Author Vikram Seth just did a live audio interview with SAJA. The audio will be archived here.

A suitable interview

A Conversation with Vikram Seth, bestselling author of “A Suitable Boy” and “The Golden Gate” – about his brand-new book, “Two Lives,” and his career.

Interviewing Seth will be Sreenath Sreenivasan, SAJA co-founder and Aseem Chhabra, SAJA board member. They are in NYC, Vikram’s in Seattle. All three will be on a conference call, and that call is webcast live + they will be taking the questions you send in via e-mail. [Link]

Liveblogging, quotes are inexact:

A Suitable Boy: … the publisher asked, can we have a few more foreign characters to appeal to the foreign market… that’s why I was rather surprised that the… interminable book about a rather obscure period of Indian history in the ’50s… without war, without the assassination of prime ministers, without… much in the way of sex… without even a glossary… was successful outside India…

Whether to include a glossary: You can describe what a duck is, but if somebody hasn’t even seen a duck… If someone’s read Dickens… they have certain references to the geography of London… that we don’t get. But as long as the writer’s not trying to be particularly obscure… we give them latitude…

My being the author of the books sometimes gets in the way of my enjoyment of them… I don’t really read my books, but occasionally I read poems I’ve written because I want to capture a certain mood…

I don’t find mess stimulating, but I’m just incapable of keeping things tidy… I’ve only been here for half a day, but the whole place is indescribable… I write at no particular time of day… at the earlier stages of the book, it’s good to choose a time and a place where it can be quiet… so the characters can form themselves… once when I came back from a trip to Australia, I tried to preserve my jet lag, because I could wake at two in the morning, and I could write when the house was dark and quiet…

Question via email: Many of your character names are anagrams of your own name…

Question: How does a small town writer make him- or herself heard?

Seth: I’m sorry, I don’t really know… the first book I wrote… [describes how his dad told him to go to the library and look up publishers, and he mailed unsolicited manuscripts which died unheralded and unmourned on the slush pile]… Finally an editor looked at a chapter or two… I didn’t have an agent in the beginning, and I didn’t know how to get one… when I wrote The Golden Gate, I didn’t think I could sell something as strange as that [a novel in verse] through an agent…

Try to write what you’re [compelled] to write, not what the market tells you… the market didn’t tell me to write a 300-page novel in verse. Selling a 60-page novel in verse would have been impossible, so why 300?… my own method of entering print was rather unorthodox…

Question from Renu K.: Thank you for the topic… fascinating… thought-provoking… both internal and external.

Seth: First of all, thank you, Renu… I’m gladdened that my idle chatter has [sustained?] something… The thing to remember even with such… delightful conversation… readings, book signings, prizes, reviews… all the paraphernalia of books… the crucial thing to remember about the act of reading is that it’s a very private act… writing is a very private activity… If one can get to that private space, that’s the most crucial thing of all, and everything else is just a means to that end.

Spooky — this is what I heard as I was typing, totally self-referential:

Interviewer: He may not even know this, but he was being liveblogged… on a separate Web site called Sepia Mutiny… a very good… second-generation South Asian American Web site…

Seth: Sepia Mutiny?

Interviewer: Yes, that’s right… it’s linked off the SAJA Web site…

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p>And he was right, the link was already up. Damn, they’re fast.

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p>And finally:

Seth: Are we off the air?

It sounded like the film rights for A Suitable Boy have been optioned, but it’s not clear whether the movie will be made.

Related posts: This Suitablegirl is suitably loyal, Tyler Cowen’s Favorite Indian Things