A couple weeks ago I was standing on the train during my morning commute, my arm stretched all the way up so my finger could curl about the ceiling pole, idly twisting about on my toes in a half-turn to survey the crowd and eye-scape their morning reading for titles, authors, snatches of prose. What are they reading? I always wonder, like a ghost watching a feast. These days it makes me ill to read on the train, and I feel like I never have time to read real books–spoiled by my steady diet of magazines and blogs, I can’t quite digest those bricks of literature. That morning there were some romance novels, a Crichton, Guns Germs & Steel. A woman shifted, and behind her a gray-suited man’s folded back New Yorker came into view, the familiar Deco font, and like my mother’s voice the desi words sharpened into focus:
Karma, by Rishi Reddi, Harper Perennial; $12.95: Each of the stories in this startlingly mature collection shows first- and second-generation Indian-Americans attempting to manage the disconnect between cultures. The premise is hardly a new one, but Reddi’s understated prose and her choice of details give her revelations a quiet power.(link.)
Some part of me groaned. Karma? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s really the best title you can come up with? Saying the premise is hardly new seems like the understatement of the generation. My skimming glance over the title story (then findable online, now sadly only partially available online as a pdf excerpt) quickly got me to a line that seemed worrisomely familiar:
. . Shankar and Neha were deposited on the threshold of their new life.
Oh not, not another catalog of the first apartment’s goods! Quick, do they mention those EIGHT DOLLARS?
And then I caught myself. So what if there’s another book with tales of confusion and misunderstanding blossoming into a new life? Yet another list of the precise order in which first a chest-of-drawers was purchased and then a record player? Every husband’s frantic search for his clothes among the silk saris cheongsams? How many books do we have on roadtrips, replete with convertibles, mix-tapes, and crazy encounters? Or thrillers about the moody American expat? Perhaps immigration-fiction, the constant probing of that crease in the heart, is a genre unto itself. (Shanti, Manish, there are no mangos or mehndhi patterns or emroidered mirrors on the cover, just a stencilled pigeon and some flowers, and even the font is free of devnagari-styled serifs.)
I frequently bemoan the fact that minority writers feel the need to their minority’s themes while a white man has the freedom to write a Japanese story and gets the whole canvas to play on. I want the New Yorker to write a two-page review of a great American novel that’s deeply, equally relevant to the whole nation and have the desi name be almost an afterthought, as it is with so many of the other categories of accomplishment we celebrate here. I want my white or Asian or black or Hispanic friends to call me up and say, “You have to read this book,” where the book is by a desi author but that commonality between me and the author has nothing to do with their insistence. Why must we always be meekly constrained to the edges?
But who am I kidding? I want to write that book, and I want all my friends to rave to each other about it. But I can’t even write most of a blogpost in two whole weeks. This woman, on the other hand, is an environmental lawyer, is raising a daughter, and serves on the board of SAALT. Yet somehow she found the time to write story after story, one of which was even chosen by the illustrious Michael Chabon for a Best American Short Stories collection, and then get them published as a book. (link.) If she needs to write out her version of the disconnect story, and she does it well enough to garner good reviews from The New Yorker and the Washington Post, maybe I should give her a chance without rolling my eyes. Literature is not just about the keywords on the dust jacket. It’s also about voice–and this woman has voice.
The cliche is that the test of a pudding is in the taste–but the aftertaste is where a masterwork can be destroyed or raised to heavenliness.(Example: I could give you an intellectual list of reasons why Snow Falling on Cedars is a good novel, but the best proof is that strawberries have always smelled sweeter since.)I read the title story, Karma, online. It’s pleasant enough, and deeply recognizable in its basic structure–new couple from India, how will they make it? Hard work and serendipity, of course! And yet, for all my cynicism, it has since stuck with through the darkening of the moon–not because of the life details which are recognizably uber desi but the details which anyone can appreciate, like the lives of birds . As the Washington Post reviewer Adriana Leshko wrote, “While Many of the stories seem simple, characters and plots linger long after you turn the page.”
So next weekend I’ll try again to work on my Great American novel. This weekend I’ll be in a bookstore, humbly paying for my Karma.
Perhaps its not mango fatigues as much as raw mango fatigue.
NotQuiteAuntieYet—I’m going to presumptiously speak on Siddhartha’s behalf and say no need to apologize! You jogged his memory and got him to dig out a great link which I myself had totally forgotten. It’s an important function in blogging, to turn over the loam of the archives every now and then, and get all that rich content connected to the new stuff. That’s a wonderful class of comment. Welcome to the Mutiny!
