[In Parenthesis]

Happiness and Other Disorders shortlisted for Danuta Gleed

2009-05-28T18:07:00.005-05:00

Ahmad Saidullah was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Happiness and Other Disorders, his first short story collection, along with Rebecca Rosenblum, Pasha Malla, Ian Colford, and Betsy Trumpener. Pasha Malla won the Gleed. Ian and Rebecca were the runners up. The winners announced in Calgary at the Writers Union AGM on May 23, 2009.

Congratulations, Pasha, Ian and Rebecca.

Some notices about the shortlist:

Google
Bibioasis
CBC
Metro
Rebecca Rosenblum blog
Lethbridge Herald
Canada East
The Record
All Voices
The Star
MSN
Guelph Mercury
Yahoo
http://theculturemill.blogspot.com/2009/05/butcher-of-penetang-shortlisted.html

Literary animus in the New Russia

2008-09-07T08:36:00.017-05:00

Last night, we were startled to come across a reference in a book of short stories to another Russian writer we had just read.

Viktor Erofeyev, enfant terrible of the new Russian wave which includes Andreï Makine and Viktor Pelevin, mentions a Vladimir Sorokin in his story titled The Shit-Sucker in his collection Life with an Idiot:

Having been demobilised four years ago, Vladimir Sorokin, member of the Young Communist League, had returned to his native village, not too proud to get his hands dirty in shitty work on the farm. Now the whole region was trying to emulate this cattle breeder.

Hardly a coincidence as Sorokin the novelist is well known not just in his country. Anyway, it makes us wonder about the state of libel laws in the New Russia. Are the grapes sour?

It oughtn't to surprise us, though, as Erofyev rebelled against his privileged upbringing among the Stalinist elite. Erofeyev is the son of one of Stalin's translators. His father became a key figure in that regime.

Anyway, the set piece of Erofeyev's Life with an Idiot is not The Shit-Sucker but The Parakeet which we urge you to read.

Here are Erofeyev and Sorokin side by side, a tableau that we suspect doesn't happen often in life. In the spirit of mischief, we have placed Sorokin on the right and Erofeyev on the left.

Netherland: A conversation with Joseph O'Neill

2008-09-07T08:28:00.004-05:00

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is an account of an immigrant in the cricketing fraternity of New York. As a quondam cricket fan and writer, we were interested in reading this piece in The Guardian. O'Neill is rumoured to be a long shot for the Booker, for those of you who follow literary punting.

The Assassin's Song: A review

2008-09-07T08:24:00.002-05:00

Giles Foden, author of books on Africa, reviews Moyez Vassanji's The Assassin's Song in the Guardian.

Geist excerpts Happiness

2008-09-06T15:04:00.004-05:00

Geist magazine published an excerpt from Happiness in Curiosa.

Happiness has a Face(book)

2008-09-06T09:16:00.006-05:00

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories has its own Facebook group.

You can read excerpts from several reviews of Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories published in Canada and India, as well as news and announcements.

Join the Happiness and Other Disorders group to read the latest announcements and reviews.

There's also the Happiness blogspot.

Reviews of How Fiction Works by James Wood

2008-09-06T09:08:00.002-05:00

Two recent reviews of James Wood's How Fiction Works:

Catherine Bush's Globe review and Morgan Meis' The Smart Set review from Drexel.

The Kenyon Review on adverbs

2008-09-06T09:01:00.004-05:00

A writer friend is editing the adverbs out of the second edition of her book. We sent her this Kenyon Review feuilleton recently.

This was an act of literary exchange. She reads Sentences and was kind enough to recommend it to us.

Atlantic Canadian Fiction

2008-09-06T08:57:00.002-05:00

Stephen Clare and Trevor Adams are producing a book for Nimbus Publishing in Halifax to be released next year titled "Spindrift; The 100 Greatest Atlantic Canadian Books Ever Written."

By way of methodology, they are polling over 1,000 writers, readers and literary people of all sorts across the country to submit their "Top 10" list of fiction/non-fiction works from the East Coast.

So please, share your favourites with them. Feel free to include comments on the books you choose and why they're important to you. Don't limit yourself to fiction, either - feel free to include biographies, historical works, travelogues, and the like.

The only criterion is that the author(s) be from Atlantic Canada, and/or lived in the region for a significant period during their writing careers. And if you are having a hard time coming up with 10 titles, send them your top 5, or even top 3.

Please send your choices along to bookpoll@gmail.com

The deadline for submission is September 30, 2008.

For regularly updated information, visit the website: freewebs.com/bookpoll

Least likely literary places

2008-09-06T08:53:00.002-05:00

The Guardian on places unlikely to have inspired writers.

Click here for the story and comments.

I wonder about other countries and their literary maps. Any ideas?

Rushdie reviewed in The Nation

2008-09-06T08:48:00.002-05:00

Back after a while....

William Deresiewicz reviews The Enchantress of Florence. Click here for the review

The Writer as Satchmo

2008-01-02T19:50:00.003-06:00

Time for writers to blow a few of their own trumpets even if they don’t bring the walls of Jericho down.Advance praise for the book:

"Brimming with unexpected humour and poignancy, and rich in sub-text, Saidullah’s stories never disappear. They haunt you!”
—Deepa Mehta, director of the Academy Award nominated film Water.

“Ahmad Saidullah is a storyteller with an engaging and original voice and a surfeit of talent.”
—Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India and Water.

“These remarkable stories are propelled by a quiet but purposeful insight. They twist and turn in delightful ways. Where you would expect anger, there is compassion; where you might anticipate grimness, there is humour. An accomplished first collection.”
—Rabindranath Maharaj, author of A Perfect Pledge

"Obsession and desperate attempts at escape propel these interconnected lives. This is a startling and memorable debut.”
—Catherine Bush, author of Claire’s Head and The Rules of Engagement

Quill and Quire, Canada’s leading publishing trade journal, has given Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories a starred feature review. Heather Birrell loved the stories. Some excerpts from the review.

"The author’s stunning prose and subtle sense of the symbolic allow the tales to transcend their conventions. . . Saidullah’s bouts of description are either grounded in sensory detail — “the tinkle from the local shaka, the lowing of cows being milked, the rococo of a distant, laggard cock, and the occasional roar of a lorry rushing past” — or float away on a raft of dreamlike imagery. Either way, the writing is mesmerizing and confident. . . Like his weaver, the author of Happiness and Other Disorders possesses an entirely singular form of ominous and lovely second sight; he also has the literary chops to give it voice. Saidullah is a tale-spinner of the first order, and this collection is both a mystery and a treasure."

Other favourable mentions include Halifax News which names it among his 10 picks and South Asian Outlook. DemiRep writing on the blog Kissing in the Grass picks Happiness as one of five books, after Yann Martel, Garcia Marquez, Margaret Macmillan  and Stacey May Fowles while Lindsey Keilty of The Daily News picks the book as “hot.” Here’s what was said:

HOT: Diversity

The face of Canadian literature is changing, as many first and second generation immigrant authors compare and contrast their lives before and after coming to this country, writes Clare.

Hamida Ghafour, Ameen Merchant, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Leilah Nadir, Ahmad Saidullah and Darcy Tamayose are a few of the names now emerging as the new voice of Canada.

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories

2006-07-28T05:07:00.001-05:00

Happiness and Other Disorders: Short Stories, our book of short stories was published by Key Porter Books on Saturday 5 January 2008.

The book can be ordered from Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca.

This is from the book jacket:

Set in India, Burma, England, the Czech Republic, Greenland, the US, and Canada, from World War II to the present, Happiness and Other Disorders offers subtle and vivid portraits of characters and societies torn apart by violence and oppression.

Ahmad Saidullah displays a fine command over a wide and complex range of emotional effects, narrative styles, genres, and devices, all woven together in this debut collection.

In “Vatan and the Cow”, an old man, whose son has married out of his religion, is forced to go on a pilgrimage to a holy place in the foothills of the Himalayas, only to return home empty-handed and broken in spirit.

In “Flight into Egypt”, which was a finalist in the Drunken Boat Pan Literary Awards, an unnamed man flees on a train bound for Bombay after assassinating a politician during a religious riot in western India.

“Happiness and Other Disorders” is a comic account of the editor's back problems written in a unique run-on style. And “The Guest” is the haunting story of an Indian woman whose musical madness reveals a peculiarly Scottish slant.

Ahmad Saidullah wins CBC Literary Award

2006-05-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

Ahmad Saidullah's short story Happiness And Other Disorders won second prize in the 2005 CBC Literary Awards held at La Grande Bibliotheque in Montreal, Canada on 26 February 2006. 3,500 entries in all English and French categories were sent in by Canadians from all over the world. The English fiction jurors were Random House Canada publisher Anne Collins and award-winning novelists Catherine Bush and Eden Robinson.

Prizes were awarded on the author's use of language, originality of subject and writing style. Novelist Bill Richardson and Montreal journalist Chantal Jolie were the MCs at the event. The jury called Happiness And Other Disorders "a lively monologue that takes us on a journey across continents and makes the collision between cultures bizarrely literal, doing so with idiosyncrasy, humour and empathetic breadth." CBC presenter Bill Richardson noted that Happiness And Other Disorders was unique among the 3,500 entries received in being written in one sentence which was 7-pages long.

Ahmad is the third Canadian South Asian writer after Michael Ondaatje and Shauna Singh Baldwin to be recognized by Canada's top literary short story prize and the first since the awards were redesigned in 2001. Past winners have also included Carol Shields, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Robert Munsch, Susan Musgrave, Leon Rooke, Michel Tremblay, and Monique Proulx. For writeups on the current winners, click here.

Happiness and other disorders can be read in the June 2006 edition of enRoute, Air Canada's flight magazine, and will reach a million readers. The CBC Literary Awards were broadcast in April 2006 and the story was read by Cedric De Souza on Between the Covers on CBC Radio Canada's national airwaves on 23 May 2006.

Canada Council for the Arts. Air Canada, and enRoute were the principal partners for the awards.

Bookselling on the margins

2006-05-14T20:50:00.000-05:00

What does it take to sell books? What are the risks to a street hawker hustling a sale at busy traffic lights in Delhi? Click here for visuals on a life on the margins.

Alison Pick wins CBC Literary Award for Poetry

2006-05-14T20:44:00.000-05:00

Alison Pick, a rising literary star, won the top CBC Literary Award for poetry. Alison is the author of the novel The Sweet Edge, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2005. The title section of her poetry collection, Question & Answer, won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising writer under 35, and the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry. The book itself was short-listed for both the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada, and for a Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. Alison grew up in Kitchener, and spent summers in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Her first manuscript was written while living in Saskatchewan at a Benedictine monastery, then at a cattle ranch, and then in Saskatoon. She now divides her time between Ontario and St. John's, Newfoundland. Her winning poems, The Mind’s Eye, appear in EnRoute.

Paulette Dubé, Second Poetry Prize, CBC Literary Award

2006-05-14T20:38:00.000-05:00

Because her parents made it to a hospital on time, Paulette Dubé was born in Westlock, Alberta. Growing up in the French village of Legal, she watched her third sister being born on the kitchen table and was suddenly sentient to miracles. She relies heavily on the good fortune of living in Jasper National Park these days for her inspiration.

Talon, her first novel, made the short lists for the 1999 Canadian Literary Awards, the Alberta Writers' Guild Best Novel Award (2003) and the Starburst Award (2003). Her poetry garnered a number of rewards including the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry Award (1994), the CBC Alberta Anthology (1998) and now the CBC Literary Awards (2005). Read First Mountain in enRoute later this year.

Erin Soros wins the Bob Weaver Prize for Fiction (CBC Literary Award)

2006-05-14T20:35:00.000-05:00

Erin Soros’ The Chorus won the 2005 Bob Weaver Prize, the top CBC Literary Award for short fiction. Soros was born and raised in Vancouver where she worked as a rape crisis counselor and as a coordinator of literacy programs for marginalized youth. She completed a MA in English at UBC and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. In 2005, Erin was the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her awards include a Fulbright Fellowship and the Governor General's Gold Medal. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in Canadian, American and Australian journals. A recent publication was chosen as a "Notable Essay" in The Best American Essays 2005. Erin is at work on her first novel. Read The Chorus.

CBC prizewinner Jane Hamilton’s Drafts 1-11 (Not Including 10)

2006-05-14T20:31:00.001-05:00

Jane Silcott, whose essay won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards, had moved to the west coast 30 years ago from Toronto to ski and climb and live in a milk truck in the mountains. Now she lives in a house with her husband and two children, using the skills from her past life to scale the mountains of household chores on the way to her attic writing office. Jane has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of literary magazines. She recently completed a novel and is working on a series of prose poems. Jane Silcott spent most of her life as Jane Hamilton but recently adopted her grandmother's name as a pseudonym to prevent confusion with not just one, but two other writers, with her birth name. Read her charmingly personal Drafts 1-11 (Not Including 10).

