing. You don't want
any maudlin show of it. But you do want a pervading suggestion that it
is there. It makes all the difference between being playful and being
cruel. Again I must say, above all things--especially to young people
writing: For the love of God don't condescend! Don't assume the attitude
of saying, "See how clever I am, and what fun everybody else is!" Take
any shape but that.

I observe an excellent quality of observation throughout, and think the
boy at the shop, and all about him, particularly good. I have no doubt
whatever that the rest of the journal will be much better if the writer
chooses to make it so. If she considers for a moment within herself, she
will know that she derived pleasure from everything she saw, because she
saw it with innumerable lights and shades upon it, and bound to humanity
by innumerable fine links; she cannot possibly communicate anything of
that pleasure to another by showing it from one little limited point
only, and that point, observe, the one from which it is impossible to
detach the exponent as the patroness of a whole universe of inferior
souls. This is what everybody would mean in objecting to these notes
(supposing them to be published), that they are too smart and too
flippant.

As I understand this matter to be altogether between us three, and as I
think your confidence, and hers, imposes a duty of friendship on me, I
discharge it to the best of my ability. Perhaps I make more of it than
you may have meant or expected; if so, it is because I am interested and
wish to express it. If there had been anything in my objection not
perfectly easy of removal, I might, after all, have hesitated to state
it; but that is not the case. A very little indeed would make all this
gaiety as sound and wholesome and good-natured in the reader's mind as
it is in the writer's.
Affectionately always,
Charles Dickens

The JAIPUR LIT FEST 2012

2012-02-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Was a rather different affair this year. Some differing points of view -- vitriolic, explanatory, celebratory -- and accounts of events, here and here and here and here.

What the media accounts did not care to highlight were the many excellent sessions that did take place despite the problems -- I went to brilliant ones by Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Pavord, Nayanjot Lahiri, Tom Stoppard, Girish Karnad. As always I discovered new writers and came back with their (signed) books. As William Dalrymple's article says, other than the extra security, most visitors perceived nothing out of the ordinary.

THE FOLDED EARTH: PUBLISHING SOON IN THE US

2012-02-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

THE FOLDED EARTH is coming out in April 2012 in the US, published by the Free Press, as An Atlas of Impossible Longing was. If you want an early, free copy, there is a giveaway on Goodreads -- have a look here. The giveaway closes in about 3 weeks. Watch this space for the cover... I still haven't seen it, and can hardly wait.


The British paperback

The Folded Earth has been out in India and the UK for about a year and has had some great reviews -- you can look at excerpts and go to the links here. It was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Award alongside Haruki Murakami's IQ84 -- I love Murakami's writing so I was delighted to be on a list with him (and almost as pleased that when my book was knocked out in the shortlist, so was his!)

The good news about both An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth is that they will soon be out in Arabic, published by Dar al Adab, a Beirut-based press that publishes Elias Khoury and other excellent writers. Very happy that my books will be on their list. The other translations of the books are listed here.

The Folded Earth also had an outing at the Jaipur Lit Fest, where I read from it. Will post a few pictures soon -- don't have any yet. But for people looking in general for pics from the Jaipur lit fest, there are tons of pictures of each day's activities posted by an agency, Solaris.

And finally, both the UK (Maclehose Press) and Indian (Hachette India) paperback editions of The Folded Earth will be out in April. The British edition will have the gorgeous new cover shown above.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS, 2011

2012-01-03T00:51:00.000-08:00

Both An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth figured in year-end book lists, in newspapers as well as blogs.

The Washington Post had An Atlas of Impossible Longing at number two in their Best Books of 2011, saying "In this sprawling epic set in 20th-century India, a single act of pity rattles down generations to break a caste’s rules, test a family’s mettle and throw together two unlikely childhood friends who will negotiate every circuit of human love"; it was also in the books of the year list of The Seattle Times ("In this richly imagined debut novel about three generations of a Bengali family set in early 20th-century India, we come to understand what it means to have a home and family and also to lose them and become fully free") and Huffington Post's Red Carpet Season for Books list.

The Folded Earth was in The Business Standard's The Year in Books by columnist Nilanjana S. Roy: "One of the quieter and lovelier surprises of 2011 was Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, set in Ranikhet, which updated the “plain tales of the hills” genre for our times." It was also at the top of the list in The Asian Age, which said: "This year we were spoilt for choice with regard to fiction. First-time as well as old and venerable authors gave us spectacular stories. The few that come immediately to mind were Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, Julian Barne’s The Sense of an Ending, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Storyteller of Marrakesh, David Davidar’s Ithaca, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis and Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon." Eleuthrophobia, an interesting literary website in the UK which I discovered recently, placed it at number 4 in its Books of the Year list and described it as "a book to clutch to your heart through the cold winter. It's a rich and evocative story of rural India's struggle to shake off the remnants of the Raj and embrace a new political and religious future."

GOING GENTLY SIDEWAYS

2011-12-31T19:54:00.000-08:00

In the INDIAN EXPRESS, 1 January 2012

He didn’t have enough time with his children, Johnny Depp complained in an interview, he was always at work. So why not make fewer movies? At this Depp’s eyes took on an ever so subtle manic gleam. He explained that if he did — if he did slow down — he felt himself starting to go “y’know — sideways.” The eyes gleamed more, you sensed that there was no telling what Depp would do if he went sideways, perhaps right then, in the studio.

2011 was meant to be my year of liberation. I had finished a second novel, I would no longer need to think about it, it was publication year. Some writers gripe that their book promotions take months, eating into the time for their next book. They have to travel too much; drink too much; sleep too little; do book tours, signings, and suchlike. Sounds hellish. Luckily for me, I was going nowhere. I was just going to sit on my hilltop watching the woodpecker tap the deodar. Doing nothing. Going gently sideways.

“Doing nothing” is more or less what my life consists of, even to people in Ranikhet, who do even less. I live there much of the year and my version of going sideways is long walks, partly because I like walking, partly because walking untangles my confusions when I’ve driven myself or my novel-in-progress into a dead end.

Almost the only other people out in the wilds are cowherds, who view my wanderings with condescending indulgence. “Bacche-kachhe nahi hain?” asks one, implying I’ve failed as a woman. Another observes that for women who have time to kill it’s good to stroll away the days. As for herself, she has to graze Lalli and her calves although her old legs ache.

If the world thinks I am doing nothing, it isn’t that inaccurate. I feel fraudulent if I ever tick “writer” in the box next to Occupation. Is mine a real Occupation? As real as being a cowherd? To retreat into a place you have invented, to write something nobody is asking you to, nor waiting for — is that work? Lives wouldn’t be lost without the book. The libraries wouldn’t shut. Nobody would know or care if it weren’t written.

I have a sense that it is to convince themselves that they are at work — at important, real work — that novelists devise grandiose versions of masochism:

“On [Jonathan] Franzen's desk sit a pair of earplugs that he wears when he writes, over which he places noise-cancelling headphones that pipe ‘pink noise’ – white noise at lower frequency. His computer has had its card removed, so he cannot be tempted by computer games. The ethernet port has been physically sealed, so he can't connect to the internet. While writing The Corrections, he even wore a blindfold as he touch-typed.” (The Guardian)

And here is Nadeem Aslam:

“Writing absorbs all his concentration, thus he saw not a single human being during seven months writing The Wasted Vigil. The book is dedicated to his brother and sister-in-law, who left food for him whilst he was sleeping. After turning on his mobile phone he received an old text message and only then realized that a new year had begun.” (The Independent)

I can’t afford physical imprisonment of this kind. My spouse and I run a small publishing house – that is, we publish books from our small house. Our days are a muddle of printers, typesetters, authors, couriers. And telemarketers who ask for “Your company’s Human Resource Manager”. Between all of this, and obeying the commands of our dog, we scrape together our human resources to publish books. Some of these are so scholarly that not even the scholars can fathom what’s going on in them.