Thank you Namrata! That’s so kind. This is the first time I have ever commented on a blog (yes I know, I’m showing my age 🙂 so thanks for making me feel welcome.
Does anyone have good suggestions as to where to get your short stories published? Googling didn’t help much.
TIA.
Exactly! Good material is always worth re-discovering. Welcome!
You need to send them out, and you will get those little notes back, some rude, some detached, but….keep trying. Here’s a list of probable future homes for you stories.
Friend, welcome to our plight.
But on a less apocalyptic note, try the links that Neale’s website wonderfully assembles, or go the mutinous way and start a blog!
Schmooze with agents.
I totally agree with with what MD says here:
I’ve gotten flack — it’s the writing not the story — for bringing up this same point about being tired of the same ole story lines by some of our great desi authors. I just feel a real lack of reading about South Asian Americans who are interacting with other people of color, or working in a gas station, or working in a homeless shelter, or being homeless, or … and I know it should be about the writing but I want to be jarred out of my comfort zone and intrigued and fascinated. I want an anti-hero, a fuck up, a magician. Sorry if this sounds like a personal ad, but maybe it is, this comment is to all those desi writers — and I know there are hundreds that come to this site — who are sitting on ideas about atypical characters. Let’s flood the market with them. And I read Reddy’s book awhile ago, I agree, it’s quite good. Great writing. But for every Karma out there, let’s unleash 10 anti-Karmas. Shall we? Ready. Go!
There seems to be a certain close-mindedness about Indian diaspora fiction. While it is good advice for writers to write about things they know well or have experienced themselves, if all desi writers sound like each other, does it not mean that they are refusing to have new experiences. How does a writer grow if they refuse to see new things and gain new perspectives? Even if they are bound to their ethnicity, why does the story always have to be of comfortably upper-middle class suburban families? Is it because that is the class the writers come from, and they lack the imagination to handle anything different.India is going through massive changes and there are a thousand stories right now in India waiting to be told, and yet I do not see that happening, because desi writers refuse to move out of their comfort zone of navel-gazing angst.
I’d like to add Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace to that list: a historical novel that stands quite well for itself, all desiness aside.
How many rejections ya got, Neale, Ankur? I’ve got over seventy. I figure I’ll stop around 150.
It warms the cockles of my heart to know there’s others dealing with the cold world of lit magazines.
Lord of the Dings – try entering your stories into competitions (although be wary of entry fees and do some research into the organisation running the competition etc.). It will help to make sure you have a series of completed stories that are final edit ready and it may help to get you some attention (especially if the judging panel are from the industry).
Good luck!
NotQuiteAuntieYet, she is possibly the worst writer I have ever come across. Everytime I see a new book of hers out in the bookstore, I want to shake her and beg her to stop- stop painting desis with her cliched and tired brush. I’ve not met anyone who likes her work, so HOW is she still able to get her work published?!
Something that really struck me after I read Lahiri’s “interpreter of maladies” and “namesake” is the fact that we only see Indians interact with white Americans. I realize that many South Asian Ams who came to this country are mid-class or upper-mid-class and b/c of socioeconomic patterns often had neighbors who were white, but I’m sure so many of us have had to deal with the racial dynamics of this country and not being white or black or being perceived as a race we are not; where/what is our sense of self-identity from interacting (and often being forced to self-position) in the white/black race context of the United States.
I’m thinking this context is very different than what South Asian Brits have experienced.
—- it would be interesting for a great writer to tackle this experience; I’ve often thought maybe it would too touchy a subject by writers who are generally progressive and in the United States so many minorities who are progressive want a political identity that unites with other minorities.
I found the movie Miss Masala so interesting b/c it tackled this.
I just finished reading Anita Desai’s book “feasting and fasting” or “fasting and feasting” (always can’t remember which word comes first in the title.
Loved the book b/c of the pov it gave between a sister’s experience in India and the brother’s experience in the United States as a student. But again, no mention within the brothers experience of interacting with anyone else outside of white americans.
There are interesting differences in experiences amongst indians from uk, africa, caribbean and usa. I don’t have time to illustrate some of these but it is worth looking into and alarming. I have lived in a variety of these places and have been surprised at the assumptions people make including my own. Hanief Kureshi sp? and others has written a few perspectives on this. It is also interesting to compare the racial experiences of blacks from uk africa caribbean to the american one. There are quite a few sensitive differences there also. It eventually alls boil down to the mentality that we are similar and different. And given our laziness we are likely to simplify things beyond what is accurate. In each person a variety of dynamic complex forces are at work to substantiate a private and public identity. Therefore, guard against your natural assumptions.