La Regle du Jeu: A new Criterion for excellence

2006-05-14T20:31:00.000-05:00

Between Munich and World War II, fresh from his successes with La Bete Humaine and Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir set out to paint "a precise portrait of the bourgeoisie" in France (which to the end of his life he thought of as "rotten"). To this corrosive satire, he applied a light touch, the gossamer trappings of a Musset play or a Marivaux comedy. Indeed, La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) opens with a quotation from Beaumarchais. He set it fittingly for the most part with its eighteenth-century sensibility of upstairs-downstairs intrigues, romantic preoccupations, its casual anti-semitism and conformist mores in Le Château de La Ferté Saint-Aubin outside Paris in 1939. As a film-making experiment from this most democratic, one may say socialist, of film directors, Renoir often abandoned his shooting script in favour of improvisation.

The film's reception has passed into history. Although he called it a magnificent failure, Renoir was crushed by the hostility shown by critics and viewers when La Regle opened in an elegant part of Paris. He recalled a man at the screening setting fire to a newspaper hoping to burn the theatre down. Renoir summoned his "editor" Marguerite Huguet to the viewings so she could cut scenes where the audiences booed the loudest. Predictably, they objected to what they saw as caricatures of the haute bourgeoisie; to Nora Gregor's age and nationality; to Dalio’s aristocratic character’s Jewish ancestry; to Renoir's own character Octave; to the slaughter at the hunting scenes which presaged war; to the restless camera work; to voices appearing on the soundtrack before the actors came into view; to his use of the long shot through interiors to suggest depth of field where concurrent actions were taking place; to the mixture of styles; and to the ensemble, decentred approach that he had taken in making La Regle. Despite the cuts from a 94-minute film to a 80-minute distribution version, the film closed at the Coliseum in Paris after three weeks. It lasted a few months at another Parisian theatre. With the onset of war, the French government banned the film altogether on grounds that it was demoralizing. It certainly demoralized Renoir who declared that he would give up making films or leave France. After a brief stint in Italy he left France to avoid collaborating with the Vichy regime and the Germans and went to Hollywood. His film company NEF went bankrupt. La Regle did not play in France again until 1962. It is now hailed as a masterpiece and the movie that anticipated the French New Wave.

That there is a revival now is entirely due to Jean Gaborit, a film enthusiast, who was stung by Truffaut's review of his ciné club's version of La Regle and set out to find the negative and the ten prints in France and north Africa. He had heard that the negative had been burned at the GM Labs in Boulogne during the Allied bombing. However, he discovered 224 reels with negatives, dupes and different versions of La Regle there. He and Jacques Durand, a film technician, slowly worked through all the versions to assemble 20 minutes of unseen footage. They decided to consult Renoir so the footage could be added in the right places. One scene where Octave discusses the sexual habits of maids is missing but otherwise the film is complete. When this restored 106-minute version was screened for the first time before Renoir, the great man had tears in his eyes.

The Criterion Collection has issued this version in a two-disc set. And what a fine job it has done. The transfer from what might be a 35-mm fine-grain negative is crisp and the contrast between light and dark that marks the film is sharper and nuanced. There are minor items to cavil about: the scenes comparison could have used commentary but that is trivial. Watching these DVDs was like reading an authoritative critical edition of a great writer. If we ever move to e-books, Criterion's would be the model to bring to the market.

Ars longa, vita brevis

2006-05-14T20:30:00.000-05:00

Heaps lie on the kitchen and bedside tables to be read or re-read:

Nuruddin Farah, Maurice Blanchot, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Georges Perec, Alison Pick, Vila-Matas, Arundhati Roy, Javier Marías, Amartya Sen, Juan Goytisolo, Amitav Ghosh, Jean Baudrillard, Macherey, Azzopardi, Jean Giono, Futehally, Amitava Kumar, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Patrick O'Brian, Vassanji, Schlink, Anar Ali, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Álvaro Mutis, Tariq Ali, Foer, Redhill, Eden Robinson, Hariharan, Fanon, Ismat Chugtai, Hogan, Dai Sijie, Pavese, Akira Yoshimura, Zulfikar Ghose, Catherine Bush, Marqusee, Nabokov, Premchand, Reginald Reynolds, Siddharth Deb, Sciascia, Blanchette-Dubé, Themerson, Pizishkzād, Gramsci, Mo Yan, Arnold Hauser, Perutz, Vainik, Hanan al-Shaykh, Kim Echlin, Hardt, Negri, Yiyun Li, Stifter, Makine, Fedin, Sabina Murray, Hrabal, MacLaverty, Pierre Bourdieu, Mahasweta Devi, Thomas King, Silcott, Hašek, the new Rushdie and Vikram Chandra... Gawd.

Edicts: Fight off sleep as long as you can. Postpone work on the novel by writing blog entries that nobody reads.

Mottoes: the words of Longinus: Art is long, life is short. Work, alas, overflows the space you give it. If there was only a way to suspend time’s passage but not activity...

Winning entries on CBC radio

2006-05-14T20:29:00.000-05:00

2005 CBC Literary Awards' prize-winning entries were read on Between The Covers. The English-language categories winners were broadcast on

Mon May 22 — 1st prize short story “The Chorus” by Erin Soros
Tues May 23 — 2nd prize short story “Happiness And Other Disorders” by Ahmad Saidullah
Wed May 24 — 1st prize creative non-fiction “I, Witness” by Kim Echlin
Thurs. May 25 — 2nd prize creative non-fiction “Drafts 1-11 (Not Including 10)” by Jane Silcott
Fri May 26 — 1st prize poetry “The Mind’s Eye” by Alison Pick; 2nd prize poetry “First Mountain” by Paulette Dubé

Societe Radio-Canada and CBC Radio One are co-broadcasters of the CBC Literary Awards. The Canada Council for the Arts provided the prize money and EnRoute magazine was a publishing partner for the Awards. Between the Covers can be heard online at CBC. The program is produced by Heather Brown and Dagmar Kaffanke-Nunn.

Books in translation

2006-05-14T20:28:00.001-05:00

For those disenchanted with the quality and focus of much of recent Indoanglian lit, Penguin India's announcement in April 2005 seemed to promise a change. However, PI's programme to publish books in different Indian languages does not boost vernacular Indian writing. Rather, it introduces well-known fictionistas writing in English to Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam readers. We've learned since that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (godawful title) has sold more than a million copies in Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi and that, wonders of wonders, J.K. Rowling even made an appearance in Delhi. Paulo Coelho's Zahir, which incidentally is banned in Iran despite hot sales there, is a bestseller in Malayalam. All this in a "soft" country where a sale of 1,000 copies of a book in English is considered good and where 5,000 copies make a best seller. (An exception is P.G. Wodehouse who still sells more 70,000 copies.) Sheela Reddy notes that with the increased purchasing power of Indians translated self-help and management books have become the biggest sellers. I hope that this one-way flow of globalization will not continue to mean a dumbing down. Can we see some better titles please? On a related note, Booker has announced a £15,000 prize for a work translated into English.

Birthdays

2006-05-14T20:28:00.000-05:00

So from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and from hour to hour we rot and rot…

Of vampires and baitals

2006-05-14T20:27:00.000-05:00

Deathless shape shifters have come in many forms and with varying habits, powers, and vulnerabilities such as eisoptrophobia (fear of mirrors) and alliumphobia (fear of garlic). Bloody-eyed creatures with coloured hair were written about in China and vampires and vixens are often associated with guileful women in Japan (no doubt some misogyny there). Shape shifters feature in Old Norse Þáttr and sagas, in the Old Testament, and in African stories. The ancient Greeks had their own composite Lamia, the Babylonians their Ekimmu, Romans their Stryx, and there was even a myth with a horrific beast from Penang. One Indian scholar believes that all vampire stories sprang from the worship of Kali, the goddess of creation and destruction, often depicted adorned with skulls, intestines or severed arms, thousands of years back in the valley of Kashmir. Regardless of their origins, one wonders how many of these colourful tales "travellers" such as Mandeville borrowed from this kind of lore; some certainly found their way into Othello's travel narrative and into European literature!

The oldest revenant myths seem to have originated in Asia and may have been carried from Asia (India, China, Tibet, Japan) by traders and travellers to Europe where they were gradually assimilated into pagan (pre-christian) traditions with some local variations. In some eastern European versions, the Roma peoples who went from India and spread through Europe by 1000 AD were often associated with vampire myths. Bram Stoker's Dracula is guarded by Szgany Romas which may have reflected their own beliefs of a dead soul passing into a deathless world.

Sir Richard F. Burton translated eleven of Bhavabhuti's "Baital Pacchisi" (Twenty Five Tales of Baital) from Sanskrit as "Vikram and the Vampire" in 1870. There may have been a fuller version. A suspicious mind may infer Isabel Burton's hand in bowdlerising the other tales from her comments in the 1893 preface to the memorial edition later re-issued by Dover (1969). In his introduction, Burton describes the influence of Indian vampire and other tales on the likes of Apuleius, Boccaccio and the author(s) of the Arabic 1000 Nights and 1 Night (which Burton also Englished) disseminated by traders and travellers of many nationalities passing through the Greek trading port of Miletus (now Turkey).

So what exactly is a baital? Burton's text has the demon, a ropy, muscular, all-brown figure condemned by a necromancer to hang upside down from the branch of a siras (mimosa) tree like a flying fox (a large bat) in the smashana ("cremation ground"). In her preface to Vikram, Isabel Burton describes the baital (demon or evil spirit) as a large bat vampire but in C.H. Tawney's translation of Vikram aur Vetala, the demon is a plain "ghost," as it is in Bannerjee's English version. Vikram's "vampire" is a playful, elusive figure but the word "baital" is the modern form of the Sanskrit "vetala," a demon that haunts burial grounds and revives corpses but the ghoulish practice of drinking blood that’s associated with vampires is not always specified. (However, other myths also tell of female demons who feasted on the blood of elephants.) "Vetala siddhi," said to be a tantric practice, refers to a form of "sorcery" for obtaining power over the living by "black magic, incantations, and ceremonies performed over a dead human body, during which process the corpse is desecrated." The incantatory properties of these tales are said by some to be linked to their use during the ashwamedha ceremony (horse sacrifice).

It's quite ironic that the concept of blood-drinking bats in older cultures may antedate the scientific discovery of actual vampire bats. In any case, by Burton's time, there was also a certain taste for the macabre that was emerging in England which linked vampires and bats. It may have had its origins in a wave of attack of vampire bats on eastern European peasants in the 1700s which is when the Magyar word "vampir" (blood-sucking bat) entered the English language (1732). The first modern equation of the blood-drinking undead with vampire bats in an English story is, we believe, James Malcolm Rhymer's "Varney, The Vampyre, or the Feast of Blood" (1845). It may have helped Burton's strengthen his identification of baitals with vampire bats. Varney certainly influenced Stoker who also owed debts to Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" and J. Polidori's "The Vampyre," similar texts that were published earlier. A “vampire” in Burton's time was common usage for a blood-drinking fiend able to transform his or her human form into a chiropteric shape. Who knows if the similarities in sound between the English "bat" and Sanskrit "baital" further helped Burton's associate baitals with vampire bats although, according to Skeat, the English word "bat" has obscure Scandinavian origins.

Tom Holland's Slave of My Thirst (1997) links the Indian vampire legend with the London Whitechapel murders. We don't know about the Vikram TV show from the 1980s having left India before that and we wouldn't be surprised if there is a bollywood version too. However, we suspect the connection between vampires and hallowe'en dates to the Lon Chaney Sr. days of hollywood horrors. Chambers’ Books of Days (1865) says hallowe’en is “the night set apart for a universal walking abroad of spirits" but does not mention vampires specifically. In his book on death traditions, David J. Skal, the American scholar of the gothic, notes a Hallowe’en postcard from 1909 with a bat as the centrepiece but that's hardly conclusive. Incidentally, Lee Siegel, a professor at the University of Hawaii (and a magician!) and an authority on the forms of the Indian macabre, is worth reading.