But writing is a form of incarceration for me as well. I don’t need a curtained, padded cell because my own mind is cell enough.

Comparing weavers to writers in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald says: “It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread.”

After some months contemplating the woodpecker, I condemned myself to my cell again. My characters had already moved in: they existed as yet for nobody else but they had taken up residence in my head. They scratched the sides of my skull to wake me at night. And then they had nothing to say. I started the process of weaving the fabric of their lives, kept getting hold of the wrong threads.

I read a stack of learned books, took notes. Opened new folders on my computer. Then I found therapy in Geoff Dyer’s funny, sarcastic literary memoir, Out of Sheer Rage. Because it also grew sideways: from his paralysis with the book on Lawrence that he intended writing. The book isn’t new, it came out in 1997. Yet Dyer had foreseen my strategies: “All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for.”

Resolving not to fritter away the entire year, I decided to make some effort to help my publisher sell my book: I took copies along to a hotel near my house. I showed the manager his hotel’s name—it was in the novel, I told him, as were many other Ranikhet landmarks. Look, there’s even a hand-painted map of the town in the book – okay, not accurate, but enough. The tourists were sure to buy it. Would he sell it? To egg him into agreement I reminded him he sold locally-made jams from his hotel, and my book had a whole jam factory in it. Gingerly, the manager picked up one book from my proffered pile. “Shuru mein ek kapi hi bahut hai,” he said. Then he took shelter behind his computer.

Anxious as a stockbroker gazing at the NASDAQ, I circled the hotel every day, not daring to enter. National bestseller lists were as nothing, I wanted that one copy to sell. A week later I went into the hotel — casually — as if to buy a bottle of jam. The manager looked compassionate, shook his head. Another week went by. I saw tourists come and tourists go. Did I dare enquire again? I stamped on my pride and went in. In despair, I asked him to return the book – where was it? Was it displayed in the dining room or the corridor? Why not in the lobby?

The manager unlocked a drawer hidden beneath the lobby’s teakwood counter. Extracting the book, he handed it to me with the smile of one who cannot be reproached. “See, I kept it safe,” he said. It was indeed pristine, down to the paper band my spouse had put around the book with a ballpoint scrawl saying “Bestseller! Set in Ranikhet! 25% Discount.”

On my way back from the hotel, unsold book in hand, I encountered Lalli’s keeper. “Out for a stroll again!” she shouted. “Look at my Lalli, happy every day! It’s a good way to pass the time.”

The Folded Earth Makes The Man Asian Longlist

2011-11-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

A despatch from the Maclehose Press blog:

The Folded Earth Makes The Man Asian Longlist

Anuradha’s second novel, The Folded Earth, has been included on the longlist for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. Also on the longlist are Haruki Murakami’s novel-in-three-books 1Q84, novels by Jamil Ahmad and Amitav Ghosh and Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut, The Sly Company of People Who Care. Rahul Bhattacharya’s novel was yesterday announced as the winner of the Hindu Literary Prize, the shortlist for which included The Folded Earth.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Roy’s own first novel, was one of the very earliest books to be published by MacLehose Press after she met Christopher MacLehose at the London Book Fair. When the Man Asian Longlist was announced on Sunday, he was impressed by the strength of the list: “There are at least three outstanding novelists on it — Anuradha must be as proud as we are.”

The Longlist in Full
JAMIL AHMAD (Pakistan) - The Wandering Falcon
TAHMIMA ANAM (Bangladesh) - The Good Muslim
JAHNAVI BARUA (India) - Rebirth
RAHUL BHATTACHARYA (India) - The Sly Company of People Who Care
MAHMOUD DOWLATABADI (Iran) - The Colonel
AMITAV GHOSH (India) - River of Smoke
HARUKI MURAKAMI (Japan) - 1Q84
ANURADHA ROY (India) - The Folded Earth
KYUNG-SOOK SHIN (South Korea) - Please Look After Mom
TARUN J TEJPAL (India) - The Valley of Masks
YAN LIANKE (China) - Dream of Ding Village
BANANA YOSHIMOTO (Japan) - The Lake

The shortlist will be announced on 10 January 2012

UNDER THE MASK

2011-10-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Nobody expected it at the Kovalam Litfest. It felt so relaxed that you chatted with strangers as with friends. And yet here was a bearded, elderly man in the row behind mine raging at the Israeli playwright Savyon Liebrecht. Wagging a finger, ignoring all reprimands, he tried to establish through persistence alone that he knew, if nobody else did, how terrible were the Jewish people because he had lived in Germany for thirty years and they had been awful to him and this proved that they deserved the Holocaust.

The festival organisers managed to put the lid on him — only for the moment as it later turned out — but that moment was occupied by another voice: “Why you are still stuck in the past Madam? Why you don’t think of the future? The Germans have the best brains. They make the best machines. They make the best films. Why you are stuck with the Holocaust?” (In another context, this could have been Modi’s question: “Look how much I have done for Gujarat. Why you are stuck in Godhra?”)

The bookstall at the Kovalam Litfest; courtesy of Noctilucent

It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so nasty. Liebrecht is the author of novels, short stories, plays, and novellas. She has won awards in three countries and has been Israel’s Playwright of the Year. Born in 1948, she is the child of Holocaust survivors and has devoted her entire writerly life to it. She stood on stage now trying to absorb what the audience was flinging at her: a prolific writer at a loss for words.

And Liebrecht was not the only one trying to make sense of the hatred pouring out from an audience that had appeared so benign. Poet, translator and activist Meena Kandaswamy, not even thirty, is already well known as a radical political writer, not afraid to use explicitly sexual language as a shock tactic. She read a series of angry, polemical, passionate poems on womanhood and Dalithood. Then went through an exhausting hour of attacks from the audience.

I listened more and more bewildered by the aggression as people pulled out all sorts of old chestnuts. They informed her that Dalits today no longer suffered; that they actually had it rather good what with reservations and all; that when they got those reserved-quota jobs they never worked, etc., etc. One bitter generalization followed another.

In the questions put to both Liebrecht and Kandaswamy, suffering was weighed in scales. Whose was worse? Were not the Palestinians as oppressed as the Jewish people had been? Wasn’t India’s Partition a Holocaust as well? Some wanted to know why Kandaswamy focused on Dalits. Did not the disabled deserve poetic attention? If Surpanakha could be the subject of a poem, why not Draupadi?

Not everyone in the audience was as perverse, of course. Several people tried reasoning it out. Rebecca Mammen, criminal lawyer at the Delhi High Court, gave examples from her own cases to prove how violence against Dalits was rarely punished by the state. Novelist Binoo John and cricket writer Suresh Menon attempted arguing with those brushing away the Holocaust. Various others tried turning the discussion towards less hostile directions. Nothing worked.

I realized later that the booing sections had sat beaming through Fatima Bhutto telling them all sorts of uncomfortable truths about India. The same listeners who were more or less spitting at a Dalit poet and a Jewish playwright had been fawning over the visiting princess from Pakistan. There wasn’t a single inconvenient question. Did her pedigree and our love of kings and queens create that submissiveness? Or was it a sane response to the eloquence of her appeal for Indo-Pak brotherhood?

Prefacing her reading, Liebrecht spoke in a quiet voice of the silences and absences in her family because of the Holocaust. She spoke of not having cousins or grandparents or other relatives. Of discovering very late in life, from a photograph, that her father had had a different family before the war. The story she read to us was a moving one, of ghastly memories tumbling out from an old man who had been silent thus far about his years in Auschwitz. Nothing in her reading suggested she was looking for a fight. (Kandaswamy — something of a firecracker both in what she writes and the way she reads from it — certainly was, and took an endearing pleasure in the battle.)

