Last week I was in New York for just a few hours, accompanying some family members who had a chore at the Canadian Consulate. My three hour visit to the city happened to coincide with Salman Rushdie’s reading at the New York corporate office of Google, on 8th Ave, so I left my family members to fend for themselves for an hour, and hopped on the A/C/E. Since I’m close to someone who works in the office, I was able to enter the Googleplex for lunch (at their legendary cafeteria), and see the reading at this unusual venue.

First of all, the turnout was striking, considering that this is an office comprised mainly of software engineers and sales/marketing people working for an internet search/advertising giant. The auditorium within the office was full, with about 200 people — about what you might expect to see at a college or university with an English department. Quite a number of people had copies of Rushdie’s new novel with them. In short, Googlers read.

Second, the reading was being teleconferenced live with three other Google offices, which you could see on a screen projected behind Rushdie’s head. (By contrast, when we have readings where I teach, we have enough trouble just getting the microphones to work without brutal feedback…)

Third, in keeping with Google’s “do your thing” office environment, there was a bright red exercise ball just hanging out on the floor of the auditorium, about 10 feet from the podium. It was unclear to me whether it was there as a seating option, or simply as decoration (the bright red goes well with the Google office’s bright, “primary colors” palette).

Rushdie himself tailored his comments to his environment quite nicely, reinforcing my impression of Rushdie as a demi-God of public speaking engagements. Continue reading →

The situation for the Indian community in Malaysia has worsened in recent months, as many readers may be aware from earlier posts (see here and here, for starters). There were a series of major protests a few months ago, and as I understand it the situation remains tenuous (though I must admit I haven’t been following the political situation there closely). [UPDATE: The above is not exactly up to date, and in fact is inaccurate. See Preston’s
comment below.] Most people in the west know little about Malaysia, and indeed, even in India, it’s really by and large Tamil communities that have a strong historical connection to the country (see Wikipedia here); the Indian diaspora in Malaysia is, by and large, a Tamil diaspora. Given the recent tensions and our general interest in different South Asian diasporic experiences, a novel like Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day will likely be of interest to many readers. After the jump I have a review of the novel. Continue reading →

I was surprised by how much the others in my book group didn’t like Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva. The biggest complaint was from the mothers in the group (including my better half), who didn’t like Suri’s use of a first/second person narrative method (the novel is written in the voice of a woman named Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin). Several people said they didn’t think Suri really pulled off the trick of writing about the intimate space of family life from a woman’s point of view.

Reading as a man, I didn’t notice anything implausible or false, though obviously I can’t be the judge. Certainly, some of the intimate passages regarding things like Meera’s breastfeeding of her son are quite risky (starting with the opening paragraphs of the novel; you can hear Suri read them aloud here). I find the opening a bit stylistically overwrought (the novel quickly shifts to a more conventional style), but it’s still, I think, plausible.

(Chandrahas Chowdhury, reviewing the novel in the Guardian, wasn’t bothered by this aspect, but by the novel’s use of Indian history. Jabberwock, whose opinion I respect greatly, loved the novel, and found Suri’s attempt at a woman’s point of view convincing. Then again, both reviewers are men. The only review of the novel by a woman I’ve come across is by Caryn James, in the New York Times — and she doesn’t take issue with Suri along these lines. Still, I wonder what readers thought?)

Though I suspect some other readers may share my book group’s distaste, I did think The Age of Shiva had some real strengths. Continue reading →

Hello dear SepiaReaders, it’s that girl with half a face again. I’ve been absent from the bunker for a while but fresh air is vastly overrated so I wormed my way back in. I hope to hunker down in the bowels of our concrete barracks and start posting furiously. Whether this is promise or a threat greatly depends on how drunk you are while reading this. Cheers!