South Asian Chinese voices

2006-05-14T20:26:00.001-05:00

With India and China poised to become world superpowers, it’s time to reflect on their shared histories and tensions. Huan-Tsang, or Xuan-Zang, (aka Yuan Chang) came to central India ca. 645 CE after his travels through central Asia. He studied Sanskrit and collected Buddhist scriptures and later introduced Buddhism to China. Since then, thousands of Hakka Chinese families have lived in India. Generations grew up in India without first-hand knowledge of China. The 1962 Indo-China war changed all that. Many left India for Australia, UK, USA and Canada after the quite horrific restrictions placed on their rights but we have been unable to find any scholarly or literary accounts in English of their experiences. All we recall is Altaf Fatima's The One Who Did Not Ask published a few years ago. Her character is a Chinese pedlar in pre-partition India but, as the title indicates, he barely speaks. Is there anyone who can break this silence? It's important to learn about our common heritage while politicians bicker over glaciers and nuclear accords.

CBC Literary Awardwinner Kim Echlin's Cambodia

2006-05-14T20:26:00.000-05:00

Kim Echlin has been a documentary-maker and editor. She completed her PhD on the translation of Ojibway trickster stories. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa and Cambodia. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her books include Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, and Inanna. She is also the winner of this year's CBC Literary Awards for creative non-fiction for I, Witness, her testimony to the killing fields in Cambodia in year zero.

Paul Ricoeur on testimony

2006-05-14T20:25:00.000-05:00

“Testimony signifies something other than a simple narrative of things seen. Testimony is that on which we rely to think…to estimate…in short, to judge. Testimony wants to justify and prove the good basis of an assertion which, beyond the fact, claims to attain its meaning…The eyewitness character of testimony never suffices to constitute its meaning. It is necessary that there be not only a statement but an account of a fact serving to prove an opinion or truth.”

This Blinding Absence of Light

2006-05-14T20:24:00.000-05:00

Another testament to that most murderous of centuries. Prix Goncourt and Prix Maghreb winner Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light uncovers an infamous event in history. Blindness, a book based in prisoners' testimony, is a harrowing account of courage told in simple prose that has been translated by Linda Coverdale. The book won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004 and is on the shortlist for other major prizes.

A man lives in darkness. Salim, a junior officer, is swept up in an army plot to assassinate King Hassan II of Morocco in 1971. When the coup fails, some of the superior officers who have misled the soldiers into taking part change sides and arrest them. Upon the king's orders, the conspirators are taken to Kenitra prison and later driven blindfolded to the desert to Tazmamart and dumped into darkness. Salim and the others in Cell Block B are put in six-by-three-ft underground cells where light does not enter and where they cannot stand upright. It feels like being buried alive. They survive on a diet of water, bread and a revolting starch mixture.

One day, Salim is seized by prison guards. They thrust him into a bodybag and take him outside. He hears them debating whether he should be buried alive or allowed to dig his own grave. When they can’t agree, they return him to the cell on the verge of madness. To keep his sanity, he talks to the others. Salim and the inmates help each other by counting the hours and announcing the days to keep track of time and by praying. He tries to forget his former life (remembering is a form of dying, he thinks) and his father, a court jester at the palace, who has disowned him. Entire pages from Pere Goriot float up to his consciousness which he narrates to the inmates as he does The Little Prince and Baudelaire. He tells them the plot of The Streetcar Named Desire with Brando. He dreams of rewriting Camus' L'Etranger where Raymond, Meursault and their companions will be resting and playing the flute and will be shot for no reason by an Arab who will still be nameless but he gives up.

The prisoners look forward to an inmate's death as this is the only time they are allowed out into the light but even this outing is stopped by the authorities. Death is welcomed. It allows prisoners to snatch a dead man's clothes to cover themselves against the freezing cold. They sleep upright during the day but have to keep moving at night to avoid freezing to death. Many die from the cold, from constipation, from starvation, from eating bread poisoned with roach eggs, and one from being stung and eaten alive by scorpions that an NCO has dumped in their cells.

By the time word reaches Amnesty International, Salim has spent eighteen years in this hell hole. In his cell block, only three out of the original twenty-two prisoners have survived through sheer acts of will. Some of the living cadavers have shrunk by a foot in height. Finally, Salim is taken away from the concentration camp, examined by doctors and fattened up before his release. His eyes are mad, his teeth have dropped out, his limbs are atrophied. He cannot bear to look at his own reflection or sleep on a mattress. This is what freedom means to the tortured.

Plethoric writing

2006-05-14T20:22:00.001-05:00

A provocation: Deep down, we feel Rushdie is, at times, a sloppy plethoric writer who needs a strong editor. We wonder if he can find one for his novels in his publishing circle with the necessary linguistic and cultural competencies. An exception to this observation which may prove the rule is Sonny Mehta's line-by-line editing of The Jaguar's Smile to the point which when we read it first led us to think ah, Rushdie is a much better non-fiction writer than a novelist (the obverse of Naipaul) where his best has been derivative (Grass and Desani being the obvious exemplars and amalgams of the central conceits of his most famous novel with its paan shop banter) but we should quit as we can see some hackles rising. The question remains.

Mapping ignorance

2006-05-14T20:22:00.000-05:00

It's heinous when the foreign policy of a country such as the US is propped up by shamateurs prosing "expertly" on "Middle Eastern" culture but it's just as bad when its soi-disant literateurs reflect the same arrogance and ignorance. They ought to know better.

In a recent edition of Bookslut, reviewer Julia Ramey chose to group The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Snow by Orhan Pamuk, Mothsmoke by Mohsin Hamid and West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby as "Middle Eastern" books. Although Halaby makes the cut geopolitically and culturally, we fail to see how Hosseini, Pamuk or Hamid can be accommodated in the "Middle East." Even ignoring the eurocentricism of "the Middle East" as a term for the moment, we should point out that Hosseini is from Afghanistan and may self-identify as central or south Asian although he lives in the US. Pamuk is in Turkey and as such qualifies for a European or west Asian label if one must be found and Hamid from Pakistan would be considered south Asian.

If Ms. Ramey was truly searching for "Middle Eastern" writing, why couldn't she have started with Fuad al-Takarli (Iraq), Emile Habiby, Amin Maalouf, Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon), Abdelrahman Munif (Saudi Arabia/Jordan), Ahdaf Soueif, Naguib Mahfouz, Nawal al Saadawi (Egypt), Mohammed Darwish (Palestine), Amoz Oz (Israel), Sadegh Hedayet and Ismail Fassih (Iran), to name just a few modern luminaries from countries as different from each other as Sweden is from the US? We suspect though from the focus of her generalizations that Ms. Ramey is not really talking about Middle Eastern novelists as much as she is about Muslim writers. In any case, she should know that most Muslims are not Arabs and do not live in the Middle East (the figure may be as high as 80%) but that Jews and Christians, whom she excludes, do.

Given all this, the book that we'd recommend most to her, aside from an atlas, would be Edward Said's Orientalism. Most of her clichés, analyses, charlatanry and ignorance could have been preempted there.

Millions advance backwards

2006-05-14T20:20:00.001-05:00

We just wonder sometimes if, a little like the Red Queen, we are being asked to swallow six impossible things before breakfast. Publishers claim that they're losing money but then we hear of an advance of US$8.5 million for Alan Greenspan's life, £5 million for 20-year-old footballer Wayne Rooney's memoirs, a million dollars for Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a thousand-page opus. Ditto for the Clintons, Vikram Seth, and somewhat less to desi chick-lit (another godawful tag) newcomers Lavanya Sankaran and Kaavya Viswanathan (cancelled after her plagiarism).

So what is the average advance for a novelist? John Scalzi has his own rating scale ranging from $0 to $100,000 and above. Justine Larbalestier's survey of first-time novel advances is depressing:

1962: $1,000
1965: $3,000
1970: $10,000
1976: $700
1982: $7,500
1984: $7,500
1985: $2,500, $8,000
1989: $3,000
1990: $15,000
1995: $4,000
1996: $4,000
1997: $7,500
1999: $2,500
2002: $6,500
2003: $13,500
2004: $350, $10,000

Average advance: $5,920

Assuming a slump with $5,000 as the average advance for a budding writer in 2006, the million-dollar payola to Chandra means that as many as 200 new writers won't get book contracts as a result. Larbalestier concludes that "there's not a whole lot to be made writing novels. Find another way to make dosh. Personally I'd recommend plumbing."

The rationale for the big handouts? Apparently, in these days of Oprah and reality and TV, nonfiction sells. It makes so much money, sometimes four times the huge advances that they hand out, that publishers can afford to publish more fiction. Or so they say. We know that literary agents and houses are dropping their fiction lists altogether. Besides, nonfiction has taken a bad rap with the Frey, Nasdijj, and Leroy incidents (never mind the US papers' lies about the cause for war in Iraq) so what is its future?

Mr. and Ms. Malaprop, we presume

2006-05-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

We are not talking about typos as in an English translation of Kathasaritasagar ("my lather is very ill") or about wholesale hilarity on the order of Conversational Bashghali ("thy bride is a girl" "what o'clock is it?") that Eric Newby mentions in his book on trekking in the Hindu Kush. Desi readers enjoy a malicious chuckle whenever they come across an obviously wrong translation or transliteration of a phrase from a south Asian language. We know we do. Travel guidebooks are a good source of amusement for us. One shoestring guide had an Hindi equivalent for "what is the way to?" which really meant "what is the best way to get lost?" No doubt the wag who did that had as much schadenfreude imagining travellers faced by grinning desis as we do, a little sadistically we admit, when we come across gaffes in E.M. Forster or H.R.F. Keating or the ones perpetrated by the British Gazetteer. The reach of south Asian fiction is global. So who has the capacity to edit this fiction which has grown beyond its borders? How many Sonny Mehtas are there in the global publishing field who can do line edits of these texts if needed? We'll return to this in a post on Rushdie but the question of mistakes in art beckons.

Awards for the poor life

2006-05-14T20:19:00.000-05:00

Perhaps fittingly for someone who trades in suffering, a writer’s lot has never been a happy one. Baudelaire’s life was an essay in privations, Joyce lived as a beggar, and Dostoevsky died a pauper. Unless we have confused him with a period painting by a German artist, Oliver Goldsmith wrote in bed thrusting his arm through the hole he had cut in the bedsheet. Of course, then as now there were some early-days Dan Browns and Rowlings who lived well on favours, subscriptions and sales but they were a precious few.

Even in today’s laissez-faire age, it’s hard to countenance an industry that complains about hard times while it skims off 95% of the revenues from a writer’s intellectual labour. A writer often lives on sufferance, on meagre livings that can be gleaned from hackwork, a teaching post or two, by another career or on scraps of publicity. There are some consolations, namely literary awards. One surefire way for a newish writer to gain recognition is by serving on an awards jury.

Although James F. English in his book on the economy of prestige mentions that there are 26,000 arts and science contests with over a hundred prizes worth over $100,000, most literary prizes usually do not pay a lot. Exceptions are, of course, the Nobel and the Poetry Foundation with a chest of $100 million from Eli Lilly and some other well-heeled endowments. On the other hand, France’s Prix Goncourt, for instance, pays the winner the generous sum of $10 but guarantees that with the exposure the author can count on sizeable royalties.

Philip Larkin said that a poet could amass "medals and prizes and honorary this-and-thats . . . but if you turned round and said, Right, if I'm so good, give me an index-linked permanent income equal to what I can get for being an undistinguished university administrator — well, reason would remount its throne pretty quickly.” A writer is expected to be above this kind of venality. To ask for more is to be like Oliver but not to is hard to resist when we look at the millions doled out to sportsmen — we use the male form deliberately — and other “cultural geniuses” (a form of hyperbole that Ulrich in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities found distasteful even in the 1930s).

Some argue that contests are the best ways for peers to recognize the intrinsic merit of works; others complain that “readers” often screen out pieces that are not written by “professional” writers. Awards are said to be value-free but as, English points out, Toni Morrison’s supporters claimed that they rarely recognize writers other than their own. There have been scandals of writing teachers favouring their students and in one case a judge choosing her spouse. There are “blind” contests too. Whether these are truths or sour grapes, the richest irony may be that English’s book which is so critical of the prize mill has itself earned a prize.

There are dissenters. Amitav Ghosh spurned the Commonwealth Prize for political reasons and Zadie Smith crossed swords with the Orange Prize organizers. Recently, Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, known for his critiques of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, refused the €100 000 Camoes Prize for "intimate, personal reasons." African recipients of the Camoes Prize have included Mozambique's Jose Craveirinha (1991) and Angola's Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos, penname Pepetela (1997) and will be added to our reading list along with Vieira.

For writers who despair of winning recognition or a living, think of this example. Laxman Rao, 51, a poor man, has written 18 novels in Hindi — nary an award among them — while supporting his family by running a tea stall in Delhi.