Given that much literature is now obviously and overtly political, all writers — even those who do not write in that vein — expect political rather than literary questions at book events, whether in India or the West. It is the level of acrimony that is strikingly different. There must be verbal versions of rotten eggs and tomatoes at literary festivals in the West, but I haven’t seen comments being worded as personal accusations. I’ve been asked pointed political questions and seen them being put to others. But there was always the underlying acknowledgement that the writer pinned by that spotlight, trapped on that podium, deserved courtesy and attention.

Liebrecht later said she was used to occasional hostility — but had not expected it in Kerala. What image had she, or we, of Kerala? Mammen, John and Menon, all Malayalis, defined Kerala for me. Like most outsiders I knew only of its cultural richness, its natural beauty, its leftwing politics, its stable birth rate, its incredible literacy rates, its enviable healthcare and old age care systems. Landing there from Delhi, where even the Chief Minister reprimands women for driving alone at night, I was delighted to see stout matrons in saris and helmets ferrying their children about on speedy little scooters. I felt unthreatened walking alone on the beach. Everyone I spoke to was welcoming and cordial. My first impressions confirmed my view that Kerala had got it all right. I would not have been surprised by aggression anywhere else in India. I hadn’t expected it in Kerala.

It’s not just Kerala. Most writers assume that they and their readers share a protective sheath of liberal values — but it disintegrates alarmingly during most such occasions in India. We usually associate rightwing aggression with loutish mobs. That’s a mistake. It may be the woman in the tussar sari or the man in a linen suit, sitting next to you in an air-conditioned hall, listening to poetry. Scribbling notes. Sharpening knives. Priming the bomb. Adjusting the mask.

Published in The Telegraph. Read it here.

The Hindu Literary Award

2011-09-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

The shortlist for the Hindu Literary Award, started last year by India's national newspaper The Hindu, was announced today. The Folded Earth is on the shortlist, in some very good company.

Apart from The Folded Earth, the shortlist includes "River of Smoke" by Amitav Ghosh, "The Fakir" (translated from Bengali) by Sunil Gangopadhyay, "Bharatipura" by U.R. Ananthamurthy (translated from Kannada), "Litanies of the Dutch Battery" by N.S. Madhavan (translated from Malayalam), "The Sly Company of People Who Care" by Rahul Bhattacharya, and "The Storyteller of Marrakesh" by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya.

The jury received 129 submissions for the award this year. The award will be announced on 30 October in Chennai.

More news on The Folded Earth:

I will read from the book and answer questions at the Kovalam Literary Festival.which has events in Delhi as well this time. The first Folded Earth session is at 1030 AM on Thursday 29 September. The rest follow, in Kerala, from 30 Sept to 2 October.

WANDERLUST -- from Simon and Schuster

2011-09-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

S&S has done a new sampler themed around books that make you travel. You can order it here

There are extracts in it from An Atlas of Impossible Longing; and a note on armchair travels:

My father’s sister lived in a rambling, many-floored, many-roomed joint family house in the older part of Calcutta and when my brother and I were taken on visits to that house, we entered a different era. Corridors, staircases, terraces, different food smells, caged birds, people, conversations, snatches of songs – we passed all this as we walked up many flights of steep, dark stairs to reach my aunt’s set of rooms. On one of the landings there was a picture of the family’s country home, abandoned because it went permanently under water years ago. This image of a pillared mansion half-submerged by a river kept coming back to me over the years and gradually people—the novel’s characters— floated up out of its surroundings and An Atlas of Impossible Longing began.

When a novel begins I barely know it myself. Some people have appeared in my head, I’m not quite sure from where, and they demand that their stories be told. In the middle of my daily life — my battle with traffic or my dog demanding her walk — these just-appeared people murmur and sigh somewhere in the back of my head. Slowly their voices acquire tone and timbre, the place defines itself, the people come closer; out of the mist their blurred edges become sharper. Then one day, at a magical point, the world of the book becomes a planet spinning away on its own. It’s left my hands, cut loose. It doesn’t need me any more. Now it’s a place for readers to inhabit.

My brother and I read a book called The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw when we were children. It was about Ranofer, an orphan boy in ancient Egypt. He is a goldsmith’s apprentice who discovers that his evil half-brother, who works at the same shop, is stealing from the tombs in the Valley of Kings. It was a thrilling, tense, atmospheric book and for days after reading it, it seemed imperative to eat whole raw onions instead of real meals – because that was all poor, scrounging Ranofer found to eat some days. I’m sure I’ll steal glances over a shoulder for Ranofer’s goldsmith’s shop if I ever go to Egypt. His Egypt is my Egypt, I’ve already been there, sort of. All readers of fiction carry within themselves sediments of the places they have traveled to in books, the people they’ve met on the way. Therefore the strange déjà vu when you land in a foreign country and wonder if you’ve been there before.

Unfaithful Reader| The Hindu, 7 August 2011

2011-08-07T01:59:00.000-07:00

During a recent conversation I had with a Frenchwoman she posed the “what is your favourite book” question in relation to French writers. The only name I could come up with, racking my brains and trying to distract her by asking if she wanted tea, was Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, of which I can't remember a thing except that it had a lot of sex and the sex was minus love because the whole point of the book was that we are all unlinked atoms, incapable of connection, rattling about in the sterile tin that is the cosmos. The Frenchwoman gave me a helpful nudge. “Proust, perhaps?” she suggested, “Would you say you like Remembrance of Things Past?” After that, having no access to madeleines, we ordered pineapple pastries and changed the subject.

One afternoon, creaking up a Ranikhet hillside, I came to a stop when I realised I have no favourite authors or even a favourite book. Worse, there is no author, even among the ones I love, whose every work I have read; not unless forced to by an exam or tutorial. I might love an author but not with the adoration that makes me a devotee. I am an Unfaithful Reader. My tastes change often and I can be immersed to the point of drowning in a book whose name I will fail to summon up a year or two later.

Despite my cavalier lack of devotion to individual authors, it makes me disproportionately happy when one author I like (at the time) turns out to be devoted to another author I like (at the time). Such a thrill to discover, for example, the link between Haruki Murakami and Raymond Carver. Reading one Carver story made Murakami swear he would translate everything Carver had written. He kept his promise. What more selfless act of literary love could there be? Murakami's own first novel came out the year after Carver's death in 1988 so, while they did once meet, Carver never read the work of his devotee. And although I read them both years after the Carver stories and Murakami's first novel came out, and may be years after the Japanese translations were published, I felt somewhat proprietorial, as if they were the bride and groom and I the go-between.

Raymond Carver in turn loved Chekhov, another hero of mine, as did Virginia Woolf. This seemed to place them in a nice love triangle, which I, in love with the trio, felt was a good way for them to be. While Carver wrote of “the awesome frequency with which (Chekhov) produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish”, Woolf remarked on the “unfinishedness” of Chekov's stories: “(In reading) Tchekov, we need a very daring and alert sense of literature to make us hear the tune, and in particular those last notes which complete the harmony.”

When trying to make sense of my own first book for a post-publication article, I found that Satyajit Ray, whose films were a great influence on that book, had said in an interview almost exactly what I wanted to say: “I am interested in a way of life that is passing and the representatives of that way of life. You can find the same thing in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and it fascinates me.”

Everyone was so tangled up now that I could hardly untwist the limbs any longer, and the world of my reading felt like a jalebi: strands spiralling and twisting into others, each contributing to the taste and character of the jalebi, which could not be a homogenous ball like a gulab jamun if it tried. The very jalebiness of the jalebi resides in its fragile, delicate, unexpected twists and, where the strands intersect, those fatter pockets that burst with extra syrup.

Further down this spiral I found Geoff Dyer listing Ryszard Kapuscinski as one of his most revered writers. Kapuscinski's combination of story-telling, ideas, and great prose can make you charge through 300 pages on disintegrating Soviet Russia even if you had only a polite interest in Ukraine and Armenia before you came upon the book. Once I knew how Dyer felt about him, it appeared obvious that one reason why Dyer wrote on Varanasi was Travels with Herodotus, in which Kapuscinski wanders through India. Discovering that one loved writer likes another loved writer feels like a vindication and creates a sense of companionship for the reader who is the link in a chain.

