Let Vikram Twist Your Arm

If you need any more persuasion to go to the Ubud Writers and Readers' Festival this year do have a listen to what Vikram Seth has to say about it!



Early Bird tickets for 4 Day Passes (at 10% off) are available now! Early Bird offer ends 14 July.

A Suitable Sequel

I am so glad I asked Vikram Seth last year at Ubud to write a sequel to A Suitable Boy. I told him that it just wasn't long enough and I wanted more! (And I didn't even resort to any Annie Wilkes like tricks.)

I'm jumping up and down cheering to hear that :

A Suitable Girl will see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A Suitable Boy, who suffered the efforts of her mother attempting to find her a suitable husband during the first book, now a grandmother, searching for the right match for her grandson. To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

Trivial Love?

Love is sometimes thought a theme too trivial to be tackled, especially by male writers, one better left to women.

Louis Nowra in the Australian looks at the prejudice against love as a theme in literary fiction, noting that :

Recently a reviewer summed up many academics' distaste for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's superb novel Love in the Time of Cholera as "an attempt by the author to broaden his appeal by concentrating on the universal and soft subject of love". Irene Nemirovsky's novel Suite Francaise appalled J.M. Coetzee. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books he criticises the author for writing about love instead of concentrating on World War II as a time of "conquest and extermination aimed at wiping certain despised people from the face of the earth and enslaving others".

I remember being quite aghast that Vikram Seth's wonderful A Suitable Boy never got within a sniff of the Booker and neither did the Louis de Berniere's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which I'm sorry, I keep waxing lyrical about!) though both went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Someone I mentioned this apparent oversight to sniffed "Yes, well of course. They are both love stories."

Therefore by implication not to be taken as seriously??

I am, I'm afraid a sucker for love stories, although not the cheesy cliched Mills & Boon happily ever after things. It only works when the reader cares deeply for both characters in the relationship.

De Berniere's book has two great big heart wrenching love stories, one gay, one straight. Seth's A Suitable Boy pits the sensible suitor against the romantic lover. My Malaysian book loving friends (college colleagues all) told me I was looking at love in a hopelessly Western way when I wanted Kabir to win Lata's hand, and that Asians were invariably more pragmatic about affairs of the heart. (Honestly, they said that!) But I was heartened to find the author agreed with me when I heard him speak in Bali.

Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain is a passionate love story, but made the Booker list - perhaps because the central relationship was so subtly handled? (Some not so clued in readers actually missed it!)

Well, what great literary romances have warmed the cockles of your own hearts? And what do you think of Nowra's observation about the most significant literary love stories coming from male authors?

Good Things on Other Blogs

The latest literary gossip from local bloggers:

Is Kafka Austrian or Czech? Raman recounts a diplomatic tug of war and writes about Milan Kundera's new book The Curtain (which I was tempted to buy when I slipped into Silverfish yesterday ... such is the power of blog reviews.)

MPH Bookstores blog Redwhitespot has sadly gone under just as it was beginning to get interesting with some of May Lee's posts. I think the name had bad feng-shui and wanted to warn them, as it always made me think of a pimple. (So sorry!) May Lee and Rodney and the rest - if you feel the need for a space to blog, feel free to tumpang a space here.

Talking of MPH though, super-editor Eric Forbes has a nice post which talks about how book reviewers are developing in Malaysia - and I have to agree with him and he ties this to reviews of James Wood's essays which now I have to buy. (Expensive business, reading other book blogs.)

Eli James of Novelr wrestles valiantly with the question of purple prose.

I've not been very good at turning up for events organised by other people, much to my shame. I sincerely apologise to the folks who would like to have seen me there. I'm grateful to those who give me a vicarious glimpse of what went on, including Ted (left) who posted pictures of last months Katasuara at Raja Ahmad's gallery. Jordan Macvay (spelt right!) writes about being part of Bernice's Ceritaku storytelling event.

I've always has a great phobia of dentists, and when I can avoid 'em I do. Deepika had a very special "dentist" take a look at her teeth during a panel discussion which she was moderating at the Galle Literary festival in Sri Lanka: it was none other that Vikram Seth! (See photo right.) In his round up of festival events, Nury Vittachi tells the story :

At one point, he (Vikram) told an entertaining story about a relative who was a one-armed dentist. To illustrate the challenges involved, he put his arm around the head of moderator Deepika Shetty and duly inspected her back molars. ... What the author didn’t know – but many of the rest of us did – was that Singapore journalist Ms Shetty has just completed a lengthy dental treatment which involved carrying around a quarter of a ton of metal in her mouth for more than a year. Thus his good reports about her dentition carried great weight.

Postscript :

Oops. How did I forget to say welcome to the new Kakiseni blog?

Hardtalking Seth

It was so good yesterday to catch Vikram Seth interviewed on the BBC's Hardtalk Extra. Seth took time out from the Hay-on-Wye literary festival to talk to Gavin Esler about his memoir/biography Two Lives and the extraordinary lives that inspired it: those of his Uncle Shanti, (a dentist who had studied in Berlin lost his right arm in combat) and his Aunty Henny (a German Jew who lost her mother and sister to the death camps).

Seth also described how supportive his parents were when he decided to quit his job with the Economist and move home to work on his novel A Suitable Boy. He planned it to be just 200-300 pages long when he began it! In the end his parents patiently put up with him for the seven years it took him to complete the book, which grew to a marathon 1,400 pages (even after cuts). An obsession to find out what happened to the characters (many of whom were based on members of his own family) compelled him to complete it. (He describes himself as lazy!) He thanked his parents for their support by buying his mum books for life, and his dad whisky for life!