Toronto for writers

2006-05-14T20:17:00.000-05:00

We know about south Asian writing from Delhi, Bombay, London, New York and LA. Vanity Fair takes us to the land of Rohinton Mistry, M. G. Vassanji, Shyam Selvadurai, and Rabindranath Maharaj. Where else but to Toronto, the writers' capital of the north, which also boasts a DesiLit chapter? There are other Torontonians whom Vanity Fair doesn't mention: Nurjehan Aziz who runs TSAR publications with her partner Moyez Vassanji, Shani Mootoo, Anar Ali, and Nazneen Sadiq. And these are just a handful of writers in English. Although Urdu poetry may be fading in India, there's quite a scene for it in Toronto. Hindi. Punjabi, and Tamil writings also flourish.

... and for readers

2006-05-14T20:15:00.000-05:00

The Toronto South Asian Book Club met on 2 May to plan its reading list for 2006/07. Except for Anar Ali's book, all are available in paperback:

June — Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
July — Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
August — Meera Sayal, Anita and Me
September — Ginu Kamani, Junglee Girl
October — Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
November — Shyam Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens
December — Mary Anne Mohanraj, Bodies in Motion
January — Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
February — Anar Ali, Baby Khaki's Wings
March — Romesh Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge
April — Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting
May — Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night

The group meets the first Thursday of every month. The first meeting was on June 1 at 7 p.m. at the Chapters (2225 Bloor St. W. at Runnymede).

A note on reading and writing

2006-05-14T20:13:00.000-05:00

Rick Salutin believes that Canadians read more for show than for pleasure or instruction. He points to book clubs and voting on books as proof of this malaise. However, those of us who are impressed by reading prodigies — JS Mill passim — should note the precocious infants in Vietnam who have started reading signboards, newspapers and books by the age of 28 months. The media will have turned them into a show of a different kind, no doubt. Of course, there are writer prodigies too. The pre-teen Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters (sic) features "an elderly gentleman of 47," if we recall rightly, and was even made into a film. Gemma Williams, 17, who could only read and write upside down was cured by the use of an amber filter.

The topology of writing

2006-05-14T20:11:00.000-05:00

What are the formal structural similarities among the alphabets of various scripts? What is the underlying logic of letters? Is there a topology behind the use of letters? Can the forms be considered as a contour map of the features of the natural world such as trees, mountains houses, apartments and streets that are common to a certain culture or locale? Which shapes of letters are the most popular? Mark Changizi, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena looked at "the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other "abugidas", which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words." Click here to read about the structure of letters.

Speculative fiction: A categorical objection

2006-05-14T20:10:00.000-05:00

"Speculative fiction" is a term we have trouble with. All fiction is speculative. It posits a "what if" as its premise. Think of Joyce's Ulysses beginning with an elided conditional "(What if) stately, plump Buck Mulligan..." and the rest of the novel flows as an apodosis. At the beginning of speculation, said Aristotle, lies a feeling of child-like wonder. Good fiction is speculative even in the strictest sense of speculation (from "speculum") as it holds up a mirror to an age, a distorting mirror at times, to be sure. Through this act of seeing, fiction creates worlds with a weird but familiar and believable logic of relevance for the reader. So "speculative fiction" sounds like redundant cant.

Literature like any project or institution in our society seeks to perpetuate and reproduce itself through such "choices." "Speculative fiction" is, however, an industrial (publishing/academic) category. It is a catch-all genre for science fiction, ghost stories, horror, gothic tales, and fantasy and marks it off from other forms of fiction. The question to ask is: when these subcategories are clearer with their own histories why blur them under one grouping? The rise of science fiction as a genre, for example, has its origins in the industrial revolution in Europe and leads to specific utopian or dystopian narrative events. These are quite different in their genesis, traditions, values, outlooks, forms and styles from the tall tales of Baron Munchhausen, from Dante's Inferno, Hesiod's Cosmogony or from More's Utopia. Lumping them all under one rubric as emblematic of the speculative imagination is not useful. On the other hand, Michael Moorcock’s futuristic novels where he assumes an alternative world in which dirigibles, not airplanes, have become the common mode of transport readily qualify as speculative fiction. But why this need to squeeze writing into bottle with labels? Besides, as a writer-friend noted about the spate of dystopian science fiction, is it speculative fiction when much of it is real already?

We can also ask another question: what do these items in this "genre" then do collectively that other forms of fiction don't? The common ground is that "speculative fiction" answers a “what if?” It suspends, inverts or erases the natural order of things in favour of a "magical" narrative where reality is arranged differently, sometimes unrecognizably, but always freighted with more possibilities than the present. Todorov dwells on the literary space where two orders of explanations for events coexist: the natural and the supranatural, or the realistic and the fantastic. But that is true of many works of imagination and where does a hybrid form like magic realism fit in with its own traditions?

The history of modern European literature has had many such speculative writers in this new sense: Gilman, Walpole, Poe, Verne, Voltaire, Stoker, Huxley, Lefanu, Wells, Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, Kafka, Ivan Angelo, Calvino, Perutz, Borges, Zamyatin, Voinovich, Dick, Clarke, Lem, Moorcock, Pratchett, et alia. Certainly, Shelley, Poe, Kafka, Calvino, Perutz, Borges and some others can be said to have transcended their genres, whatever that means. Now academies may have overlooked others, assigned some of their stories a lesser value, and maybe this new genre is claiming them as the central figures of its pantheon but will there be cross-overs when the boundaries are made watertight and relativism rules?

There are some new writers to note. Japan has a notable tradition of science-fiction. Encouragingly, writers of colour such as Walter Mosley and Nalo Hopkinson are willing to interpose their new experiential counterpoints into the rather blank discourses of Atwood and Silverberg, Le Guin being the exception. One such stalwart Octavia Butler died recently. They need to be appreciated widely and deeply in the mainstream, more than just as oppositional tokens in a new marginal and manufactured genre.

We leave the junk categories of "creative non-fiction" and the "nonfiction novel" for others to unravel.

A reader writes

2006-05-14T20:09:00.000-05:00

A reader sends in his praises. It makes the whole exercise worthwhile. We are pleased and somewhat flustered to quote them.

"What a treat. As I read, I thought I would mentally note a few things and compliment you on them. But, to my unease, the list kept growing, and I abandoned the idea. But the riches I garnered, unhinged me a little, by their variety and volume. I doubt there are any similar blogs rivalling in spice, slivers of info, splinters of satiric genteel-ism, and on occasions, wry mockery.

Redundant cant. Speculative Fiction. Weird. I ended my morning reading there. Other pieces, later. And, hearty congrats to have emerged a winner out of 3500 entries. This more than from just the parochial (Allahabadi) pride.

The literary and cultural cornucopia this blog is freighted with, and yet skims so airily, makes eyes pop open at every turn. The delight, the delicacy. And, the sudden discovery. Prix Goncourt awards $10! How to handle such a princely sum! I wish for monetarily more weighty awards coming to you. So that you continue exploring, venturing, regaling freely and long. Of course, without charging us, the readers.

Best.
I.K.Shukla"

Apples or oranges?

2006-05-14T20:08:00.001-05:00

The apple is a potent fruit long equated with the rites of courtship, marriage and fertility. Centuries before the apple of knowledge was eaten in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, couples in seventh-century B.C. Greece shared apples as symbols of marriage and their hopes for offspring. There was the equally ancient practice of throwing apples at newlyweds at weddings so it's not surprising to find Aphrodite the goddess of love associated with apples. We are familiar with the story of the suitor, Melanion or in some sources Hippomenes, who on Aphrodite's advice rolled three golden apples that she had given him to distract Atalanta who had promised to marry anyone who outran her in a race. In the tradition of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica, Atalanta, a formidable warrior, is listed as taking part in the expedition to recover the golden fleece probably because of her skills as a runner. According to Diodorus Siculus and Apollodorus, Atalanta was wounded in a battle with the Colchians and healed by Medea on the voyage. Suckled by wolves and brought up by hunters in Arcadia — Hesiod differs in this, he says Boeotia — where she had been exposed by her father who wanted a boy, Atalanta had joined the Calydonian Boar Hunt which led to some objections and bloodshed after which she was reunited with her father Iasus who wanted her to marry. However, an oracle forbade that but the lure of Aphrodite's golden apples proved too powerful for Atalanta to resist. She relented and the couple's sexual union in the temple of Zeus angered the god so much that he turned them into lions. It is worthwhile to mention another possible connection of Atalanta with gold. Αταλαντη "equal in weight" is derived from αταλαντος (atalantos) which is related to ταλαντον (talanton) meaning "a scale" or "a balance" used to weigh metals.

The source of the golden apples myth is interesting. In what some see as evidence of a shift in the classical pantheon from Titans to Olympians, Gaia the earth goddess gave golden apples as a present to Hera and Zeus on their marriage. Although the tree was planted in a grove circled by a high wall, guarded by Ladon a dragon with many heads which spoke different tongues at the same time (kind of an early-day Erich Auerbach or Spitzer), Hera assigned some nymphs, the hesperides (daughters of Hesperus, evening), to look after the fruit. The grove was in the Atlas region although some traditions put it in the isle of the hesperides among the hyperboreans ("beyond the north wind" at the northern edge of the world), the land of perpetual sunshine and perfect happiness. Perseus after slaying the gorgon Medusa rested in the kingdom of the titan King Atlas who had been told that a descendant of Zeus would steal the gold fruit hidden by golden leaves hanging from the golden branches of a tree made of gold in his orchard. In that story, Perseus used the gorgon's head to petrify Atlas into a mountain. In a related myth, Atlas had to travel from his kingdom to the land of the hyperboreans for the fruit. In his eleventh labour for his cousin Eurystheus (also associated with Atalanta and the Calydonian boar hunt), Perseus's descendant Heracles fulfilled the prophecy when he followed Prometheus' advice (whom he had found chained to a rock with his liver being devoured by an eagle which, according to Hesiod, he slew) and tricked Atlas into fetching the hesperidean apples from the land of the hyperboreans. (According to Jan Kott, the myths of Heracles were assimiliated into the bible and his eleventh labour to Mount Atlas which divides the cosmos vertically prefigures Christ's ascension to paradise.) Milton in his Comus also refers to the golden tree and calls the hesperides the nieces of Atlas. The legends of the golden apples, Atalanta, the argonauts, and the feats of Perseus and Heracles are intertwined with the geography of the Atlas kingdom and the land of the hyperboreans.

The often-touted theory that "golden apple" is an ekphrasis for oranges from Spain which the Greeks had heard about has been disputed by several scholars. A friend cited Timothy Gantz in his Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (John Hopkins, 1993) who claimed that the fruits were golden apples given by Aphrodite, nothing more. She further enlisted Agnes Mary Clerke's Familiar Studies in Homer (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1892): "The apple evidently excited Homer's particular admiration; he in fact, made it his representative fruit. That it should have been so considered in the North, where competition or the place of honour was small, is less surprising; and apples, accordingly, of an etherealised and paradisaical kind, served to restore youth to the aging gods of Asaheim." In her chapter on "Homeric Meals", Clerke wrote about apples, pears, pomegranates, figs, ollives, and grapes being cultivated but not oranges. Further support was garnered from the evidence that oranges came to Europe, first to what is now Spain, quite late from India. My friend cited Harold McGee on the citrus family from his On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984): "With the exception of the grapefruit and other recent hybrids, the members of the citrus family are native to Southeast Asia and were first cultivated in India (our word orange comes from the Hindi), China, and Japan. . . .but it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the lemon, and in the 15th century the orange, made it to the West, where they were initially treated as ornamentals and spice plants." [This is inaccurate as Hindi did not exist at the time of the transmission. Alan Davidson in the Penguin Companion to Food claims Charaka Samhita, a Sanskrit medical treatise, mentions the fruit for the first time by what has become its modern name "naranja." He derives the modern English term from Skt. "narunga" (fruit like an elephant), also transliterated as "naranga" whence Hindi "narangi." The transmission to Europe though may have been through Arabic "naranj" (Pers. "narang") which was used as "a norange" in English and later hyper-corrected aphetically to "an orange" (the original form survives in the Spanish "naranja"). According to a Purdue University website, the fruit is known as "naranja de China," "China dulce," or simply "China" (pronounced cheena) in some Caribbean and Latin American areas.]