It can work the other way too. When I came upon a New York Times review by Geoff Dyer of Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk about Running I rejoiced in advance because “Ah! My two good friends have met!” Dyer was scathing, however. “Is this low-maintenance, attention-deficit prose part of Murakami's attraction, especially among the young?” he asked.

I am happily submerged right now in Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, his furious, funny, iconoclastic book that grew sideways: out of his paralysis with the book on D.H. Lawrence that he intended writing. So I can see very clearly why he and the Murakami of What I Talk About would not get along. Listening to Murakami's own voice in the autobiographical What I Talk About, you wonder how this humourless model of determination — with a regime allowing few friends, no late nights, and no alcohol or overeating — could have produced one novel after another filled with whimsicality, mystery, playfulness, and eroticism. Utterly the opposite in his writerly habits, Dyer revels in his adopted persona of a layabout: a confused, laidback, anarchic and often stoned guy who has no idea what he wants to do.

Yet Dyer produces book after original, bestselling book. Which means he is just-can't-help-it brilliant, which means he's contemptuous of Murakami's rigorous discipline in relation to both running and writing: “Nothing about the book under review suggests that Murakami will (like Mishima) disembowel himself and get a friend to cut off his head. Even so, aspects of his training involve such extremes of self-torture that even the most tolerant reader will find them questionable…” I would understand Murakami slipping some cyanide into a cocktail if Dyer turned up at his jazz bar; Murakami used to run a jazz bar in the days when he still drank; perhaps that period overlapped with Dyer's time writing But Beautiful, his book on jazz; I haven't checked.

The other similarity between the two is that both maintain the exact same voice in each of their books. Dyer's mix of deadpan humour, cynicism, fizzing intelligence, and plain craziness is as much his voice in Out of Sheer Rage or Jeff in Venice as in his essays. Murakami too has that one voice in all his novels, and though the novels all have bewitching women and the eternal chase — alongside other clichés and lazy writing — their simplicity is deceptive and the books are endlessly intriguing. With both writers it doesn't matter that they sound the same everywhere. I think of Anthony Bourdain saying to them, as he did in Kitchen Confidential: when you order your regular dish at your favourite restaurant you want nothing other than the taste that made it your favourite. You don't want the chef of the day to have experimented with cooking it a whole new way.

May be Dyer and Murakami have the kind of kinship that repels. Not all relatives get along, very often they don't. At times writers who live harmoniously in your head don't get along in life; or their books don't get along and you love one book by them and are bored to tears by another. Yet their words settle in, layer upon layer, and turn into a rich compost in which your own writing sometimes sprouts.

In my head, no writer leads an atomised existence: they are joined with each other through their books and their cosmos is a bit of my consciousness. Often they squabble, they wander off and are forgotten, and then years later one of them pops back in because someone I am reading has mentioned in her book someone else I once read — but then forgot all about. And it starts again: the restless searching through the shelves for that tatty paperback you were sure you had, the re-reading of the old, the abandoning of the new, the entwining of limbs, the unfaithfulness.

TO READ THE ARTICLE WHERE IT WAS PUBLISHED CLICK HERE
c. Anuradha Roy

Chutnified

2011-07-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

It was lovely to find that Jillian, of the Delirious Kitchen blog, read An Atlas of Impossible Longing and concocted out of it.... a mango chutney! You can look up the recipe her e and her blog here. I know the feeling -- that need for a deep red glass of good wine, softly ageing camembert cheese and herbed olives that charges at you exactly five and a quarter pages into A Year in Provence. Miles away from both in Ranikhet, I saved myself pain and shut the book on the sixth page -- but Jillian's is a better solution.

Talking of chutneys, an eighty-plus writer I knew used to sit out in a square of sun in front of his cottage and drink gin and lime. A glass jar with decaying pieces of lime stood on the window sill next to him and he claimed it was lime pickle in the process of being made: each time he squeezed drops of lime into his gin, he tossed the used piece into the jar, sprinkled a bit of salt over it and shut the lid. Sure enough, a few months of perseverance led to a whole jar of salted, pickled lime wedges.

The process doesn't seem that different from the writing of a novel...

(image of lime pickle from here)

LAKE, DOG, DUNG

2011-07-15T21:49:00.001-07:00

It is a pastoral idyll within the squalor of East Delhi: a cool lake, patches of purple water hyacinth, ferny leaves overhead and twisted fingers of keekar below. An egret contemplates its dinner on a little island halfway across. On the other bank, a line of full moons have dipped from the sky to the ground. Except that the full moons have trousers bunched below them and what they are doing is releasing into the water the odoriferous still-lifeform known as Turdus giganticus.

Delhi has the overwrought elegance of Nehru Park and the ancient stone grandeur of Lodi Gardens. And far away from the bureaucrats and embassies, it has Sanjay Gandhi Park. I began frequenting it when a curly-tailed puppy adopted me. The park was an enormous stretch of wilderness from which paths were being hacked out. It had a sparkling lake shadowed by trees and bulrushes. In winter the water was noisy with ducks, painted storks and cormorants. In summer boys fished and swam in it. My puppy ran about as puppies do, chasing squirrels. Apart from workmen building boundary walls, there were no other people.

Once the paths were ready, the matrons and pensioners of Mayur Vihar discovered it. Things began to change. My pup became a pariah. The average Dilliwala knows from birth that while every dog is a leopard in disguise, a dark dog is a man-eater. White poms and golden labradors are just about ok. But a dark brown mongrel is evil incarnate: not of good family, nor fair, and therefore not lovely. One day, as my puppy was discreetly disbursing her own Turdus minuticus beneath a secluded bush, a group of passing elders observed, not without hostility: ‘Fine place you’ve chosen to make your dog shit.’ To which my companion suggested, ‘Why don’t you join her?’

Because by now, the park was the extension of the neighbouring slum’s communal toilet (which drains into the lake). Many spurn that toilet in favour of multi-tasking: taking in the air while answering nature’s call and gossiping (for this is a group activity). The real birds have long fled, replaced by Delhi Tourism’s swan-headed boats. As the turds plop into the lake, lovers whisper to each other downstream in lurid bird-boats,trailing their hands in the water. When it rains, and the water becomes a steaming brown broth, women swathe their faces with dupattas as they sail, trying not to retch between their flirty giggles.

Boats are not the only improvement. There are rock and cement grottoes, a squeaking windmill, a bridge, and warped, limbless benches.Scraps of discarded plastic bags add more colour than flowers could. A desi theka is at hand by the gate for those wishing to join the drunks comatose under trees. For a taste of the countryside, the park authorities have provided herds of grazing cows that manure as they mow. The brick-dust pathways are tramped by determined lines of walkers dodging cricket balls. Quadrangles of baked earth are packed with screaming young cricketers—all boys, because in India girls don’t play. In the monsoon even the boys stay home as their pitches are flooded with black sewage from the overflowing lake. My dog, now six, rolls about with boundless joy in the stench-filled mud. A kind-hearted man who has a shanty in the park unleashes a waterpipe for a tenner so that we can wash her.

Delhi, 2006

THE FOLDED EARTH, an extract

2011-07-09T01:28:00.001-07:00

My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still
chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a
card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and
walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened
and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then
not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted
pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at
the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one
of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of
green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was
a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror
images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its
shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was
being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board.
She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to
live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones
at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas,
tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with
ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces
of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of
the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water,
magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed
to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away
from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s.

The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the
fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on
crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in
dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet
and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face
was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and
I was late for Michael’s priest.

I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without
knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A
house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had
said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund,
the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me
where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each
morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit
its three tips one by one.

“Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on
here a single day longer.”
* * *

Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken
him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward
journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different
train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines
stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over
twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the
Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father
Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres
from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance
was beyond measurement.

