In an interview with the Guardian, novelist Anita Desai says that male characters tell more adventurous stories (via Kitabkhana):

As a young woman, Desai says she felt her own life was not big or broad enough to feed her writing. “My whole life was about family and neighbours: it was very difficult for a woman to experience anything else. I was bored, and I needed to find more range, which is why I started to write about men in books like Baumgartner’s Bombay [in which a German Jew flees the war in India] and In Custody [a college lecturer goes in search of a famous poet]. Men led lives of adventure, chance and risk. It just wasn’t possible to write that from an Indian female perspective.“

Desai, who grew up in Delhi, had a German mother and a Bengali father. Her new book, The Zigzag Way, is a tale about the Cornish miners who settled in Mexico before mysteriously fading away. Desai also wrote the novel In Custody, about a slowly degenerating Urdu poet. The book was adapted into a luscious movie, Muhafiz, starring Shabana Azmi (one of the greatest pleasures in film is watching the lovely Ms. Azmi, bedecked and bejeweled, sitar in hand, croon a ghazal full of smoke and longing). Desai’s daughter Kiran recently debuted as a novelist with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.

Nadeem Aslam’s tale of honor killings, Maps for Lost Lovers, has been placed on the long list for the Booker Prize this year (via Kitabkhana). Novelist Kamila Shamsie reviewed the book in the Guardian:

[T]he most extraordinary of the characters is Shamas’s wife, Kaukub… she is the young bride who used to step out of the bath and wake up her husband by twisting her hair into a yard-long rope and letting beads of water fall over him, but then grew into a woman who equates sex with shame and sin… a woman’s gold bracelet is composed of a series of semi-colons; dead tulips lean out of a bin like the necks of drunk swans; a falling icicle is a radiant dagger.

From the Author of Passport Photos and the (IMO) brilliant Bombay London New York, (see my rather long review of it from the Satya Circle)comes Husband of a Fanatic, “fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy,” according to the British Council website. The Council recently sponsored a book reading for Kumar, while he is on a book-tour in India.

More from the Penguin website:

In the summer of 1999, while the Kargil War was being fought, author Amitava Kumar married a Pakistani Muslim. That event led to a process of discovery that made Kumar examine the relationship not only between India and Pakistan but also between Hindus and Muslims inside India. Written with complete honesty and with no claims to journalistic detachment, this book chronicles the complicity that binds the writer to the rioter. Unlike both the fundamentalists and the secularists, Kumar finds—or makes—utterly human those whom he opposes. More than a travelogue which takes the reader to Wagah, Patna, Bhagalpur, Karachi, Kashmir, and even Johannesburg, this book, then, becomes a portrait of the people the author meets in these places, people dealing with the consequences of the politics of faith.

The book, which was released by Penguin India will be published in the States by the New Press in January 2005. Click here to go to the authors homepage.

Luckily, I am headed to South Asia for work in a couple weeks and can pick it up early.

Literary wrangler Sukhdev Sandhu, he of the wondrous New York magazine piece on the desified Spiderman, interviews Hanif Kureishi about his new memoir about his father. In My Ear at His Heart, Kureishi writes of his father’s assimilationism, marrying an Englishwoman and refusing to teach his kids Urdu:

“My dad was always very Anglicised. He felt himself to be a Chekhovian figure, wandering aimlessly and foolishly around a country where other people were very committed to religion or community. He saw England as a new start. He wanted us to be English; he didn’t want any of that in-between stuff. So I didn’t have access to India or Pakistan. If his brothers came round he’d speak Urdu, but he didn’t want my sister or me to learn it. I spent my childhood sitting around listening to people speaking in a language I didn’t understand.”

Hanif’s ascension as an iconic ‘in-betweener’ is a form of rebellion, a deep irony. It’s like the Bradford Muslims who turn fundamentalist because their parents aren’t, or the Iranians who are stridently pro-USA because their government isn’t. And Kureishi’s inability to understand Urdu left him doubly isolated, both from the outside world as a ‘Paki’ and from the Muslim community.

This piece reminds me of how much richer the diasporic milieu is in the UK than in the U.S., we’re such hicks in comparison. On Kureishi’s mentoring of other British Asians, including the writer of Bombay Dreams: Continue reading →

Abhi, one of our bloggers, has a great post on the film Before Sunset and the absinthe of fiction. He just posted it, hasn’t told me about it or asked me to link it, but it’s deliciously, deliriously romantic:

Fiction is a heartless charlatan… You are incapable of a normal relationship because normal is a pale substitution for what already flows in your veins: possibility… Years later you don’t fit anymore. You stand out like a heroin addict on a Friday night, wearing long sleeves so no one will notice.

On losing a deep connection:

Is it possible that you can experience a period of time so perfect, so idealized, that it stains your soul with a color that nothing else can ever match? If so, aren’t you screwed for the rest of your days?… [A]ll the things that I spend the majority of my Time doing, are really motivated by one thing. Finding a color to match the stain.

Continue reading →

Amardeep Singh, prof at Lehigh University, finds an invisible man in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. I normally wouldn’t point at a piece referencing Gayatri Spivak and other jargon-filled lit academics, but this was so worthy.

For Sikh men of course, the misnaming is much more aggressive: “Osama” and “Bin Laden” are the most common mis-names one hears. One South Philly man (a caucasian), in a moment of inspired racist efficiency, recently referred to me simply as “Bin,” thus saving himself the expenditure of five syllables he no doubt did not have to spare…

“Jhumpa” is her pet name rather than her good name… Growing up in America, however, she has chosen it as her official, public name… Asserting the name “Jhumpa” is at once a misnaming and a refusal to be misnamed…

And he dissects the lack of a handle for the desi community in the U.S., while those in the UK have long since usurped the term Asian.

…desi may work, but it remains a name like a Punjabi or Bengali pet-name, a name used around the house rather than recognized by a broader public. In this case, there is a chance that the term will reach a critical mass, but it is not yet broadly available. I find it hard to imagine the word rolling off the tongue of someone like Charlie Rose…

“India” (like Calcutta and Delhi) is itself is an Anglicization of “al-Hind,” the Persian name for the area around the Indus River… What was India before it was misnamed? The confusion of the community-without-a-name is merely the latest extension of a permanent historical crisis in naming.

Let your chai tea latte runneth over.

______ has graying temples with a thin patch at the back, rimless eye-glasses and a satisfied masculine air. He smells faintly of cigarette smoke and late nights in the lab.

And then, like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, she completes the story.

But he orders gnocchi anyway, saying in his slightly raspy from smoking too many cigarettes voice, “This could be dangerous.”