The book trailer: A necessary evil?

A book trailer of Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure.

Indian writer

Uday Prakash writes primarily in Hindi; he is one of the rare vernacular writers whose novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol will be published in the U.S. by an American publishing house (Yale University Press).

The book is about caste prejudices in modern India seen through the lens of a love story.

Uday Prakash has also answered some questions about writing, and they are of appalling quality.

I love to read interviews of authors and the segment "By the Book" in the NYT Sunday Book Review, is one of my favorite weekly reads. When writers respond to a set of standard questions, they, I believe are at their creative best, because the onus to answer uniquely is on them.

There is a similar segment in the "India Ink" section of NYT, started, I think, in light of the Jaipur Literary Festival. The Indians get less complicated questions.

Look at what the writer Uday Prakash has to say in response to a question about criticism:

"How do you deal with critics?"

No author should deal with critics. Don’t worry about them. They try to stunt your growth.

I haven't come across a more absolutist and irrational position on criticism.

Here is the rest:

Q. What are the occupational hazards of being a writer?

A.This profession doesn’t pay you enough.

Q.What is your everyday writing ritual?

A.I can write when I am alone. I do most of my writing in my village of Sitapur in Madhya Pradesh.

Q.Why should we read your latest book, “The Walls of Delhi”?

A.The overarching theme of the book is corruption and systemic failure. The novel is set in Delhi, and it tells you how difficult it is to make a living in Delhi through sheer hard work and honesty.

Q.Why does the Jaipur Literature Festival matter to you?

A.It is a lottery for me that my work has been shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. It means a lot to me when I see people like Binayak Sen and Mahasweta Devi. This is a liberal platform. It gives dignity to an author.

Ok, so I understand that the interview was conducted in Hindi and translated into English. But even in Hindi, these responses are brusque and silly, and diminish, in my eyes, the stature of the author.

Can lesbians be misogynists?

Can lesbians be misogynists? 

A brief introduction of two lesbian novelists, the British Mary Renault (1905-1983) and The French-Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), by a contemporary writer Agnes Bushell, suggests that this is a distinct possibility.

According to Bushell, Renault and Yourcenar both created idealized homosexual characters, but they were all inevitably male. Strangely, they both seemed to despise their female characters, all of whom, says Bushell, "are either absent or loathsome."

Moreover, they go back in time to ancient Greek history and mythology to model their heroic gay male characters on.

In other words, their creative inspirations remarkably match those of gay male writers of their era, like Arthur Symons. 

It could be that to come out openly as a lesbian would've been risky for both women, and to champion lesbian characters would've got negative press or no press at all. Safer to exalt same sex male love than same sex female romance? 

The titles of some of the novels by Renault and Yourcenar indicate the presence of male personas. Here are two samples:

Women as readers

I don't know much about the symbols/typology that inhere in Renaissance painting on Christian themes.

Yet, the 17th century painting of the Virgin Mary ("The Annunciation and Two Saints" by Simone Martini), distracted from her reading by the entry of the angel Gabriel into her room, tells me something--not about religion, but about women, knowledge and power in the Renaissance--because it is so intelligently put in context by Joan Acocella in her review of The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack.

I had never thought of Mary as a reader, or as a woman who had any role outside of her role as a bearer/vessel of the son of God. But this painting, interpreted differently, grants Mary an intellectual life.

The painting has a remarkable detail: Mary keeps her thumb in her book, as though Gabriel's presence is an intrusion on her private time which is devoted to the reading of a book. She will revert to the book once Gabriel is gone. God's words are secondary compared to the pleasures of a book.

If Mary weren't required to listen to Gabriel's spiel, she wouldn't. But reading is volitional on the part of Mary.

A traditional painting can become provocative, even subversive, if seen through the lens of a detail that isn't accentuated.

I've been wanting to read the French author Michael Houellebecque for some time now.

He is considered to be one of the best writers on global capitalism and its effects.

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides expresses Houellebecque's metier best:

[...] He is acute on the subjects of business and the macro effects of global capitalism. His books are the strangest confections: part Gallic anomie, part sociological analysis, part Harold Robbins. He says a lot of depressing un-American things I get a big kick out of.

Misanthropic laughter and loathing in Seattle

Maria Semple's novel on living in Seattle has been dubbed this summer's "most absorbing" novel.

Where'd You Go Benadette's heroine is Bernadette Fox 

[...] A former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school. 

Bernadette is a misanthrope and views Seattle through a misanthropic lens:

[...] where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman, [...] It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. 

As far as I know, Seattle has been home to a vast array of novels, none of which hold Seattle in bright light.

I had in mind Jonathan Raban's Waxwings, that showed Seattlelites as ruthless and mindless wealth-accumulators during the dot com boom era. 

A large number of zombie and vampire novels, including one of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, have Seattle as background. 

Georgian garden

While reading a review of Orwell's Diaries, I came across the following Orwellian dictum: 

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

(Didn't Sylvia Plath express a similarly foreboding sentiment, about her present?)

The Diaries, reassures the reviewer, reveals Orwell in a different light--as an approachable flesh and blood man, who loved gardening.

TriBeCa Nation

Once upon a time the novel used to be spoken of in the same breath as the nation. It was said that the "rise" of the novel was more or less synchronous with the "rise" of the nation (one has to read Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel to make sense of the affinity between the genre and nation-formation).

Today the typical novel is written within the context of a specific locality. Karl Taro Greenfeld's debut novel Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa, an enclave within the borough of Manhattan.

Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa from being an artist's colony/bohemia in the 1970s to becoming what it is today: one of the most expensive urban zip codes in the U.S.

The following are some self-reflective lines spoken by one of the characters in the novel:

We are a prosperous community [...] Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of the ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better than that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on our iTunes playlists, our children in their secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.

Who knows, next we might just have a novel named Sohonama?

One shade of chrome yellow (color of shit)

When it comes to erotic writing, the more explicit it gets – the more heaving, the more panting – the more I want to laugh. Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree: the goings-on in Ovid, the whipping in Sade, the bare-arsed wrestling in Lawrence, the garter-snapping in Anaïs Nin, the wife-swapping in Updike, the arcs of semen hither and yon. But it’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page. 

So says Andrew O'Hagan in exposing the inferior quality of erotica in E.L. James' blockbuster, Fifty Shades of Grey.

So how does such shitty stuff sell so much? For one, shit does sell, as evidenced by the huge success of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Secondly, shit sells because a majority of shit-buyers do not have the discerning and experienced reader's ability to call a shit a shit. 

Mythologies

Sam Anderson re visits an old legend: Roland Barthe's Mythologies:

Barthe's basic idea was that the operation of mass culture is analogous to mythology. He argued that the cultural work previously done by gods and epic sagas--teaching citizens the values of their society, providing a common language--was now being done by film stars and laundry-detergent commercials. In Mythologies, his project is to demystify these myths.

Why Write?

Forget George Orwell's and Joan Didion's exploration of the personal motivations to write (both writers wrote "Why I Write?")

The current era's novelists draw inspiration from myriad sources, none of which needn't be of an intellectual sort.