You can now listen to Salman Rushdie’s mellifluous British tones in an interview on NPR (thanks, Abhi). The PR tufan bears all the hallmarks of a practiced public speaker: note the near-total absence of fillers like ‘um.’

Now that I think about it, although I’ve bumped into him at Midnight’s Children the play, I don’t think I’ve ever heard his voice before. As usual, it’s not quite how I imagined it.

Here’s a lame, anti-epic review of Shalimar the Clown, which I rather enjoyed, in the NYT. I place it far above Fury and just a hair below his best work, but it’s a clear return to form.

Cascading clauses are a Rushdie trademark; they can be taken as a manifestation of abundant imagination or as a symptom of poor writerly discipline.. It’s hard, though, to see them as anything but laziness when they’re misapplied…

As a rule, Rushdie’s characters lack a plausible inner life; instead they have bizarre quirks, unusual looks or magical powers, like the figures in a fable… For the creation of such a description-mad writer, Rushdie’s Pachigam remains stubbornly hazy: How big is it? How developed? How many rooms do the houses have and what are they made of? Do they have electricity? Are the roads paved? Your guess, even if you haven’t read the book, is as good as mine. [Link]

Yes, and please specify the width of the caulking in the bathrooms. Reviewer please. This kind of dis on Rushdie is not only widespread, it’s absurd. Don’t hate on the book just because you don’t dig the genre. Westerns don’t have a lot of interior dialogue either. Rushdie’s style is very male, and his stories, like Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, are sweeping, masculine epics with strong, idealized women. Sometimes you’re in the mood for circumscribed domestic weepies, sometimes you’re not.

Continue reading →

The folks behind Desilicious (the erotic anthology, not the pride party) are at it again with a call for submissions for Divas and Dusham! Dusham! Mmm, onomatopoetic irregularity.

The anthology will collect both scholarly and literary works inspired by Bollywood, and the deadline is Jan. 31. Methinks a certain per’fessor could submit.

The Politics: How have characters, narratives, or cinematic techniques sustained or subverted hegemonies? How do we identify and engage progressive and reactionary strains in Bombay cinema? What is the relationship between filmmaking and national/transnational politics? Why are Bollywood actresses all fair? Why do the movies tell stories especially of young people? Why are they mostly upper-caste (and Punjabi based)? …

Literary Adaptations: Submissions could include subversive alternate endings to famous Bollywood films… stories in which the central character is modeled after a distinctly filmi character; or screenplays (story-length or excerpts) attempting contemporary Hollywood remakes of Bollywood classics… [Link]

My favorite category:

Explorations of Villainy: Bombay Cinema is the only cinema that grants major film awards for “Best Performance in a Villainous Role…” Bollywood villains who can drop a line as menacing as, “is ko liquid oxygen mem duba do. Liquid ise jine nahin dega aur oxygen ise marne nahin dega” (Drop him in liquid oxygen… the liquid will not let him live and the oxygen will not let him die) make Darth Vader look like a kitty. [Link]

I, for one, welcome our new erotic villainy overlords.

Submit to submissions@masalatrois.com or: Masala Trois Collective, 71 McCaul Street, #113, Toronto, ON M5T 2X1, Canada Continue reading →

Over the past year, whenever the topic of books comes up, I grab whomever I am speaking to by the collar and hiss just one word: “Stiff.”  You have to read this book.  This is quite ironic since the person who finally gave me the book for my birthday tried unsuccessfully for about 6 months to get me to buy it on my own.  Who the hell would want to read a book about dead bodies?  The full title, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadaver,” is an entire book of non-fiction that pays homage (through use of a unique and witty brand of dark humor) to the unlikeliest of heroes:  the human cadaver (see previous SM post).  SM tipster Shailaja informs me that the author, Mary Roach, is following up her brilliant book with the most logical sequel possible.  The New York Times reviews SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife:

Mary Roach’s journey into the occult takes her to as many strange places as she can scare up. Having written a humorous book about corpses (“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”), Ms. Roach has now ventured one step further into the unknown. On this new journey, she is supposedly searching for answers to life’s great questions about the migration of the soul. But readers of “Stiff” know what to expect: the author is looking for quacks.

