More Kaavya Fallout

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the water ...

Kaavya Vishvanathan was back in the news this week when it was revealed that her plagiarism extended (can you believe?) to other texts as well.

The New York Times credits the blogging community with forcing publisher Little, Brown, to withdraw the product after blog search engine Technorati revealed that Ms. Visvanathan's name was the most searched term in the blogosphere:

In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time.

Hey, friends, we're part of that! (Limitless amounts of time, though? I wish I could kick the addiction.)

Principle whistle blower was the Sepia Mutiny blog (which I intitially discovered thanks to Sharanya: the first post on the scandal is here .)

Kaavya seems also to have lifted from Sopia Kinsella's Can you Keep A Secret, from Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, and from Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused and from Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

But all may not be lost for Kaavya, as some wag notes on the blog - since many Indians don't believe in intellectual property, Viswanathan could have a tremendous career writing for Bollywood!

An interesting case of cryptonesia came to light in the wake of KaavyaGate when it was revealed that Helen Keller created her own publishing scandal when she published a story called The Frost King. As Keller tells it in her autobigraphy:

Mr. Anagnos was delighted with 'The Frost King,' and published it in one of the Perkins Institution reports. This was the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth. I had been in Boston only a short time when it was discovered that a story similar to 'The Frost King,' called 'The Frost Fairies' by Miss Margaret T. Canby, had appeared before I was born in a book called 'Birdie and His Friends.' The two stories were so much alike in thought and language that it was evident Miss Canby's story had been read to me, and that mine was — a plagiarism."

So it does happen.

(Thanks McLee for dropping this story into the comments of my previous post on the case.)

Kaavya and Carver: Cryptonesiacs?

One of the things I love most about having this blog is the way folks drop by and leave links to stuff that's much more interesting than the post that lead to the comments in the first place! Am I humbled or what?

That certainly happened the other day when I wrote about Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism and if you have the time, do go and pick up some of the leads.

Dear old Anon left an intriguing note about an interesting article in IHT which highlighted that the author actually worked with a book packager to come up with the storyline. I tracked down the article to the New York Times, and intriguing reading it makes too. Like Anon, I had never heard of a book packager before and my eyes are opened. Tom Tomorrow tackles the same subject on his blog (thanks so much Swifty, for this link) and smells a rat:

Obviously I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d be willing to bet some modest sum (my own advances falling rather short of the half million mark) that there’s more to this story than is being reported so far.

Also worth checking out is the story from the archives of salon.com that Sufian mentioned: why is Raymond Carver's most famous short-story Cathedral so similar to a D.H. Lawrence: The Blind Man? Of course, there can be no question of a great writer like Carver getting up to Kaavya-like shenanigans ... can there?

Meanwhile, copies of Kaayva's book are stacked high in Times in Bangsar Shopping complex. Since the book is apparently being recalled, you might want to whiz over there and bag one, because it's bound to have rarity value later on. (One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I didn't buy the locally produced Gulf War board game back in 1991. Just think how much that would be worth now!)

Just in case you aren't sure what a cryptonesiac is, check it out here.