To kick things off, I’m delighted to discuss the debut novel by non other the mutiny’s own V.V. “Sugi” Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage. Published recently by Random House U.S., the book will also be available in Canada, the U.K. Italy, France, Romania, and Germany. So GO BUY IT, wherever you are. Sugi’s posts on Sepia introduced us to a eloquent writer unafraid to tackle to thorny issues surrounding the Sri Lankan conflict with even-handedness and humor. In Love Marriage she pulls off the astonishing feat of writing about Sri Lanka with an honesty that doesn’t simplify, tackling issues without a trace of polemics, and a love that still remains clear-eyed.

Super full disclaimer: it’s proved incredibly difficult for me to distance myself enough to write a fair review. I know and adore the author as a person, she’s a fellow Sri Lankan, instead of some Kaavya Viswanathan-style American Desi fluff, she wrote about Sri Lanka. And instead of a pretty “beaches and jungles” treatment, she delves into a sticky thicket of diasporas, internecine warfare, generational drift, ‘ethnic’ identity creation, politics, love, nostalgia, loyalty…

(Uh, wait. The book is a fun read, I swear!)

To continue disclaiming: I wrote a review a while ago and kept revising it. Then Sandhya’s awesome Q&A was in the works so I sat on the review so we’d get both pieces up simultaneously. Then I found out that the dastardly speedy Ultrabrown posted a review today (with mistakes!!) so to juice things up a bit, this review was rewritten to go head-to-head with the fearsomely logorrheic (or, to use my favorite made-up word for him, verbacious) Manish.

Prepare to duck as the verbal darts (or in my case, coconuts) fly! Continue reading →

There’s a profile in the New York Times of Chetan Bhagat (thanks, Pocobrat), author of One Night @ The Call Center, which was released in the U.S. on paperback last year. Bhagat, an author few in the west will have heard of, has now become the biggest English-language author in Indian history:

But he has also become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history, according to his publisher, Rupa & Company, one of India’s oldest and best established publishers. His story of campus life, “Five Point Someone,” published in 2004, and a later novel, “One Night @ the Call Center,” sold a combined one million copies.

Mr. Bhagat, who wrote his books while living here, has difficulty explaining why a 35-year-old investment banker writing in his spare time has had such phenomenal success reaching an audience of mainly middle-class Indians in their 20s. The novels, deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket — just 100 rupees, or $2.46 — and have won little praise as literature.

“The book critics, they all hate me,” Mr. Bhagat said in an interview here. (link)

Yes, it’s true, we do hate him.

I read One Night @ The Call Center a few months ago, when the American publisher sent me a review copy. Some parts were so bad, they made me cry. I was particularly bored by the chapters detailing the protagonist’s unrequited romance, which are set off in bold type for some reason (though the fact that they are set off in bold is actually useful — the font makes it easier to identify the chapters to skip!).

That said, the novel does have some amusing cultural commentary scattered here and there, and I suspect it’s the book’s candor on the grim–yet economically privileged–experience of overnight call center workers that has made Bhagat so popular. That, and the book is so easy it could be read by a stoned dog on a moonless night.

Here is one passage, on accents, I thought interesting: Continue reading →

A friend gave me a copy of A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam, as a present a couple of months ago, and I finally got around to reading it this week. A Golden Age, it turns out, is a very strong first novel, written in a direct, natural style, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Anam’s is the first novel put out by a western publisher that I know of to have Bangladesh’s war for independence as its main theme, and for that reason alone, I suspect A Golden Age will become the kind of book that is often taught in college classes on “South Asian Literature” (like the courses I myself get to teach every couple of years). The War is important in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, but only at a great distance (Mistry’s novel is set in Bombay). And a section of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children deals with this event, but it comes near the end, and Rushdie addresses it in rather lyrical terms — you don’t really get a solid explanation of how the war started or what it was about.

Here, you do. The center of the novel is, of course, the family drama — involving a widow named Rehana and her two grown children, Sohail and Maya. Both of the children are politically oriented, and take a strongly pro-Bangla, pro-Sheikh Mujib position on the events that transpired in 1971. By contrast, their mother Rehana is at first reluctant to make a commitment — though the needs of her children soon force her to inject herself into the conflict. She also begins to come out of her shell emotionally, which is of course what most readers want to see.

Continue reading →