INTERVIEW WITH INDE REUNION, FRANCE

2011-07-09T01:12:00.000-07:00

1) Can you tell us about yourself?

What can I say about myself? As a child I lived all over India because my father was a field geologist and this work made him move around a lot. Thirty or forty years ago when phones and television and internet had not connected everyone, moving from one part of India to another was like moving to another country. The language, food, culture, architecture: everything changed totally. I went to many schools, then moved to Calcutta for college and then to Cambridge for university — so I have roots everywhere and nowhere and am an insider and outsider simultaneously anywhere I find myself. It was only when I began working at a publisher’s office in Delhi that I first spent a long stretch of time in one place and now I live with my husband and dog partly in a tiny town in the hills and partly in Delhi.

2) When and how did you get the taste for writing ? What did your write first?

I’ve written stories ever since I can remember. I published my first few in an Indian newspaper when I was fourteen. The money I earned from those stories financed a box camera. One or two of them even attracted letters from readers. So immediately two of the “side effects” of writing became apparent.

3) Novel is a tradition in Bengal literature from 19th century : do you consider you are continuing this tradition ?

I haven’t read enough Bengali fiction to think I am continuing that tradition. I feel myself a fusion of all sorts of traditions from Bengali literature and nonsense verse to Chekov and Hardy and Asterix and Henning Mankell.

4) Who are the writers, from India or any other place, from present or past times, whom you consider have an influence on you or you admire ?

This novel was most influenced by the films of Satyajit Ray and the fiction of Bibhutibhushan, a Bengali writer whose work is exquisite, poetic, and deeply moving, filled with humanity and empathy for landscapes and places.

I admire many writers: Chekhov, Yasunari Kawabata, Virginia Woolf, Dickens, Anne Stevenson, Ahmed Ali and Bibhutibhushan are among the writers I re-read. I love Kawabata’s very Chekhovian novel The Sound of the Mountain which reveals the extraordinary through a series of daily events and perceptions – nothing earth-shattering has happened, yet by the end of the book after layer upon layer of incidents, memories, talk -- everything is altered. The same applies to a novel like Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I think I gravitate towards fiction that doesn’t feel the need for obviously grand themes but is about the lives of ordinary people.

Among the present-day Indians who write in English I enjoy and admire Vikram Seth’s writing because he is so versatile, and uncaring of trendiness. You have to be very brave — apart from brilliantly gifted — to write a novel in sonnets as he did, or a novel which focuses on Western classical music.

There are some books I love but know to be quite different from anything I would ever aspire to write. For example I’ve just been reading Imperium, Ryszard Kapucinski’s book about the Soviet Republic and the brutality and tragedy he writes of, and the kind of travelling he does to reach his stories, are both unimaginable and terrifying for me. Currently I am reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, which is a book about Dyer’s inability to write the book he is meant to be writing. Like all his writing it is hugely witty, highly intelligent and acrobatic in its ability to keep seemingly insignificant ideas afloat, draw meaning out from them. Again it is a book I can only be helplessly admiring of. But I suppose all that anyone reads settles in, layer upon layer, and turns into a kind of rich compost in which their own writing sprouts.

5) An Atlas of Impossible Longing is your first novel : how did you get the idea to write this story ?

The novel grew out of an image of a large house half-submerged by a river. It was a haunting photograph of an actual house that had to be abandoned by my aunt’s family. This image kept coming back to me, gradually people—the novel’s characters— floated up out of its surroundings and the novel began.

6) Would you please give a clue about the story ?

It is a family saga, a kind of trilogy-in-one-volume structurally, and follows the fortunes of a cloistered, conservative family in India, into which is introduced – almost by accident — an orphan who moves by degrees from the periphery of the family to its centre. The novel is set over a long period of time, 1907 to the 1950s during which time India went through gigantic transformation (from being colonised to becoming an independent country, the Partition of India among other thing) and some of this is reflected in the lives of the characters; but it is primarily a book about solitude, loneliness, domestic politics, love, lost landscapes, the migration to big cities. These themes could have worked in the present day equally, but I wanted a language and pace from time when things were slower, and the slowness allowed for a different kind of richness.

7) What is the most important in this novel : characters, places, emotions, ambience, social message... or what else ?

For me the most important reason to write the book was that I had to tell the story of the people in it, and of the landscapes and houses that were inextricable from those people, and which vanished with them. They felt like real people and places to me: things happened to them, and I had to write about those things, convey what the gradual dissolution of one way of life meant.

8) How would you define your style ? Is style a special preoccupation when you write ?

If by style you mean the prose, I revise and rewrite and rethink quite obsessively until each sentence sounds right to me – but of course you can never get everything right. I really dislike having to go back to read anything I’ve written because I know those deformed bits I’d rather forget will pop out and stare at me. Language is everything in good fiction: I can’t read indifferently written novels and wouldn’t want to write one.

9) Being also a journalist, has this activity any influence on your writings ?

I was not a full time journalist for long; I understood very quickly it was not my world. Since then I’ve only written as a freelancer or been a consulting editor, which is not at all the same thing as being a journalist. But even my brush with it did some good: for a start, it made me very obedient with deadlines. So if I have promised my publisher that I will finish reading proofs by a certain date, for example, I will stay up nights and wake at dawn to get it done by then. I think a spell of journalism demystifies writing, makes you aware of the drudgery, makes you understand that if you need to write something, you have to be at your desk and chair for long hours and get down to it. If you have something you need to write, you know you can’t wait for absolute solitude and a darkened room and a year in which to devote yourself only to writing.

10) Can you tell us about Permanent Black ?

Permanent Black is an independent publishing house doing mainly books on Indian politics and history. My husband and I started it in 2000 and have been running it since then; we have published over 250 books in these years. The best and most renowned social scientists and historians have published with us as well as absolutely new, brilliant young scholars of promise. One of the French writers we have published is Christophe Jaffrelot, who writes on political and caste issues.

11) What are your plans now ? Maybe soon another novel to be published ?

My second novel, The Folded Earth, was published this year in Britain and India and is due out in the US in 2012. The first of its translations is going to be out soon, in Norwegian. This book is set in the present day, in a small town in the Himalayan foothills – in the town where I live.

read the interview in its original place here.

HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY... by Chekhov

2011-07-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy hated Chekhov's plays. And Chekhov's only consolation was that Tolstoy did not like Shakespeare either.

Some brilliant vignettes from a writer's life here, from the soon-to-be published MEMORIES OF CHEKHOV by Peter Sekirin.

(And if you like Chekhov, then Janet Malcolm's book slim little book on him, READING CHEKHOV, is an unimproveable combination of travel, biography and literary history.)

Ivan Bunin, “Chekhov,” from The Russian Word (1904)

I got to know Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. I remember a few specifically Chekhovian phrases that he often said to me back then.

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.

I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”

“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”

And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.”

Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child’s play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare… For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does.”

Peter Gnedich, “Memories,” from The Book of Life (1922)

Lev Tolstoy sincerely loved Chekhov, but did not like his plays. He told Chekhov once, “A playwright should take the theater-goer by the hand, and lead him in the direction he wants him to go. And where can I follow your character? To the couch in the living-room and back—because your character has no other place to go.” They both—Tolstoy and Chekhov—laughed at these words.

Chekhov told me later, “When I am writing a new play, and I want my character to exit the stage, I remember those words of Lev Nikolaevich, and I think ‘Where will my character go?’ I feel both funny and angry.” Chekhov’s only consolation was that Tolstoy also did not like the plays of Shakespeare.

Chekhov told me once, “You know, I recently visited Tolstoy in Gaspra. He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, ‘Kiss me goodbye.’ While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man’s voice, ‘You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.’”

FROM THE INDIGO BLOG

2011-06-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

This month, the Canadian booksellers, Indigo, celebrate Indian authors with a series of interviews, guest bloggers, essays.