DQ, The acceptance, when they have occured,make it all worth it – in a very intimate fashion.
NotQuiteAuntieYet — if you liked English, August, you might be interested in The Mammaries of the Welfare State. It’s the sequel to English, August and follows up on the lives of some of the same characters.
Neale, Yeah, I’m hoping for that moment soon. It can be terribly discouraging, this race.
All these english novels/books written by desis have white anglos as their primary audience and desis living in the west and anglicized desis living in India as their secondary audience. Their writings have no relevance whatsoever to the overwhelming majority of desis. The overwhelming majority of whom cant read english.
Few if any of these books are world class. How many desi-written english books have been translated into other languages?
An alternative take to collecting rejection letters is to work on improving your work. Contrary to popular belief, editors don’t toss stuff they really really like. And most editors have pretty refined taste after sifting through the mad detritus of the mailbox.
Go to a workshop. Build yo’ skillz. Then submit again.
And thank god other people are suffering from…”mango fatigue.” Heh, I love it. It’s funny, because a great many non-desis are only just discovering our collective cultural angst just now, as I think some few of us are finally getting over it.
I have a Persian friend from Jerusalem at work who just read The Namesake, and is finding all kinds of common ground, and loves to share it with me, and I’m sure I come across as “aww, aren’t you cute?” supercilious now and again for thinking the generational woe-is-me stuff is annoying.
I don’t think great writers fall into any “write what you know / write what you don’t know” camps, either. In fact, I think most great writers do some of both, sometimes in the same work. But generally, if you’re starting off as a writer, it’s safer to write what you know rather than extrapolate and try too hard to identify with something you really don’t. Beginning writers do this all the time, and well…it sucks.
Let’s talk about this one at the meetup tomorrow. 🙂
Thanks for the recommendation. Love the title already!
I know…. all the people who give me details of their favorite Indian restaurant(or in one case, Bill Gates’ favorite Indian restaurant so I could visit it if I were in the neighborhood), realign their chakras periodically, go to spas where they drip warm oil on your third eye and look disappointed when I tell them I went to school in a schoolbus in India must lap that stuff up..
I started with an extension course at UCLA several years ago. It was there, hearing about a really wide spectrum of authors that got me reading in a more focused manner. Good thing about lit mags is the abundance of good, diverse, short pieces. Reading people like Lydia Davis, Benard Cooper, Mark Doty, Rick Moody and the heavyweights like William Trevor and Alice Munro was a revelation. Above all, short fiction required less investement , timewise, than a novel. Its the best $12 you can spend. I have been in a serious workshop off and on for a while now. No regrets. I wish there were more folks, outside the workshops, that are as obsessive about literary fiction. But, writing is a solitary pursuit. Gotta sit your butt down and write,making sure you unplug your DSL cable before:-).
As Salil said, a meetup to talk about this would be fun.
Unfortunately, there is no alternative to collecting rejection slips. I’ve gotten to know many published writers through workshops and courses. Every single one of them collected rejection slips. A friend of mine collected 125 before getting her first acceptance. As for the theory that editors only throw away crap – um, that’s crap. Editors will pass on stuff they really like for reasons unrelated to the writing (a good book to give you insight on this is The Practical Writer) like space considerations, a story which is not entirely ‘suitable’ for the magazine’s genre, a story which repeats themes already showcased in another selected story etc.
Namrata: Admired your subtle reactions to Karma and similar desi diasporic literature. I have never considered the cliches of this new genre – the eight dollars, the first apartment, the month long vacations to India to rub the ABD’s nose into some Indian culture – to be problematic in a truly great book but extremely annoying in the mediocre ones.
A great literary work seems to own its time and place. A mediocre book seems to merely exploit them. There is such an inevitability about the milieu in a truly inspired work that one has to admit that without all those familiar cliches, the work would not have been quite that rich, or believable. That’s how I reacted to The Namesake. To me, its rootedness in a micro culture – not just the desi but a smaller, tighter Bengali diaspora – was its source of nourishment. But the book soared from its familiar footing to the greater heights of universality, the specifics of which I will not bore dear readers with in this comment.