Those quacks are sitting ducks for Ms. Roach’s fine-tuned sense of the absurd. So Ms. Roach studies ectoplasm, notes that it looks like woven material and learns of a researcher who in 1921 asked of disembodied spirits: “Have you a loom in your world?”

She visits India to look for firsthand evidence that spirits return. (This trip was worth it for the chapter title alone. It is called “You Again: A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation.”) She finds scientists who have identified the weight lost by a dying person and notes that a recent movie title used the metric version of that figure, “21 Grams.” (“Who’s going to go see a movie called ‘Point Seven Five Ounces’?” she asks.) She cites two Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst, and notes that one worked with a Ouija board. She hopes that “the question ‘What is my full name and that of my partner?’ was never posed.” And she digs up the fact that Elizabeth Taylor claimed to have had a near-death experience but was sent back to the land of the living by one of her husbands, Mike Todd, then adds: “Whether this was done for her benefit or his is not clear.”

I can’t wait.  Each chapter in Stiff can be read almost as an independent essay.  I assume she will follow this model for Spook as well.

In “The Ordinances of Manu,” a legal text based on Vedic scripture that dates to A.D. 500, she finds that a rogue Brahman may be forced to reincarnate as “the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit.”

Continue reading →

Vikram Chandra, the acclaimed author of Love and Longing in Bombay, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and co-author with Suketu Mehta of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, has apparently been at the center of a vicious bidding war for publishing rights over his next novel, which according to his website is due to be released in the fall of 2006.

An untitled, 1,225-page epic set in India and billed as a combination of “The Godfather” and a Victorian Gothic novel will be released next year by HarperCollins after a bidding war involving six publishers. “It’s an extraordinarily compelling page turner that also happens to be a major work of literature,” HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham told The Associated Press on Monday. A source close to the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the deal was worth $1 million.

(It could be closer to 1.3 million.)

This novel, according to the AP story has been in the works for the past seven years. The officialy yet-to-be-titled novel centers on organized crime in modern Bombay and takes on “religion, politics, money, corruption, idealism, family, loyalty, and betrayal. All things near and dear to Mumbai.

I know, I know, another book on the Mumbai underworld. But I must admit, I am secretly very excited for this to come out for two reasons: I think there is still a lot to be written about the underworld, and it has been too long since I have read some good South Asian fiction. Continue reading →

Can’t stereotype my tingo: As a huge fan of neologism, the poetry of idiom and general language geekery, it gladdens my heart to hear of a new book collecting words with no precise English equivalents. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning Of Tingo sounds like linguistic jalebi (via Boing Boing):

The Japanese have bakku-shan – a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front. Then there’s a nakkele – a man who licks whatever the food has been served on (from Tulu, India). [Link]

Wayne’s World fans already have ‘scud,’ a bakku-shan equivalent dating back to the first Gulf War. Tulu is, of course, Aishwarya Rai’s native tongue. Mmm, lickable dishy.

You know how poets, writers and Mr. Everything Comes From India sit around at desi parties and smoky cafés bemoaning what they miss about the old country? ‘Beta, how can you explain the meaning of x? It’s not translatable. Only a true x would know about x~ness.’ Here’s to moody linguistic ethnocentrism, this from Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk:

The key, he said, is to understand the concept of huzun. This Turkish word describes a kind of melancholy, he says, not so much a personal state as one shared by an entire society, a mood of resigned despair for the great past… “The thought behind huzun was: People in Europe are happy, but we are doomed…” [Link]

I’ll throw one out: in Punjabi, nakhreli, a finicky woman (from nakhra karna, to turn up your nose at everything). In the highly functional, less ornamented American culture, there’s no exact equivalent. Or in Spanish, the idiom ‘dar calabazas’ — to give pumpkins, meaning to jilt or ignore.

… nakhur, Persian for “camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled”… tsuji-giri is Japanese for “trying out a new sword on a passer-by”… [Link]

I wonder whether nakhur is related to nakhreli. Here are other poignancies:

The French have Saint-Glinglin to mean a date that is put off indefinitely… Madogiwazoku… Japanese window gazers (office workers who sit at desks with little to do)… [Link]

Kummerspeck is a German word which literally means grief bacon: it is the word that describes the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating…

Continue reading →