Davidson notes that oranges were originally grown in southwest China and northwest India. Oranges were found in China as early as 2400 B.C. According to him, early Chinese documents mention them as being prized for the fragrance of their rind; when held in the hand, the warmth released their scent. The earliest eating orange, probably the mandarin, reached India from China in about 100 Common Era. Oranges went from India to Africa, and then to the Mediterranean area possibly through Italian traders after 1450. An alternative source suggests that six centuries after the Lombard invasion, the "bigarade" or bitter or sour orange was introduced into Spain by Arabs and into Italy and France by crusaders returning from Palestine. It is interesting to note that the oranges from roadside trees in modern-day Morocco are not eaten; their orange-flower juice is used to flavour food. The sweet orange reappeared in southern Italy and Sicily in the 15th century. The Portugese started to cultivate a superior kind of sweet orange upon Vasco de Gama's return from India ca. 1500. A sweeter variety emerged from China in the 16th century called the Portugal orange because the Portuguese spread it throughout southern Europe (the Greek word "portakali" may refer to this origin). The mandarin orange, a small loose-skinned orange named for the region of China from which it came, was brought to England from China in 1805. The lateness of the arrival of citrus aurantium var. sinensis L. (bitter Seville orange of which the sweet orange is said to be a variant) in Europe rules out oranges from being the golden apples of the old legends, the argument goes.

As the evidence indicates, oranges came first from India to Africa (the Atlas region was "known" to Greeks and mentioned in the heraclean labours) much earlier than their arrival in what is now Spain. However, direct transmission through Indo-Grecian contacts may be equally tenable as a theory as that's older than the transit points that have been suggested and challenged by food historians. The same Apollonius who wrote in the 3rd century BC including Atalanta on the Argosy certainly knew about India as did other Greek writers: he referred to Indian elephant tusks in the Argonautica. As the director of the Alexandrine library, Apollonius may have had access to more sources. However, other earlier and contemporary Greek writers in their extant accounts of India do not mention such a fruit. This does not mean that we cannot assume the possibility that the orange may have been known to Greeks by description, if not by name, even then although it may not have been available or eaten in Europe at the time. One also wonders if Apollonius chose to turn Atalanta into an argonaut searching for the golden fleece, not solely on account of her fleetness of foot, but maybe because of her association with something else that was also golden: apples or oranges — which, we shall never know for sure, but it's food for thought indeed.

Kahani for kids

2006-05-14T20:08:00.000-05:00

Monika Jain and Leena Chawla have launched Kahani, "the first children's literary magazine for South Asian kids in the United States." The editors had found that "there was nothing for their kids to read that acknowledged their appearances or family backgrounds." I have not seen it yet but the reviews are good. In an interview in The Boston Globe, Chawla said she hopes to keep the illustrated quarterly free of ads and rely on sponsorships and subscriptions instead. If you have kids or know someone who does, this would be a fun way for them to get them to learn about the various south Asia cultures which I hope Kahani will include. Make a kid — doesn't have to be south Asian — happy. Become a sponsor or subscribe to Kahani. It will make a good holiday present.

Books and film

2006-05-14T20:07:00.000-05:00

It’s expected that filmmakers would attend arts school. Peter Greenway’s framing and tableaux furnish proof of his arts training and Julian Schnabel who once called himself as a greater painter than Michelangelo has turned out some good films. Andreï Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, known for his lush and mystical evocations of nature and an exponent of the “scene,” believed that a filmmaker should be grounded in music, art, and literature. His films make references to Andreï Roublev’s icons, Breughel’s winter scenes, Piero della Francesca’s paintings, and to Don Quixote and to his beloved Bach. However, he found fault with Fellini’s attempts to create still lives on screen. He argued that film was too dynamic a medium for frozen or “live pictures,” as he called them. Equally, he reproached Pasolini who gave up writing novels for filmmaking for trying to create a literary syntax in his films through the use of cuts and montage. Ultimately, Tarkovsky believed that film should be neither literary nor painterly but ought to have a form of its own. (We wonder what he would have made of Chris Marker's narratology in La Jetée, with its 27 minutes of black-and-white stills.)

Known for the long take, Tarkovosky dreamed of being able to make a film without editing or music. Although it took four tries, his “disciple” Alexander Sokurov shot Russian Ark in one long take in the sumptuous interiors of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in one day in December 2001. Russian Ark features as expected some of the treasures of the art world but with live musical accompaniment. The film conveys 300 years of Russian history compressed into the real time of the actual Steadycam shoot (96 minutes). For us, the nearest “purely” literary equivalent to that one long take could be Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s pábení which, in one case, is a single sentence that runs the length of a novel.

Surprisingly few writers have been filmmakers although many filmmakers — Idrissa Ouedraogo and Zhang Yimou among them — work on scripts. Of Satyajit Ray, Yukio Mishima, Ousmane Sembene, Derek Jarman, Dai Sijie, and Michael Ondaatje, all of whom have written and made films, Sembene is probably the one who is best known for both. Despite Isherwood’s narrator’s confident assertion: “I’m a camera,” the nexus of literary text to film has a long and troubled history. Many writers find it hard to let go of their work. Stanislav Lem, the author of Solaris, loathed Tarkovsky’s version. He called it “Crime and Punishment In Outer Space.” His many arguments with the director and his cinematographer Vadim Yusov had left him on the verge of withdrawing his permission to film the book. He was equally displeased with Soderbergh’s Hollywood-romance version of Solaris. Czech film director Jiři Menzel, though, collaborated easily with Hrabal for many years to bring some of his novels to the screen, his narrative flow intact. As noted above, not all collaborations are this successful.

Books have been “film-treated” in a variety of ways. At the height of his powers, Bertolucci made his own masterpeices from works by Moravia and Borges. Satyajit Ray’s elegant neorealist approach to stories by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee (The Apu trilogy), Tagore (Ghaire-Bhare/Home and the World and Charulata), Tarasankar Banerjee (Jalsaghar), Saradindu Banerjee (Chiriakhana), Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee (Devi), Sunil Ganguly (Aranyer Din Ratri, Days and Nights in the Forest) and Premchand (Shatranj ke khilari or The Chess Players) resulted in superbly understated studies where the silence and pauses between the actions created tensions and meaning, as in Yasujiro Ozu's films. On the other hand, Akiro Kurosawa’s Rashomon is a film of overstatements. It matches the narrative force of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s stories as exercises in hyperbole and interpretation.

Luchino Visconti in mid-career chose a broader scope to bring Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard as a Technicolor epic to the screen. Raoul Ruiz realized film medium’s potential to play with time and reality in his fine adaptation of Proust’s Le Temps Retrouvé. Alain Resnais much earlier weaved the syntagma of Robbe Grillet’s Last Year in Marienbad in what was hailed as exploding many new-wave filmmaking pieties. However, generally, film adaptations have fared better in popular effect with drama or with prose works where the narrative structure is sequential and the actions clear. John Huston’s adaptations of Ben Traven’s Mexican novels, his version of Joyce’s The Dead and Jorge Fons’ adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley match the cumulative power and beauty of the stories, even with some changes and shifts in emphasis or locales.

One may go even further to assert that popular adaptations work best with lesser or genre novels. Mike Moncada’s The Name of The Rose discarded the literary complexity of Eco’s text by focusing on the dramaturgical elements of the story. Similarly, Roberto Sneider’s 1995 version of Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s Dos Crímenes works well as a story with serialized action. Dev Benegal’s debut feature actually improves on Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August but keeps its “problematics” alive.

For works where the narrative drive does not rely on dramaturgy but on ellipsis, symbolism and atmosphere, some film directors focus on visual mise-en-scène to recreate a work’s suggestiveness. Visconti’s claustrophobic interiors suggest the onset of the miasmic plague in his version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum which won him the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988 substituted Mo Yan’s fragmented narrative with stunning, often silent, visuals.

In looking at drama on film, some examples of the various Shakespeare films should suffice. Grigor Kozintsev’s 1970 Russian version of King Lear with Jüri Järvet in the title role — he played Snaut in Tarkovksy’s Solaris — and the various adaptations of the history plays starring Derek Jacobi, Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh were successful theatrical re-enactments in their own different ways. Like Kozintsev’s treatment of Lear which became distinct from the play, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood fitted Macbeth into the bushido code of Japanese samurai films.

This connectedness of film to text is not true of all cinéastes. Tarantino in his Kill Bill volumes delivered an experience that was purely kinetic and cinematic without the encumbrances of bookish plot, or attempts at depth of characterization or even believability (or, one may add, any interest). This is very much in the martial-arts film traditions but one up or one down — we favour the latter — on his exemplar Sam Peckinpah.

Although books have served as inspiration for filmmakers, the direction of influence in this visual age is reversing. With the focus on immediacy and accessibility, literature has taken to incorporating the language of film and TV, namely the visual properties of story construction in screenplays, into texts rather than the other way round. Most writing workshops stress the use of framing devices, découpage, shifts in perspectives and the primacy of the “scene” in composition. While books are optioned for film rights and the novelization process turns a film into a book (usually not a very good one), this reversed influence no longer valorizes written work. A film is not just an illustration and enactment of a text. It has turned from saprophytic imitation and mimicry to a self-sustaining interpretive medium that may very well engulf the text entirely one day.

Döppelganger fiction (excluding Kierkegaard and Gstrein)

2006-05-14T20:06:00.000-05:00

What do Jorge Semprún and José Saramago have in common? Both were members of the Communist Party. Saramago still is — he describes himself as “a militant member” — but Semprún was expelled in 1964. Semprún, who adapted Vassily Vassilikos’ novel for Costa-Gavras’ feature film “Z”, and Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, wrote novels featuring literary characters-as-döppelgangers-as-protagonists. Ricardo Reis was one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. In Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the eponymous hero returns to Lisboa from Rio de Janeiro in 1935 after receiving the news of Pessoa’s death. This Reis writes Pessoa’s verse and continues to be visited by the poet months after his funeral against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in Spain, Portugal, Germany and Italy. Semprún’s The Second Death of Ramón Mercarder features a character, also a killer, who bears the same name as Trotsky’s assassin (Mercader was one of his many names), twenty-five years after the assassination. Watched by the CIA, Stasi, the Soviets, and Spaniards, Semprún’s Mercader is later found dead in a hotel room. The quest for his identity begins. Is he or is he not the same Mercader? “Stories never begin where they seem to have begun. Their origins are sunk in obscurity, and a time comes when you suddenly find yourself in the very heart of a story,” Semprún writes. As in Borges’ famous story, the question is who is dreaming whom? Who is the creator, who the created?

Blowing up polyculturalism

2006-05-14T20:03:00.000-05:00

What do the Rushdie case, the Behzti play and the beach riots say about the value of multiculturalism in states like England and Australia or even Canada for that matter? Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK, has said that multiculturalism belongs to a different era. English Shadow Home Secretary David Davis too wants to scrap the "outdated" policy which allows the "perverted values of suicide bombers" to take root. Salman Rushdie has waded into the debate with "it’s harder to celebrate polyculture when Belgian women are being persuaded by Belgians 'of North African descent' to blow themselves — and others — up."

Leaving aside questions about the roots of terrorism and the role of these countries in Iraq and in the war on terror, we should ask what will this model society look like? Will it be more gated than it already is to screen out others who have a different "descent" as Rushdie euphemistically puts it? How will it avoid the scenario of the banlieues of Paris because the French certainly haven't subscribed to the idea of pluralism or positive measures for reversing discrimination. Will it expel all those who are of a different "descent" into some wilderness and will the rest live in a fake little England of cream teas and elevenses that Julian Barnes recreated on an island once in a novel? Does it entail applying the Tebbit test of Britishness or its Australian or Canadian equivalent to its new citizens? What will this new national identity consist in? How will it be formed and negotiated? How will we avoid this "us" and "them" that led us to the flawed policy of multiculturalism in the first place? Flawed in that it was a form of neocolonialism, fomented divisions, ignored rights and power imbalances among groups in society. It's certainly time to move beyond multiculturalism but in which direction and how?

First of all, let's clear up some misconceptions. Ghettoization in these countries didn't happen because of political correctness or multiculturalism. Communities first banded together for support and survival against overt prejudice or as a result of policies that flowed from the dominant racial groupings in societies. That legacy persists. You only have to visit one reservation or an Inuit settlement in Canada to see that some communities still remain quite disempowered, impoverished, and isolated as a result of segregationist policies. (In fact, the Afrikaaner government in South Africa implemented their infamous bantustans policy after a visit to Canada where this model of reservations was studied.) Unfortunately, state responses to these issues over time have done little to solve the basic problems of access to jobs and education, which have deepened resentment in these enclaves. Too often, states in their dealings have given too much power to religious leaders who were interested in preserving the status-quo imbalances in their communities at the expense of those progressive community activists who have consistently promoted change, equity, acceptance and integration. For others, the situation has worsened after the backlash from 9/11 even in more progressive societies like Sweden or Canada. So, despite earlier progress in tolerance, there hasn't been real inclusion. Now with the backlash and with fundamentalism growing in pockets of urban poverty where UK/US policy in the middle east is resented, it's become very much the slippery slope to extremism and terrorism, as Davis avers. The situation has not been helped by governments' anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric while accepting newcomers needed to build and maintain national economies.