My father was a field geologist and in my childhood he was away half the year in remote places. The months he was home in Calcutta, rules and routine were jettisoned. There were cream rolls for dinner, concerts, and tram rides with no fixed destinations. And soon AbolTabol, Sukumar Ray’s Bengali book of nonsense verse, was dug out and dusted off. We knew the poems backward, but our anticipation of my father’s characteristic intonations made us laugh even before he started reading. That is my earliest, happiest memory of a book.

I didn’t know then that books would be the bricks of my adult life. My husband and I run an independent press. My father-in-law, at 91, has been running his own bookshop for over sixty years. For some years I ran a newspaper’s book reviews page. And I also write books. Whatever we do to stem the tide, books advance into every corner of our home-office like a stealthy guerilla army. We’re almost afraid to move some of them: what if the house fell down, what if our walls were held up by that corner stack of The Small Voice of History (hardback, 600 pages)?

I may be biased of course—but working in the world of the books is the best kind of work. It’s certainly one where you get to know the most interesting people, and do the kind of work together that encourages long friendships (or enmities). The first real publisher I encountered was Ravi Dayal, who used to head Oxford University Press, Delhi. By the time I joined it as an editorial slave, he had left to start his own imprint, but he strolled in some days to cast an appraising eye over his old patch. He operated in chaotic solitude from a tree-fringed, wood-panelled study in his bungalow. Out of this room emanated the books on his distinguished list, all edited and proof-read by him, and clothed in jackets he designed with ink and crayon, innocent of technology. He had strong views on type and book design, loving statuesque fonts like Bembo and scorning pallid, sans-serif upstarts such as Arial. I was stunned by the honour when, after years of observing my work,he asked me to design a book jacket for him.This, I thought, was what soldiers felt when medals were pinned to their chests.

Ravi Dayal is not the only quirky publishing person I’ve known. My British publisher, Christopher MacLehose, goes on epic drives across Europe every year, with his dog Miska, and a bag of manuscripts. He camps in various towns en route meeting authors and agentswho have got used to the idea that if they want to talk books with him, they might need to trot across a meadow in wild pursuit of a publisher who is chasing his hound, who is chasing a frisbee.

There are water diviners who roam the arid stretches of rural India, using no more than rudimentary loops of wire to predict where underground aquifers lie. Christopher has a similar ability to pinpoint those points in a manuscript where seams of untapped possibility lurk, to which the author needs to return, rethink, rewrite. He has the diviner’s ability too, to grasp the potential of manuscripts that everyone else thinks worthless. In this way, most recently, he published the Stieg Larsson trilogy in English when about eight other publishers had turned it down.

I met my husband because of books, and our first conversations were about manuscripts—but that’s another kind of story.

In Delhi all those years ago, after two numbing years of editorial plodding through scholarly manuscripts, the classical singer Sheila Dhar turned up in my room one day. Her book Raga n’ Josh is unmatched for its rich blend of observation, learning, and story-telling. We met as strangers—author and editor—and in a few months both my husband and I were under the spell of her great wit and intellect, and her infectious sense of fun. She could turn dreary days into carnivals, stealing us from our desks for long lunches where she sang, mimicked, and planned future books. Dutifully, we scribbled deadlines and outlines into diaries, sustaining the pretence that these were working lunches.

Because it wasn’t really pretence. This is how books get made: in an alchemical process, through chance collisions of people, places, energies, thoughts, ideas. Many of those books make it to our shelves. A few make their homes within us.

The Folded Earth: A Book Trailer

2011-06-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

Beautiful and brief. Watch it here.

Two interviews

2011-05-24T04:21:00.000-07:00

Two interviews, one for The Folded Earth and the other for An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

In the first one, Sunil Sethi of NDTV's Just Books asks in detail about writing methods, memories, places, people, and whether writing about what he called miniaturised landscapes means you are writing of isolated worlds. Watch it here.

The second interview was done via the Internet, where readers quizzed me on a range of topics for a whole hour. I hadn't thought I would survive it, but it turned out to be a very interesting hour, interrupted by sounds of explosions -- there were fireworks going on at a wedding nearby. Watch it here.

FROM THE ELLIOT BAY BOOK COMPANY, SEATTLE, A STORY

2011-04-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

From Courtney Shannon Strand, former About.com Guide

“The story of how I came to find and read Anuradha Roy’s beautiful novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, is not as long as the distance I went to find it. In Delhi en route to a literature festival in Jaipur this past January, I stumbled totally by chance into a reception honoring British publisher Christopher MacLehose. His hosts, Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy, run a terrific independent academic press, Permanent Black. Talking about the role of academic publishers in India, then how a clearly significant press composed of two people, doing everything, managed to function: that was my introduction to Anuradha Roy.

I shortly learned— not terribly directly —that she had written a novel, one published in India and numerous other countries. Notes were made, and when I was in Faqir Chand and Sons’ legendary bookshop the next day, a Picador India edition of An Atlas of Impossible Longing was miraculously (to my eye) produced from the shelves of the most unfathomably organized bookshop I think I’ve ever seen.

An Atlas of Impossible Longing itself was more than fathomable even though it carries considerable mystery at its heart. Set over a span of years in early 20th-century Bengal, it tells of people brought together and then wrenched apart by circumstances historical, cultural and natural, all at once. Betrayals, secrets, chance, human greed and machination all play a big part, but a deep-set current of longing, keeping some indescribable purpose, ineffable and alive over time, no matter what waylaying occurs, makes it a particularly memorable, resonant book. It’s one of those rare books where time, rhythm, breathing change as one reads. You truly enter the book, the book inhabits you. It’s also one of the most assured novels I’ve read in some time, never mind that it’s a debut. Every character, every setting, shift of scene, situation—rings true.

Upon return to the US after India, I found myself in that nowhere-land of having this amazing, transporting book to recommend, but no easy way to put it in others’ hands. Elliott Bay imported several from the UK, selling them briskly. Everyone who got it came back, saying how wonderful it was, wanting to buy additional copies to give to others. Getting ready to place reorders overseas, we received the welcome news that Free Press would be publishing An Atlas of Impossible Longing in spring 2011.”—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

READ THE ARTICLE IN ITS ORIGINAL SITE HERE.

"THIS IS WHY YOU READ FICTION AT ALL"

2011-04-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

"Every once in a great while, a novel comes along to remind you why you rummage through shelves in the first place. Why you peck like a magpie past the bright glitter of publishers’ promises. Why you read.

No “news hook” will have brought you to it. No famous name on the spine will suggest what’s in store. But as you slip into the book’s pages, you sense you are entering a singular creation, a richly populated world. Curiosity overcomes you. Before long, you are surrendering to the voice of a confident narrator, the arc of an unfamiliar story. And then, suddenly, you are swept away in a tale that is bristling with incident, steeped in the human condition, buffeted by winds of fate. This, you think, is the feeling you had as you read “Great Expectations” or “Sophie’s Choice” or “The Kite Runner.” This is why you read fiction at all"

MARIE ARANA, WASHINGTON POST

Read the complete review here

The Music in Atlas

2011-04-22T02:15:00.000-07:00

I discovered a fabulous new website called Largeheartedboy, for books and music, when they asked me to write about the music in my first book. In their Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. I went to the site and looked up the music other writers had written about and was entranced -- how extraordinary to discover a book through music and new music through books! What could possibly be more obviously a good thing, yet so rarely done?

A still from The Cloud-capped Star.
A beautiful song from this film is in my playlist.

When I thought about it, I realized that An Atlas of Impossible Longing is filled with different kinds of music. Some of it was in my own head as I was writing it, but a lot of music is referred to in the book as well.

India has its own sophisticated, courtly, classical traditions, both instrumental and vocal; there is devotional music, both Hindu and Sufi; there are varieties of folk music in the different regions of India. There are songs in Indian movies, in which the music is influenced by just about everything. All this music happens in many different languages and uses a huge range of eastern instruments such as the sitar, tabla, sarod, ektara and so on, as well as western ones.