Seth came across as a really nice guy ... intelligent, warm and funny. As I've said of other favourite writers, the kind of guy you'd like to spend time down the pub with.

Bibliolbibuli's ultimate accolade!

Related Post:

A Suitable Heavyweight (27/8/05)

What Flavour is Your Novel?

I can't eat cheese and Branston pickle sandwiches without thinking of D.H. Lawrence.

See, cheese and pickle sandwiches were my staple diet the summer I worked in Barnaby's toyshop, and hungrily read Women in Love, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Rainbow in quick succesion during my all too short lunch breaks.

Edgar Allan Poe is the scent of overripe bananas. His Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Birmingham Library copy) was squashed at the bottom of my rucksack with the remains of my picnic lunch as I trudged 22 miles across the Malvern Hills on a sponsored walk. (Coincidentally on the same day as those guys landed on the moon.) Neither book nor banana survived the trip.

Ipoh Chicken Rice with extra beansprouts is the flavour of my induction into science writing. I devoured Steven Jay Gould's essays in that shop in Section 5 in between teaching practice observations. (Hmmm ... why do men have nipples? Glad I know the answer.)

A Suitable Boy smells of the calamine lotion I had to dab on when I had shingles.

Many of my more recent reads taste of fishball mee soup from Centrepoint.

Pucuk ubi masak lemak* is going to be the flavour of John Banville's The Sea. I'm doing an awful lot of my reading these days in the canteen of Damansara Specialist Hospital, going for physiotherapy for an achilles tendon that refuses to heal. (Step class goddess no longer.) And the Malay food in the canteen is surpringly good, including this dish which is a favourite.

This information may save some PhD student a lot of time as he embarks on DNA research into the various little stains on the library of the famous Sharon Bakar.


*Tapioca leaves cooked in coconut milk.

The Incredible Shrinking Book

Was reminded of one of my dad's favourite jokes:

I learned speed reading and managed to complete War and Peace in half an hour. ... It was about Russia.

It seems that readers are less patient with long books these days and now shorter versions of some classic tomes look set to hit the bookshops. The first book to receive this treatment is Tolstoy's War and Peace in a new translation by Anthony Briggs. Later, a shorter and less theoretical A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkins is due for release: a sort of dumbed down versions for dummies like me. I've attempted this book three times and always seem to disappear down a black hole halfway through.

I was surprised though to read that Susanna Clarke's fairly recent award-winner Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is to receive this treatment as well. I must confess though that I am among the readers who have been put off the book by its size. That's not to be pathetic: a big book claims too many hours of your life! We are living in the age of ficiton overload with more titles being published than ever before while our attention spans get ever shorter.

On the other hand I have mixed feelings about the other titles on the list for the shortening treatment: I've been meaning to get round to reading Moby Dick and Clarissa for years, but always something newer and more happening gets in the way. (My cheeks are burning with shame.) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon has been sitting on my "to-be-read-shelf" since last year (More bookguilt!) when I felt it was a gap in my own education that needed filling.

But I have read Underworld by Don DeLillo and think it quite brilliant. I gave it five stars on Amazon and wrote gushingly:

'Underworld' requires time and effort on the part of the reader, but is immensely satisfying. The story of ordinary lives lived in the shadow of the cold war, fits together like a chinese puzzle : it is left to the reader to discover all the interconnections of plot and character. I found myself rereading whole sections to enjoy the beauty of the language. Worth reading a second time!

Not that I think I will ever have time and patience to read it a second time. And I'd love to know whether anyone in Malaysia has managed to even get past the very difficult first chapter?

Wonder if Vikram Seth or Paul Anderson will find themselves getting chopped in the fullness of time! A painful thought, no doubt.

A Suitable Heavyweight

The New York Times carried a story the other day about Paul Anderson's debut novel Hunger's Brides. They say it is "certain to be one of the biggest books of the fall". And in more ways than one.

The book is 1,360 pages long and weighs 4 pounds 9 ounces. (Please can someone else convert that to kilos because I've failed every maths exam that life has ever thrown at me!) Anyway, about as much as a six-pack of beer or a chihuhua dog.

But what really made me smile was this comment on Khitabkhana's entry about the book:

It is an incredibly sad moment for the 25-year old history of Indian Literature. Our reigning champion, our soap-operatic gift to humanity, our Suitable Boy, has been beaten by bloody eleven pages. This evidently is a colonial conspiracy.

Vikram Seth urges his readers in his A Word of Thanks poem at the beginning of the book:

Buy me before good sense insists
You'll strain your purse and strain your wrists.

If I was ever told that I was going to be marooned on a desert island and could only take then books with me, for sure this would be one. Even if it weighed more than everything else in my luggage combined.

I read the book in a week when I had shingles and I was so totally engrossed that I couldn't bear to come back to the "real world".

Of course, the question that keeps the pages turning is who will Lata marry in the end? Will her head or her heart govern her choice? I'm a romantic and wanted the former, my colleagues all argued that it should be the latter because Lata is Asian, and therefore pragmatic, after all. Of course Seth (the rascal!), keeps us guessing right to the end.

And I was open-mouthed in awe at the way that Seth juggles a cast of characters larger than I'd ever have thought possible (there's someone new on almost every page!) embracing a huge sweep of society. I felt as if I had been in India for that week.

The book is way too short. Perhaps that sequel is called for!