There's another question. Just what is this British, Canadian or Australian identity that is being mooted? We've heard about "fair play" and "Canadian values" as the defining characteristics of nationhood. How do these myths sell to Aboriginal peoples or to the descendants of slaves and head-tax payers? A few days before 9/11, at the UN Conference on Racism, most of these western powers refused to apologize for their roles in colonialism or even to admit that slavery was a crime against humanity. What does UK, Australian or Canadian foreign policy in supporting the unpopular and highly undemocratic right-wing "war on terror" through the use of torture, invasions, and depleted uranium say to citizens about democracy, pacifism, secularism and the rule of law?

The truth is that traditional national identities and values have never been static. Nationalist imaginaries of Britishness or Canadianness are myths of convenience that have served many a political purpose. This, however, should not excuse religious or political extremism of any stripe. We agree that that has to be squelched but not by controlling immigration — the problem is home grown, not always imported, it's time we realized that — through other means. If we opt for a belief in a country whose citizens have a commitment to live up to their responsibilities under a secular, democratic system where religion and politics are clearly separated, well and good. But you can't force someone to become British any more than you can change the colour of his skin, his "descent," his views or even public perceptions and stereotypes just by saying so or legislating it. A lot relies on changing attitudes to accept as citizens peoples with different racial origins. (A UK publishing executive noted that the demand for south Asian writers such as Hanif Kureishi is on the decline. Funnily enough, as we think of Kureishi as English but others obviously don't.) Identities are lived, dynamic, and participatory just as any inclusive process of nation building should be.

This question about identities has to be linked to any discussion about ending terrorism, about achieving parity, and about acceptance of everyone as English or Australian or what have you. These communities haven't always been listened to but while it is important to hear their stories we need to avoid getting mired into a culture of complaint. In turn, states ought to be scrutinized for their policies as they have been experienced by communities and that have created mayhem at home and in the world. For example, the USA and European powers can confess to their role in funding, arming, and training these Islamist fundamentalists who were their allies in fighting communism and genuine nationalist movements round the globe, the very fundamentalists whom they now disavow.

Although the onus oughtn't to be entirely be on citizens, one hopes that there will be more open debate which gives a leading role to the players from these communities who will be engaged to rebuild their societies according to a progressive vision. This would be a forum starting with an admission of where we all went wrong and where we need to go followed up by the kind of public education that takes us forward not backwards. Only by this form of public engagement about citizens' and society's fears and aspirations, about the barriers to equity, about people's rights and responsibilities will some consensus be formed which can be used to promote integration, curb extremism, and put an end to segregation and inequities that may exist. Such a nation-building project would lead to the articulation of the value of everyone's cultural expression and to a person's unquestionable right to equal citizenship independent of one's "descent" but rooted in one's responsibilities to building an inclusive, secular, democratic nation. The state would then have to ensure that everyone is treated equally and produce tangible improvements and equitable life chances, resources and power-sharing as results. All should be made to feel that they belong, that they are integral parts of the whole.

Everyone has to be involved; everyone should benefit. It's only through such a dynamic, open-ended process that you can ensure that Rushdie and Kureishi will be thought of as completely British one day. At present, sad to say, Europe, Australia or the US are hardly anybody's model of multiracial integration. Pluralism is a fact; diversity is here to stay. It's how you iron out the wrinkles that's key. We, for one, are all for trying.

Books for all

2006-05-14T19:56:00.000-05:00

A report by the Bookseller and the Arts Council in England states that the book trade is ignoring the potential of the black and ethnic minority (BME) market. Michelle Pauli of The Guardian (UK) writes that the “Books for All survey of publishers, booksellers, agents and librarians found that a ‘fear factor’ was holding back the book trade from pursuing a growing market and a huge potential source of writing talent.” Since then, “new research published this week found that only one per cent of the 5,000 bestselling books sold so far this year were written by black or ethnic minority writers." Another study, Spread the Word, found that only 8% of BME poets get published although they are popular at poetry readings.

In passing, we should note that the term “black” in Britain is used Bikoesquely. It includes South Asians, Chinese, and other groups that have been discriminated against because of their skin colour or racial heritage. Ironically, publishers and publicists have been ringing the death knell of South Asian fiction in English for the last two years. Every misstep such as Kaavya Viswanathan’s plagiarism is said to underscore this. Moreover, it’s hard not to fulminate over being told (usually by marketing folk) that “we already have a South Asian writer” as if we were all alike. Is a similar census of writers of European heritage ever undertaken? When was the last time we heard a Polish writer being told that their Eastern European quota was filled because they already had a Hungarian?

Regardless of the conclusions, the Arts Council in England does do some research on these issues whereas the Canada Council for the Arts or the Ontario Arts Council have yet to deliver anything on that scale. A study is needed for Toronto where people of colour are numerically the majority but who remain underrepresented in every constructive realm. Perhaps, such a study here would lead to equitable publishing policies. We suggest that any survey include an attitudinal analysis and an analysis of barriers. Penguin Canada states a commitment to publishing new South Asian writers but it no longer has an open-submissions policy. A handful of European asset-stripping conglomerates have taken over major publishing houses in North America. As these giants don't have a stake in the cultural life here, their approach has been to discard or trim less profitable lines such as fiction. Yes, there are some small indie presses but not nearly enough to make for a level playing field. And so it goes.

Book reviews

2006-05-14T19:55:00.000-05:00

Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

None embodied the Renaissance’s excesses of imagination better than Paracelsus (1493-1541) whose birth, life, death and legacy are still surrounded by controversies and legends, including that of Dr. Faustus. Bayon called him a “rude, circuitous obscurantist,” Singer, “repellent,” Zimmerman, a “drunk,” Gesner, “an impious sorcerer,” Erastus, an “atheist pig,” Butler, a “mountebank.” and the Hoovers, “eunuchoid.” His champions include Browning, Mary Shelley, Borges and New Age followers.

Philip (Paracelsus) Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim was born to a once-noble family in Einsiedeln and grew up in Villach. He studied in European universities but left without a medical degree. Leonecino in Ferrara taught him to question Aristotle, Plato, and Galen. On his travels along the Venetian trade route, he documented peoples’ medical folklore in Europe, Africa, Russia and Scandinavia. Like Bacon, he favoured first-hand observation and experience over prescriptive book learning and galenics. Paracelsus learned about metals in Sigismund Füger’s labs, which informed his alchemy, an art practised by Newton and other scientists, but which marked him as a practitioner of witchcraft and black magic.

Ball clarifies the differences between Paracelsus’s views and those of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, hermeticists and others. Much of Paracelsus’s life was spent dodging the plague, peasant wars, city-state battles, a corrupt church, various reformations, and the inquisition and he lost appointment after appointment. Paracelsus’s unfortunate personality and his vague writings didn’t help. He burned the works of Galen and Avicenna on a bonfire, harangued in taverns, wore the same filthy cloak for months, and once offered up a dish of faeces to his disputants as proof of transubstantiation.

Ball has written a fine introduction to Paracelsus. Only after Universite du Zürich’s monumental Paracelsus project is completed, will we learn the secrets of this complex seeker of knowledge without borders.

J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

Materialist feminist geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham who write as J.K. Gibson-Graham have reissued their postmodern critique of representations of capitalism and economy. Using an Althusserian lens of overdetermination, Gibson-Graham show that capitalism is not an inevitable tendency or hegemonic in diverse post-Fordist societies, as it has often been constituted in triumphalist right-wing discourses or in marxian analyses, but that alternative noncapitalist economies are possible.

Gibson-Graham’s project is to propose a language of the diverse economy incorporating counter-discourses from alternative traditions of economic thought, feminism, and working-class, third-world, and social and community movements such as the Zapatistas in México. For this, they use case studies and deconstruction of essentialist concepts such as class which they formulate as a process of intersecting sites for gender, orientation, income-status, and other oppression markers.

The authors have to be careful not to centralize their privileged white feminist locations in the academies. In analysing the feminist rape script, for example, which characterizes the domination of MNCs in today’s globalized economy as phallocentric, Gibson-Graham’s study of the semi-conductor industry in southeast Asia leads to their claim that “the economic ‘rape’ wrought by globalization in the Third World is a script with many different outcomes…we might read the rape event as inducing a pregnancy, rather than initiating the death and destruction of indigenous economic capacity.”

As Gibson-Graham’s next phases are to cultivate subjects for noncapitalist spaces and to build community economies, it is wrong to conclude that the inclusion of academicians in the movement can be sufficiently explained by an “erotics of desirability” on the part of other participants who may see them as exploitative, arrogant, detached and careerist. Some dislocation is needed within western academia and its own discourses before the distances between enunciators of theory and community can be bridged satisfactorily.

To MFA or not to MFA?

2006-05-14T19:53:00.000-05:00

Is that the question?

Aspiring writers in North America may not have a choice in answering that. Most magazines, literary agents and publishers ask for creative arts credentials. The glitzier the better. So just how good are these programs? A Columbia University professor criticizes the mediocrity of the faculty and of most of the students in the writing division in Columbia's School of the Arts. Sam Sacks in a review of Jane Smiley's collection of new writers' works, Best New American Voices 2006, thinks these professionalized MFA "products" are rule-bound and unoriginal. Here's what he says about the stories in the anthology.

"All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree."

Our Girl in Chicago agrees with Sacks about the soul-destroying character of writing workshops but wonders if he didn't overlook the quality of the teaching in criticising the programs. Writing practice to a deadline, receiving criticism and giving it surely benefit an author. Regardless of its value, we suspect the real currency of an MFA may lie in the marketplace, in the formation of a network of contacts who can further each other's careers. All of which makes one wonder what happens to new and emerging writers in countries where BFAs and MFAs don't exist. Soon it may not be enough just to read great books and write well. Sad, really, if it’s true.

Writing whose reality? Speaking whose voice?

2006-05-14T19:50:00.001-05:00

In Brecht’s poem Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters, the worker asks some rhetorical questions about how history is written:

Der junge Alexander eroberte Indien
Er allein?
Cäsar schlug die Gallier.
Hatte er nicht wenigstens einen Koch bei sich?

The answer implied is that when Alexander conquered India, he didn’t do it alone. Yes, there were cooks (and other figures) who helped Caesar beat the Gauls. Ditto about who won glory for Philip of Spain and Frederick the Great. Similarly, women, GLBT and once-colonized peoples have engaged in “writing back” to reclaim their histories and voices.

These are simplifications, of course. Not everything is fixed to or defined by the centre. There have been struggles within the writers’ own traditions. Even writers who wore a “socially progressive” label have been criticized for co-opting the voices of those they have written about. Mulk Raj Anand’s depictions of untouchability in India have been challenged by the new crop of Dalit writers, some of whom, incidentally, are available from Orient Longman in English translation. Orhan Pamuk, a notable successor to Yashar Kemal in Turkey, chooses to arrive at truths through his works that feature characters from the middle-class gentry that he knows so well rather than through village stories about peasants and fisherfolk, an approach that was favoured by Kemal and writers of an older generation.

Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop plays nicely with this paradox. Although her novel is very much in the older Indoanglian tradition of writing about the working class, she has a scathing account of an upper-middle-class, convent educated socialite about to get married who earns fame by writing a facetious novel about the sari-shop attendant who gatecrashes her function. It would be interesting to study how complex this engagement is in the many master/mistress-servant novels that continue to emerge from India, the latest being Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us. A recent sensation is Baby Halder, a "servant's" own story told in her own voice as edited by Urvashi Butalia. Another of our quests is to find the translated Urdu story which mirrors Jorge Amado's Gabriela: Love and Cinnamon. Both are about a lustful master who marries a servant. The marriage falls apart and the woman drifts away. She returns later as a servant and they resume their transgressive romance.

Privileging theory/reading for pleasure

2006-05-14T19:49:00.000-05:00

Remember the days of source studies, new criticism, psychoanalytical readings, marxism, formalism and the theory tsunami that swept them all aside and the fatigue that followed? Derrida & co. are as firmly entrenched in the critical canon as the authorities they had once tried to overcome. Is theory as hegemonic over the literary text as all that or has it become differentiated and subtler? Jennifer Howard has some interesting observations on how it is applied as a teaching tool these days. But where does one fit in the experience of pleasure in reading in the midst of all this grand theorizing? Yes, there was Barthes but Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, takes up a conflicting call for a new literary aesthetics.