That brings me to my next point, stated so well in RED SNAPPER’s comment #34. Ultimately a great literary work is as universal as it is local. But what I would like to emphasize is that the universal emotions or experiences of a great book do depend on, and draw their strength from, a very “local” milieu. To use RED SNAPPER’s example, Joyce without Dublin would be unimaginable. So would Woody Allen without Manhattan, Fellini without small town Italy, Mark Twain without the Mississippi, Tennessee Williams without the South, and Jhumpa Lahiri without the Bengali diaspora. Their works could have been set in a different time and place without disrupting the overall theme and universal truths, but would they be truly great?
So, are those tired cliches really necessary in the desi diaspora literature? The point is that in the hands of a great writer, they are no longer cliches.
Namrata, post a book review here AFTER you have read Karma. I will look forward to it.
Joyce, Woody Allen, Fellini, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, and Jhumpa Lahiri? Though of course it is your personal opinion.
I don’t think Floridian is comparing Jhumpa Lahiri to them in terms of artistic achievment Sakshi. He’s using them as examples of how good writers root their fiction in a specific milieu out of which they spin great universal narratives, characters, stories, and writing. As he says, ‘The point is that in the hands of a great writer, they are no longer cliches’, which I agree with. Earlier I said something similar; It’s not the themes that writers deal with that’s the problem, it’s the quality of the writing, and how original they are in approaching those themes. Originality and imagination are the key.
ishiguro.
I am not so sure that the theme can be excised entirely when judging a book. Can the lack of new themes not also be seen as another symptom that something is wrong with Indian writing in english? If everything was okay, I’d expect a much broader distribution in terms of ideas, themes, scope, styles, but that does not seem to be happening. I think there’s a certain amount of self-absorption behind it, and a feeling that one’s brownness in a white land is enough to qualify one’s story as interesting.
The upshot of this is that when someone writes a great book, original, fresh and well written, you reject it because the themes you detect make you feel jaded. I’d rather invest my judgment in the quality of the writing. If a great novel is written about XYZ of desi life in the diaspora, written well with originality and intelligence and subversion, the extension of your argument is that it’s a lesser novel than a F grade novel that is badly written but deals with themes you find novel.
That, I would suggest, is down to either:
(a) A lack of genuine writing talent at the present moment
(b) The tendency of publishers to seek and publish lesser talents who conform to templates and stereotypes to be sold to the broadest possible markets.
I would say that (b) is the most likely reason — hence the mango-spice genre of second rate writing that is accepted and published so much by London and New York publishers.
But the thing is, 90% of all books published anyway are nothing special and generally cliche ridden works of mediocrity anyway, desi writers will be no different.
There’s always going to be a certain degree of self-absorption in literature. I agree with your final point though, but would say that that is more about the laziness of bad writers and bad publishers too.
First of all, it is simply not true that “most” English novels being written by Indians are redundantly about our “brownness in a white land.” Perhaps as desis living outside of India, our perception suffers from selectiveness. There has always been a lot of English writing purely indigenous to India, and in addition, there are many foreign-based Indian writers whose stories are India-based. So there is, indeed, the broader distribution of themes that Sakshi speaks of.
Secondly, even the overdone diaspora theme has a lot of unexplored territory left for writers of great talent. As a 54-year old “Mr. Ganguly” who has lived in the US since 1973 and lived the desi evolution, I know of issues and experiences that have not been touched by writers yet. You guys are right in the sense that there is a beaten path that the writers seem to follow, but given time, there will be the great ones who will bring new facets of the desi experience to light.
fact: it is her look and her look almost only that got her her book deal. She will look and sound good on her book tours and sell the silly book to young mothers in brookline massachusetts type places.
Okay, this is total geek city and would never work, probably, but does anyone want a tab on SM where we can list good fiction/non-fiction desi oriented books to read? I want to read authors who write in English, but who write about or live in India. I’d take a good Ruth Prawer Jhabvala over having an author have to be brown to write about India, if you see what I mean. And not Maximum City stuff…., which I hear really good things about, but more low key. I like ruminative prose, generally….
*Is there one already, somewhere else, maybe?
Clarification: I don’t care about brown or not. I’m just interested in good writing about India.
MD, Try Jabberwock. His blog has many good reviews / recommendations for the type of books you are trying to find. You may have to dig deep. The man has many interests.
Have you read Kiran Nagarkar’s older books? He’s one of those rare writers who write well in two languages.
Shodan: Thank you! I haven’t read Nagarkar, but I’ll try and check it out.
Middlestage has some nice reviews too.