My book is set in India in the first half of the twentieth century, in a small town with a rural, tribal hinterland. One of the important characters is Mrs Barnum, half-Indian half-British, married to an Englishman. Her kind of people made Indian music as diverse as it is. Music hall songs, pop, western classical music, jazz, church music – all came here with the British and French and Dutch and in time mingled with the local traditions of music. Fusion came here early.

Look at my playlist and listen to the music in the book here. All the music mentioned is linked within the site.

GIVEAWAY FROM GOODREADS

2011-04-18T23:21:00.000-07:00

Goodreads.com is giving away 5 copies of An Atlas of Impossible Longing. Introducing the book, it says, "In the tradition of Henning Mankell, Per Petterson, and Stieg Larsson, Roy is a major foreign success just waiting to storm the American literary scene. This is the novel that will usher her entrance, portraying several generations of family life in India with the sort of warmth, tension, and lavish detail that bestsellers are made of." Here's the link to the contest.

The New Yorker reviewed the book in its brief notes this week, saying:
“Houses serve as powerful metaphors of refuge and claustrophobia, and the novel chronicles both the strength of domestic bonds and the wounds that parents and children, husbands and wives, inflict on each other.”
And here too by coincidence Henning Mankell's new book is reviewed just above mine, which pleases me no end because I am a huge fan of Mankell's crime fiction.

For those who can get past the New Yorker paywall for the complete review, the link to it is here.

Rain, reviews, restfulness

2011-04-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

Soft, grey, rainy morning in the hills. My dog has decided there is no place more sensible than a duvet. Her nose emerges every now and then like a radar to figure out if her staff (ie us) is at hard work in the catering department. Then she buries herself again.

A review of Atlas, meanwhile, in a Cleveland paper: "Roy's writing is nuanced and luminous, never hurried, leading the reader through the lush Bengali landscape and into the hidden terrain of desire and loss". Read the complete review here.

The Folded Earth was reviewed too, in Outlook. "Roy joins Allan Sealy, whose elegiac The Everest Hotel also asks: is the way of life in colonial hill stations falling apart as they grapple with inept modernity?... As with An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Roy unravels the small-town terrain with certitude. At one level, her prose is a dirge for the Kumaon hills. At another, a Pickwickian humour infuses it with robust charm."

What is on the work table right now though is book covers: I design book covers for our independent press, Permanent Black. Here is the latest, for a brilliant autobiography of a Buddhist scholar.

Arundhati Roy's second novel... and other Atlas stories

2011-04-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

The first US reviews of An Atlas of Impossible Longing are just coming in from the blogs. In a review to return to for comfort on the bad days, Brenda Youngerman writes:

"...without a doubt the best book I have read in the past six months! It is the kind of book that stays with you throughout the day. The kind of book that resonates within your mind as you think, feel, breathe, do your daily chores. The kind of book that makes you stop and take notice of things around you that you would not otherwise stop and take notice of." Read the complete review here.
The Scarlet Letter, in a perceptive review, says: "The novel is filled with plots and subplots and points of view, all intertwining and forming, like the lines of Mukunda's palm, an atlas of impossible longing. Desire is the driving force in the novel: desire for love, for escape, for money and success and for all sorts of unfulfilled dreams. At the center of the atlas is the family house in Songarh, crumbling and aging along with the family."

Booksandbrands said: "Anuradha Roy’s prose was absolutely beautiful. The descriptive passages were perfection-not too little as to be overly concise, nor so flowery that I felt I had to skim over sentences. In fact, I devoured every single word of this lovely story. Her characters were well-developed but in such a subtle way you didn’t even feel it happening. Roy was able to perfectly balance character and story to produce what was to me a near-perfect novel."

Better Read than Dead loved it too: "The best novel I have read this year -- actually in a couple years. Each section is great with just enough action and pacing to keep the story moving."

Release notes says: "This makes a wonderful rainy day read. Curl up with a cup of tea, a blanket and get lost in India for the afternoon"

Cynthia, on Goodreads loves it, only she thinks it is Arundhati Roy's second novel:

"I read Arundhati’s first book, The God of Small Things, about 12 years ago, after I had heard her interviewed on the radio. It still remains as one of my favorite books. Now I am excited to read her again. She has a beautiful way with words. I recently found out that she was trained as an architect, which explains one of the reasons that I enjoyed An Atlas of Impossible Longing".

I hope Arundhati Roy feels as complimented by that as I do.

Nothing is everyone's cup of tea of course. So although Susie Bookworm likes most of the book, she finds that "Mukunda is a hard character to sympathize with... I want to smack Mukunda upside the head to wake him up." There are others who wanted some particular strands of the story tied up to neater conclusions, or thought that it was too tragic.

You can sample more American blog reviews of the book here, and here, here, here, and here.

FIRST CITY

2011-04-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

A review here from First City on The Folded Earth. This is an eccentric magazine in more ways than one: for one thing, it has pages and pages, usually very interesting pages too -- on books; second, it is agreed by most writers who are interviewed by the mag that their journalists are extremely good at what they do -- this is not as obvious a virtue as it might seem; it's still a magazine that is not available online; oddest of all, their journalists don't get bylines. Despite all of this, it's a great magazine, one that everyone in Delhi knows.

First City also ran an interview-based feature on The Folded Earth, which is here.

BOOKS TO GROW WITH / Vogue, April 2011

2011-04-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

My father was a field geologist and in my childhood, he was away half the year in remote places. The months he was home in Calcutta, rules and routine were jettisoned. There were cream rolls for dinner, concerts, and tram rides with no fixed destinations. And soon Abol Tabol, Sukumar Ray’s book of nonsense verse, was dug out and dusted off. We knew the poems backward, but our anticipation of Baba’s characteristic intonations made us giggle even before he started reading. That is my earliest, happiest memory of a book.

Especially when we are young, books give coherence to whatever emotions are tangled up inside us; years later, it can seem inexplicable why a particular book appeared a revelation. There are books I don’t return to now for the same reason that I don’t go back to certain places: I don’t want my memories altered.

Mostly what has stayed with me from things read long ago is poetry. At Presidency College, Calcutta, a friend opened my world to poets I had never encountered. We would rummage through piles of books at the chaotic pavement stalls on College Street, begging shopkeepers for instalment plans to buy them on, and this way I discovered Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop. One of the books I always have on my desk now is by Anne Stevenson, whose ‘Correspondences, A Family History in Letters’, is a remarkable set of poems that builds up the narrative of a troubled family in jigsaw puzzle fashion through poem-letters written in different voices.

It was at Presidency too, that I understood how much I was missing by not reading in Bengali. It is my mother-tongue, but my school reading in places far away from Bengal was in English and Hindi, and crowded out all else. As a result, I read Bibhutibhushan Banerji’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) in translation the first time: it was a set text for my brother’s class and carved itself in stone in my eleven-year-old head. The need to know it in its original language made me start reading in Bengali again. A slim novel about siblings growing up in poverty in rural Bengal, it is so tragic it makes you cry, yet tender and true about the human capacity for joy in the grimmest circumstances.

During an undergraduate degree at Cambridge that entailed digesting one British writer per week, a copy of Chekhov’s novellas fell into my hands at a second-hand stall. It included his story, The Duel, which begins with a pitilessly accurate description of failed love and develops into a poignant, comic story. Until then I had known Chekhov as a playwright. The Duel demonstrated his genius for creating complete social universes and living people through the briefest flashes of unexpected, seemingly pointless detail that work together to reveal the depths of emotion and pain that exist in the unlikeliest of us.