Phobia of phobias: a hate crime

2006-05-14T19:48:00.000-05:00

After looking at our CBC photographs sent by a writer-friend from B.C., we thought we would appeal to our readers, assuming, of course, there are any. Most of the compounds in English that express a state or attitude of hatred or loathing end in “-phobia” which really means “a fear of or an aversion to.” We need a stronger declarative suffix. Is there an apter ending that expresses “hatred of” or “dislike of” than “antipatho” or “apatheia”? “Photophobia” as “photoantipatho(s)” has a charm and a rhythm of its own but the adjective “photoantipathetic” sounds awkward and there may be issues of vowel disharmonies & c. Using μίσος, έχθρα for “hatred” and “μισητός,” “αξιομίσητος” for “hateful” yield unfamiliar compounds as does “andia/e” in what is presumably Attic, not dhimotiki.

Other Indo-European languages are not English-friendly for compound-making either. Monier-Williams presents from the Sanskrit the interesting but unusable “acyutarus” (inveterate hatred), “atithidvesa” (hatred of guests, inhospitality) which describes our state during periods of enforced report writing, even “baddhadvesa” (entertaining hatred) presumably directed at politicians south of the border. There are “brahmadvesa” (hatred of sacred knowledge) and “anuzaya” the masculine form of which expresses hatred or intense enmity whereas the feminine substantive refers, fittingly, to a boil on the head or, more puzzlingly, to a disease of the foot. Everyone ought to be familiar with “karyapradvesa” (hatred of work) and must have succumbed to “udyudh,” to “bubble up” (as water) in hatred or enmity, once or twice. “Virodhin” can mean enmity or hatred but also “the restiveness of a horse.” (In this frolicsome spirit, we skip the Sanskrit for “dislike” in case we bubble over some more madly entertaining words).

Perhaps some Latinists, Farsi scholars, or other linguophiles, can send in their suggestions. It’s hard to live with a phobophobe, someone with fear and loathing of phobias in any language.

The discourse of point

2006-05-14T19:44:00.000-05:00

Through a nocturnal pollination of the bedside pile, we notice some writers doing different things with what looks like one form, a much neglected one at that. It’s easy to see the differences between Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus where each entry is a preposition duly numbered (1.1, 1.1.1, 1.2) in a logical sequence so the reader can map and trace each set and subset of proofs and their conclusions. Blanchot’s entries are gnomic, closer to, yet different from, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Blanchot may be closest to the tradition of pensées that harks back to Pascal, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Weil. What cannot be spoken of, according to Wittgenstein, may have mystical analogues in the likes of Rumi, the Upanishads, St. John of the Cross & c. although in his positivist period he would have hardly read them.

We remember what a friend working on the Frankfurt School had said. He claimed that he had uncovered 22 steps between one statement by Hegel and the next. He had plotted the missing contents of logical argument/prepositional spaces between two full stops. In Blanchot, the lacunae between entries are not logical transition spaces but unnamable voids. The compressed and elliptical forces of his thoughts are harder to unpack and connect as the silence between the act of the disaster and the writing is enormous and cannot be spoken, written or shown, particularly in the face of what could possibly have been done which, in turn, is unimaginable. This tension between action and passivity leads to a break. Writing itself causes this fracture of expression into fragments, into what passively survives the disaster. He notes: “Writing is per se (it is still) violence: the rupture there is in each fragment, the break, the splitting, the tearing of the shred—acute singularity, steely point. And yet this combat is, for patience, debate. The name wears away, the fragment fragments, erodes. Passivity passes away patiently, lost stakes.”

Fragments may sometimes even be complete inscriptions (“Odd made me” engraved on the handle of an ancient implement) but generally they are not. Fragments are older and incomplete; they are what survives of once-complete texts. However, Valéry created texts in fragments where the reader actively supplies the meanings. Anne Carson recuperates Sappho’s fragments and weaves her own poems from them. Accused of obscurantism for his compressed, ambiguous verse, Mallarmé wrote a defence in The Mystery in Literature: "Every piece of writing, on the outside of its treasure, must — out of respect for those from whom, after all, it borrows the language, for a different purpose — present with the words a meaning, even if an unimportant one: there is an advantage to turning away the idler, who is charmed that nothing here concerns him at first sight.” A current use of fragments is in “found poetry” where items are extracted from extant works and composed into a newish whole. We should note an older form “cento” where words and phrases were taken from other known works to form an often comic pastiche. Presumably this worked hundreds of years ago because the audience often knew the stuff by heart.

Proverbs, aphorisms, wise saws, morals and sayings, the most popular kinds of compressed discourse, may in fact be the oldest forms of this kind of discursiveness; some were derived from the apologues of the likes of Aesop and older Asian fabulist texts. Their quotability allows them to be plucked from their context so that they float on the surface like flowers of wisdom. These flowers are usually compiled in the form of chrestomathy (“anthology” refers to a bouquet) as being useful to learn. Commonplace books were used to record these sayings. They can have a moral or ethical dimension and are rules to live by even in this age where wisdom is trite or ignored (think Khalil Gibran). Here is one from Juvenal’s Satires: “voluptates commendat rarior usus” [pleasure taken less often pleases more]. The homiletic tradition in English goes back a long way. Monks compiled their way of living into rule books. Equally, laws and customs could be precise and pithy in those days.

Rules were found in other forms such as theorems and axioms. Panini's Sanskrit grammar is written in the form of a verbal algebra where each grammatical theorem describes — it does not prescribe — well-formed usage. A.K. Ramanujan, who collected, translated and developed a typology of Indian folk tales in the oral tradition, also noted the heuristic force of the conclusions. Commonplace books were used to record these sayings. Sancho Panza and Švejk are both comic figures because of their endless and reflexive regurgitation of received wisdom in the form of phatics, platitudes and proverbs. Ibsen underscores the tragedy at the end of the end of A Doll's House with the deft use of a cliché.

According to Aristotle, pointed, clever sayings work best as antithesis, metaphor, and in recalling actuality or vividness. Brevity being the soul of wit, Wilde inverted moralism lightly in his epigrams (“I can resist everything except temptation”) but others, like Martial (“though I can’t live without you/I can live without you in the house”) and Catullus (“Not even if, head between his legs,/He took a swig of his own foul dregs” — both from Penguin translations), were more caustic in their poetical observations. With a soupçon of wit, wisdom can turn into maxims in prose: witness La Rochefoucauld (218: “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue”). In Aristotle’s work on rhetoric, maxims are part of enthymemes as one of two modes of persuasion, the other being the example. He claimed that maxims should be used by old men to controvert popular sayings. Maxims enable a speaker to universalize hearers’ opinions as truth, thus pleasing the audience. Used as observations, maxims can lead sometimes to a chain or a series of remarks, usually comic: from Cyril Connolly (“imprisoned in every fat man a thin man is wildly signaling to be let out.”) to Kingsley Amis (“outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in”) to Katherine Whitehorn (“outside every thin woman is a fat man trying to get in”). Ironically, the plain style favoured by such pointillists as Hemingway may be just as mannered as the baroque.

In discussing Mannerism, E.R. Curtius notes that “no poetic form is so favourable to playing with ideas as epigram” which explains the popularity of “Sinngedicht” in 17th and 18th century Germany. Curtius remarks that “the word pointe (‘point’) is the French equivalent for the ‘pointed’ diction or thought which the Romans designated as ‘acutus’” (Italian “acutezze,” Spanish “la Agudeza”). He notes that, in Spanish and Italian, “the ‘acute’ or ‘subtle’ mode of expression [is] interpreted by the term ‘concetto’ (Spanish ‘concepto and ‘conceto,’ English ‘conceit’)” before going on to illustrate how ingenuity, acuteness, and conceit became the conditions of ingenious discourse associated with the Hispanic schools of Cultism and Conceptism. The French Classicists took exception to these “two ‘dangerous’ diseases of Spanish mentality” that marked these displays of wit. In fact, the roots of “arte de ingenio” lie in Quintilian’s work on classical rhetoric which refers to “the inimitable.” In ceremonial oratory in 18th-century London, a “sentiment” was an epigram that expressed a pleasing thought or wish at a toast. Epigrammatic discourse is used in literature to this day. Chamfort and Geoffrey Madan, now sadly out of print, were modern epigrammists of note. “Saki” (H.H. Munro) was a neat quipster (“He was good as cooks go and, as cooks go, he went”) and Dorothy Parker was well-known for her one liners and putdowns.

In Nuruddin Farah and Nancy Huston, as in many others, chapters and books open with epigraphs — some literary quotations, others inventions. Here the forms seem to suggest that they are outside the confines of the story, or that they mark the beginning of a story, and that they elide the distance between author and narrator. However, while they may show off the writer’s or narrator’s erudition, epigraphs can act as thematic, narrative or even cultural frames through which the story will be developed or viewed by the reader. They encircle and contain the story which usually recuperates or recapitulates the preceding epigraph(s). “Only connect” is E.M. Forster’s facile take on his own book. In the oral tradition of Indian folklore, the opening and closing formulae (“once upon a time”, “and so it ends”), A.K. Ramanujan notes, signify the beginning and the end of the story, assuring the audience that the tale has been relayed completely.

Nothing could be less circuitous than lists. In some traditions, there are set items in the catalogue of (female) beauty which are described feature by feature. An Indian sufi romance, ca. 1545, anatomizes the princess Madhumalati vividly, itemizing her from “her parting” down to “her thighs and legs,” a topos that’s also used in the western European tradition (e.g. Alanus and Bernard Silvestris). Lists can also be family trees as in the biblical “begats.” The catalogue of ships in the second book of the Iliad is part of an oral historical recitative tradition, usually listing queens, kings, and commanders. Rabelais puts this epic tradition to more playful use when he describes Gargantua’s games starting from “at Flushes” to “at Cricket” with many scatological pastimes in between. Georges Perec, another playful writer, makes Rabelaisian use of lists in his works as does Batavus Droogstoppel of Lauriergracht, coffee trader from Last & Co., in Multatuli's Max Havelaar where he lists dissertation topics for 5 pages. Using inventories in modern books as aide memoires is yet another common device.

The discourse of point is put to many different uses in literary speech. Stichomythia was a device often used in scenes of conflict in Greek theatre where actors spoke half lines in quick succession. Mr. Jingle in The Pickwick Papers spoke comically in choppy, barely complete, phrases. As a parody of a didactic speaker, Flaubert invents M. Homais in Madame Bovary who uses clichés to numbing effect. Bouvard and Pecuchet, in their turn, come up with odd definitions which are terse but often not to the point at all. (An ironic modern equivalent can be found in the glossaries in Peter Ackroyd’s The Plato Papers.) In Compton-Burnett’s novels, characters converse acidulously in short, plain sentences that carry the narrative forcefully to its usually bitter end. In their plays, Beckett and Pinter use fragmentary speech aporiastically to suggest the futility of communication in a meaningless world riven by violence.

Other forms of compression are driven by necessity. Borges claimed to have learned terseness and indirection as a result of his political fears. Certainly, the enigmatic character of Gramsci’s Notebooks derives in part from his attempts to get by prison censors. Such anticipatory fears can lead to bitter epitaphs. Of course, epitaphs ranging from the mawkish to the scurrilous are a delight to those who relish pointed discourse, in prose or in rhyme. We offer you a tame one by Matthew Prior “And so they lived; and so they died.”

Pointed discourse is effective in compressing narrative time between events, chapters or parts of a book (e.g. “fifty years later”). Flaubert, ever the great stylist, in the middle of a “real-time” narrative of events in a book then skips over years (cf. The Sentimental Education). In extremis, we recall Samuel Johnson’s short biography of one character who is dismissed from birth to death in the space of a single, balanced sentence in Rasselas. By far, our favourite biography of a literary character with the shortest life is in Flann O’Brien’s story, “John Duffy’s Brother” — “Gumley was a doctor. He was present when John Duffy was born and also when he died, one hour later.”

Last words are another source of pointed discourse. In Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a conquistador on a raft is killed by a spear thrown from the shore. “Long spears are now the fashion” he says before he falls overboard. This is an echo of Grettissaga where, in chapter 45, Þorbjörn holding a spear (spjót) with both hands runs Atli through. Grettir’s brother comes up with a classic “andsvar” before he dies. "Broad spears are in fashion now" (Þau tíðkast nú in breiðu spjótin) are his dying words. The sardonic remark (“svar,” ‘aðugasemd,” or “andsvar”) that a character makes when he receives a death blow or deals one remains understudied in Old Icelandic sagas. It’s quite possible that these lines derive, as do other features of sagas, from classical rhetoric. Our understanding, though, is that Romans were schooled to die nobly and in silence. Swedish novelist Reidar Jönsson’s My Life As A Dog also uses these throwaways which Lasse Hallström kept in his film version of the book. The device is still used in modern literature. What could be more bathetic than “What! No soap?/so, he died” in Samuel Foote’s The Great Pajandrum Himself? Of course, there are many collections of famous last words, some apocryphal.