In Delhi, after two numbing years of editorial plodding through dense scholarly manuscripts, the singer Sheila Dhar’s book landed on my desk, meteor-like. Raga n’ Josh, containing essays on her life in Hindustani music, is unmatched for its rich blend of observation, learning, and brilliant story-telling. We met as strangers — author and editor — and in a few months, my husband (also a publisher) and I were both under the spell of her great wit and intellect, and her infectious sense of fun. She could turn dreary days into carnivals, stealing us on impulse from our desks for lunches at which she ate everything forbidden her, sang, mimicked, and planned future books. Dutifully, we scribbled deadlines and outlines into diaries, sustaining the pretence that these were working lunches.

PUBLISHING THIS WEEK IN FRANCE

2011-04-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

The French edition of An Atlas of Impossible Longing, translated by Myriam Bellehigue, is published this week by Actes Sud. It has been picked by Livres Hebdo, the French equivalent of Publisher's Weekly, as one of its three best books for the month.

The happiest translation story for me is how Myriam Bellehigue became my French translator. We have been close friends ever since we found ourselves living on the same staircase at university in Britain. She now teaches English literature at the Sorbonne, working mainly on American poetry -- Elizabeth Bishop was the subject of her PhD. When she read the first draft of An Atlas of Impossible Longing she made detailed suggestions for improving it and also said she wanted to translate it if that opportunity ever came up. At that time, with the novel being turned down by more or less every publisher, a translation of it seemed a remote possibility and we drowned our sorrows in her dark coffee.

The French rights for the book were bought by Actes Sud. And although publishers are extremely wary of trying out new translators, they gave her a trial. When they read her work, they knew -- as I always sensed -- that she would be an absolutely brilliant translator for the book.

Whatever the Question... Love is the Answer

2011-04-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that the line between fiction and fact can be a floaty, dissolving, elusive one, and to prove that you only have to walk around Ranikhet, where The Folded Earth is set. A set of photographs uploaded by MacLehose Press today shows bits and pieces of Ranikhet that will be familiar to anyone who has read the book or ever been there -- or to any other tiny hill station such as Lansdowne, Kasauli, or Dalhousie, as the Indian Express review by Dilip Bobb comments today:

"Apart from capturing the sights, sounds and character of a hill station — Ranikhet in this case — she also uses the eccentricities of the locals to fashion a tale of great beauty and depth. What makes the setting more authentic is that she writes in familiar characters like Kipling and Corbett, Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru, into the plot to combine echoes of the Raj with heartbreak and nostalgia, love and loss. The tale delights as much for the allure of the writing as for its very hill-like twists and turns."

Mountains, books

2011-03-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Folded Earth had its first outing in Landour, Mussoorie, at the Winterline Writer's Festival. Landour is a lovely little town just of Dehradun and has some famous old residential schools, including Woodstock, where the festival was held. What do you get when you stir in a pan several hundred school-children demented with the joy of half term and sugary chocolate icebars along with a few poets, novelists, climbers, artists, wildlifers, nature writers, guitarists in a tiny hill town? There were shrieks and squeals when Paro Anand read her stories to the kindergarten population; some stiffening backs when Arvind Mehrotra read from his translations of 4 BCE erotic poetry (well after school hours); George Schaller's talked of his astonishing travels across the Tibetan plateau in search its wildlife, the Swiss photographer Coni Horler, whose brilliant landscapes were on display, gave out the secret behind his waist-length hair (coconut oil) and determined efforts revealed that Mussoorie's one-street bazaar did have a nightlife.

The book may well pitch its tent somewhere on the slopes of Kilimanjaro next, or the Alps. According to one reviewer The Folded Earth can be a handy stand-in for a hill holiday. The reviewer comments: "If you, like me, expect to be cheated out of the Himalayas again this summer, I recommend Anuradha Roy’s second novel instead. Its pages are crowded with the small intense pleasures of a long trek, to be recalled years later with unbearable yearning by a veined stone, a fossil, a dry leaf. The pain of that intimacy acknowledges the imponderable: we rush to embrace the wilderness and dread the terror of being embraced by it. The Folded Earth embodies this paradox: it is a joyous novel about grief."

The first weekend's reviews and news

2011-03-21T09:02:00.000-07:00

Lots of "real" readers writing in to the author about The Folded Earth, which is always the best part. One reader wrote: "Just finished both your books back to back. They have left me with a tingling feeling. A very special chord was struck and somewhere along both the writings I drew parallels with my life and that I think put words into a lot of my feelings and actions. "

Bill Aitken, writer and Himalayan wanderer wrote to say, "I find your writing superlative. I particularly respond to the moving depiction of the hill characters, especially your tender treatment of the village women... I suspect this book will end up alongside Corbett's as a Kumauni classic."

Some reviews too. Mint Lounge here. And India Today here. The book's in its second week in the bestseller list. Let's see how long it survives there.

Talking Novels

2011-03-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

It was a freezing December afternoon, in a bleak, unheated room, when Brinda Bose spoke to Anuradha Roy about her books while Arunava Sinha sat glimmering and glinting behind the camera. The afternoon turned into evening, the room grew colder, the conversation continued. Eavesdrop here.

Early reviews of The Folded Earth in the UK

2011-03-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

"I was captivated by The Folded Earth and swept into its narrative...tells a story about love and hate, continuity and change, loss and grief in a convincing and memorable setting" The Independent

"a gently perceptive story, half-comic, half poignant" Sunday Times

"her prose is tight with life" Daily Mail

"a deeply unsettling but beautiful novel... utterly enrapturing... with incredibly touching moments...Her elegiac tone also means that Roy engages with longstanding debates, for instance the detachment of formal politics from the ‘real world’, the divisiveness of Hindu nationalism and the destruction of the environment, in a truly human and emotive way...The Folded Earth constantly grapples with grandiose themes almost effortlessly... Roy’s writing remains gently poignant and metaphoric throughout, every vignette and scenario she constructs feels multi-layered and deeply meaningful." For Book's Sake

"Roy has an admirably restrained style and her novel offers a vivid evocation of north India. She conjures up striking images with the lightest of touches" Tatler

‎"A perfect treat after the hurly-burly of Christmas, this quiet, poetic tale entices you into the foothills of the Himalayas Anuradha Roy won much acclaim for her first novel.The Folded Earth, a remarkably assured work, is her second novel and filled with beautifully crafted prose...The whole is marked by an elegant restraint which serves to make the story all the more powerful." Country and Town House Magazine, UK

"Roy’s precise prose creates the atmosphere of the hill town perfectly, and the characters are memorable and convincing. Many of the scenes are almost poetic, and some are heartbreaking... This is a book about love, loss, conflict and change, captivating and beautifully written. I recommend it to individual readers and reading groups. Five stars." Newbooks Mag

Once upon a time in Ranikhet

2011-03-15T07:52:00.001-07:00

Read an excerpt from The Folded Earth here.

JUST PUBLISHED: THE FOLDED EARTH

2011-03-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

IN A REMOTE TOWN IN THE HIMALAYA, Maya tries to put behind her a time of great sorrow. By day she teaches in a school and at night she types up drafts of a magnum opus by her landlord, a relic of princely India known to all as Diwan Sahib. Her bond with the eccentric scholar, and her friendship with a village girl, Charu, seem to offer her the chance of a new life in Ranikhet, where lush foothills meet clear skies.

As Maya finds out, no refuge is remote or small enough. The world she has come to love, where people are connected with nature, is endangered by the town’s new administration. The impending elections are hijacked by powerful outsiders who sow division and threaten the future of her school. Charu begins to behave strangely, and Maya soon understands that a new boy in the neighbourhood may be responsible for changes in her friend. When Diwan Sahib’s nephew arrives to set up his trekking company on their estate, she is drawn to him despite herself, but his disappearances into the mountains evoke painful echoes of the past.

By turn poetic, elegiac and comic, this is a many-layered and powerful narrative about characters struggling with their pasts, a novel that poignantly reveals the strange shapes that India’s religious and social conflicts can assume even on distant mountaintops.

The Folded Earth was published in February 2011 in the UK (MacLehose Press) and India (Hachette). Read an interview about the book here