We must stop. We fear that, unlike our topic, we have been neither witty nor brief in our telling or in our last words. And so we move on.

Marginalia

2006-05-14T19:43:00.000-05:00

In Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andreï Makine, who left the Soviet Union and sought refuge in Paris in 1987, recalls the “pure and simple literary hoax” that finally got him published in France. He says that his novels “had been written directly in French and rejected by publishers. I was ‘some funny little Russian who thought he could write in French.’ In a gesture of despair I had then invented a translator and submitted the manuscript presenting it as translated it from the Russian. It had been accepted, published, and hailed for the quality of the translation.”

“Where did you learn to speak such good English?” is a question that one hears not infrequently in Canadian literary circles even if it’s now considered déclassé in other parts of our mixed society to ask it. That question oughtn’t to surprise us even if we happen to be born in Canada. Despite the many cultures that make up this country, the official “culture industry” still operates in the English-French modality. After all, this isn’t India with its 20+ officially recognized languages (English being the national working language) and 50,000 dialects. True, there are many more languages spoken here but they might as well not exist. Bilingualism and multiculturalism: that’s the crux that needs to be reconciled.

As part of decolonising the region and the mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o asked African writers to write in native languages in order to reach the masses. Premchand switched from writing in Urdu to Hindi to appeal to more readers. André Brink refused to write in Afrikaans to signal his dissent over what the Boer government was doing to the people in South Africa. What choice do we have? For those of us who are rooted in English English, Indian English and Canadian English and know a bit of Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Farsi or Persian and a number of other dead or arcane eastern and western languages which have all but disappeared leaving just the dregs of English, there isn’t a simple or even a polite answer. Do folks forget that Mootoo, Ondaatje, Mistry, and Vassanji are part of the Canadian canon that’s written in English?

Although Walter Mosley thinks it gets easier the second time around, we have enough experience to suggest that it doesn’t really and that one’s status will always be interrogated. Keep your guard up and your smile pasted on. The questions will keep coming.

Language and otherness

2006-05-14T19:42:00.000-05:00

In Arjun Dangle’s 1992 edition of Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature (Orient Longman), we find Kumud Pawde’s moving autobiographical extract. In “The story of my Sanskrit,” she notes “that a woman from a caste that is the lowest of the low should learn Sanskrit, and not only that, teach it — is a dreadful anomaly to a traditional mind.” And there isn’t any shortage of traditional minds in colleges and universities.

Sanskrit is the language of scriptures, whose knowledge is vouchsafed to Brahmins, Hinduism’s highest caste, and this encroachment from a Mahar is seen as pollution. There is opposition — rejections, of course — and even words of praise come out with poisoned barbs. “Well, isn’t that amazing? So you’re teaching Sanskrit at the Government College, are you?” She is only redeemed and recognized when she marries into a higher caste, when she ceases to use her “Somkumar” surname and adopts “Pawde,” instead. Assimilation was her saviour.

The professor-friend, a teacher of postcolonial literatures, who lent us Dangle's book told us about a recent incident at a South Asian writer-friend’s book launch in Toronto. The writer’s literary agent remarked to the professor who is also South Asian: “But you speak such good English. You must have learned it here. Did you grow up in Canada?” One can spend a lifetime unpacking the contradictions that prevent integration, let alone assimilation.

Talk of the revenge of the spoken word over the written. Our story was on national radio but hot with shame and anger we switched off the set five minutes after the start. We thought that, in this day and age, national radio would have been able to transcend lumpen stereotypes since the "voice" which the jurors called "lively," "idiosyncratic," and full of "empathetic breadth' was certainly not typical. We had had a chat with the producers a few weeks ago. They had agreed that, given his age, milieu and background, the narrator's voice would be rendered by an actor speaking in an upper-crust English accent. What came out of the radio was a travesty of an "Indian" voice (think Peter Sellers at his worst) who could barely pronounce the hard words that the character loved using & c. We got six or seven emails of outrage from friends who listened. One called it a "mauling" in the name of authenticity and another wondered whether he should escalate it politically. It was so bad that our first thought was to return the prize in protest, then of sending in a letter but now we think we'll settle for a chat with the producers, that is, if they ever call us back which we doubt.

Apparently they gave another south Asian Canadian writer the same treatment: great story, ludicrously "accented" caricature of a reading. Since we can't ever be Canadian enough it seems for the literati, for one to be a south Asian writer, one has to speak like Peter Sellers. What a seal of authenticity. We are reluctant to blame the actor although he bungled a few words. We understand that he has a large repertoire but rather doubt if he or anyone of his ilk can find an assignment there that would allow him to speak in his own voice. Ironically, our reading followed an interview with a Japanese-Canadian artist who had been put in a camp after Pearl Harbour. He spoke about racism in his own voice. A tidy lesson for our radioheads, whatever their capacity for learning. Nothing can remind us more of the tunelessness of our media than its marching out of step with the times. God rot the doyennes of the spoken word. We wait to be redeemed by the written word. Here's hoping.

Anar Ali’s debut

2006-05-14T19:29:00.000-05:00

This from Anar Ali's publicist.

“Anar Ali paints a loving and rich portrait of the Ismaili community in transition from East Africa to Canada. Her stories combine the realism of a Rohinton Mistry with the whimsy of a Barbara Gowdy: a baby grows wings and flies, a family flees Idi Amin’s Uganda, a pearl diver discovers a secret world under the sea, an old woman deals with her son’s lifelong coma in a Calgary hospital. A dazzling debut by a writer whose next book I can’t wait to read.” — Shyam Selvadurai

From an original young writer, Baby Khaki’s Wings is a stunning collection of richly imagined stories about the Ismaili community, a Muslim sect with its origins in India, and a history of upheaval and dislocation.

Set in Canada and East Africa, and by turns comic and tragic, these are magical tales of men and women displaced; caught between home and exile, between what is real and imaged. A baby with wings, a disappeared life savings, a pearl diver’s magical secrets. With these stories, Anar Ali makes a powerful departure from traditional post-colonial narratives and speaks in the contemporary voice of Canada’s new international community.

Anar was born in Tanzania, grew up in Alberta, and lives in Toronto. The South Asian Journalists Association was scheduled to present Anar Ali and Ahmad Saidullah at an event on 13 April in Toronto. Anar Ali, a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, read from her acclaimed short story collection. (Ahmad Saidullah who was due to speak on south Asian writing, the short story and The Village Green Rag was unable to attend the event which was hosted at Tarek Fatah's house in Cabbagetown, Toronto.)

On melodrama

2006-05-14T19:24:00.000-05:00

One afternoon in 1993 when we were waiting for the bus to take us to Gallipoli away from Troy, wooden horse and all, we stepped into a souvenir shop to get a bottle of water. The owner looked so familiar that we were rattled until we realized that he looked like that famous Indian actor of the 1960s, Raj Kapoor. “Ah,” he said, raising his eyebrow quizzically, “Awaara Hoon,” naming a song from one of said Kapoor’s blockbusters. It turns out that bollywood musicals played in different parts of Asia and Europe. "Awaara" was Raj Kapoor's biggest hit.

The narrator in Khalid Hosseini’s best-selling debut novel The Kite Runner, which has a certain lyrical elegance, enjoys watching the Iranian musicals (similar to bollywood extravangazas) that were popular in Kabul cinemas. The boy-narrator grows up in a middle-class household and is very close to a servant from the Hazara community with whom he goes kite flying and chasing. Out of pique one day, he plants evidence of a theft on the servant who then decides to leave the house.

Time passes. The narrator and his father flee the Taliban in Kabul for Pakistan and then the US. However, the memory of his betrayal haunts him and, after his marriage, a letter impels to return to Afghanistan, now in the hands of the Taliban. He learns from a family friend that his childhood companion was really his half-brother, that he had died leaving behind a son. The narrator makes it his mission to find the boy. He encounters a childhood tormentor who is now a Talib and a child rapist. His victim is, as you probably guessed, the boy. After the narrator fights the Talib and rescues the victim, the traumatized boy stays silent until they reach the US when he finally speaks in an equally guessable moment.

Melodrama has readymade furniture: nostalgia, children or cute animals, separation at birth or mistaken identity, coincidences, redemption after conflict usually between good and evil, at times at unhappy cost, and narrative symmetry in which an ending is all the more moving for being satisfyingly predictable and reassuring at the same time. Critics have suggested that recent Iranian films focus on children because of political constraints. However, even before the ayatollahs' reign, the kind of Iranian cinema that the narrator of The Kite Runner was familiar with was strongly sentimental about romance and children. Kids and their cuteness were always part of the stock of Iranian melodrama.

Melodrama doesn’t touch anything new or inconvenient; it manipulates the old. All this is in The Kite Runner just as it is in Jonathan Safran Zoer’s work about 9/11 which handles pathos cutely but without sinking into sentimentalism. We don’t mean to suggest that Hosseini’s book isn’t moving. It touches us because melodrama always acts upon the sentiments. Take your handkerchiefs when you go to a weepie.

Let’s return to the boy’s silence. Another grammatical rule of the melodramatic is that nothing is left unsaid or unresolved. Everything, every “instant” emotion, every gesture, is weighted, articulated, expressed, underscored, perhaps with music (the needle notes of a sarangi accompany death), or with symbols (a pair of cooing doves stood in for lovers when film censorship was at its height) and finally resolved. The boy’s silence, then, is a good crux for probing the book’s aesthetics.

In Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali, the poor unwanted widow who is driven from house to house is also shown as greedy, grasping and manipulative. Her faults are not glossed over; her qualities are not enlarged or ornamented. Her death is shown simply without sentiment. Her grandchild calls to her and then touches her crouching frame. She falls over, dead, in the same stance and her head strikes the stone with a thud. That is it. There aren’t any overstatements. There was silence in the film because she was silenced in the story. That’s where the scene draws its power. In Hosseini’s book, on the other hand, the boy’s silence is a convenient way to develop some tension, to delay the rather predictable ending that is bound to come. The silence is embroidered, written about, discussed, analysed, probed, and generally used for effect. Everything is told; nothing is suggested. There is no doubt in our mind which of the two silences is more affecting.

We can extend this theme of silence beyond aesthetics to the carefully crafted politics of the book. We should remember that melodrama is a theatre of absolutes. In melodrama, there are always clear distinctions between good and evil and there’s always a chance at redemption by choosing good over evil whereas, according to Hegel, tragedy is the result of a protagonist being forced to choose between two forms of good. Tragedy results from, for instance, the tensions between public and private good. Melodrama needs a one-dimensional worldview without any shades, where evil and good are clearly distinguishable. It is free of unresolvable problematics (good vs good, evil vs evil). Readers of The Kite Runner will execrate, as they should, the Taliban as an abomination of politics and religion and for its mistreatment of dissenters, women, minorities, persons with other faiths and cultures. The narrator rightly criticizes Pakistani support for the fundamentalist movement. Some of us, though, would recognize in the Taliban’s trajectory to power the crucial role of the US which armed and trained the mujahideen and even printed their textbooks for use in classrooms. Nothing of this is mentioned in the book. It’s obviously inconvenient. In choosing to depict the Talib as a child molester, The Kite Runner moves further from realism into the familiar territory of demonizing melodramatic cant that we in this hemisphere know and unfortunately sometimes dismiss as propaganda.

Ultimately, The Kite Runner could have been more compelling, if not as satisfying, had it not been limited by its sentiments and by its aesthetics, by which silences it chooses to fill and what it, quite conveniently, leaves unsaid.

Doubt

2006-05-14T19:23:00.000-05:00

When in doubt, read the Russians. Always the Russians.

The writer and the public

2006-05-14T19:22:00.000-05:00

It might surprise some that doyens of culture who are thought to have lived on the scent of apples in some rarefied, ethereal realm often shared the grossest popular tastes. Wittgenstein, no mean influence on thinkers and a patron of the arts himself, liked nothing more than to watch shoot-'em-up westerns in the evening, and Canada’s Eden Robinson, author of Traplines, loves Stephen King. Henry James, a mandarin of letters if ever there was one, collected sensational drippings from newspapers about murders and other misdemeanours that our highfalutin’ auteurs would shun today.

Literature for them is the preserve of a coterie of theorists and practitioners whose very isolation which they despair of with romantic sighs confirms their status as elite and misunderstood geniuses well above the concerns and capacity of the masses whom they despise. This is truer of writers already in the mill-race, twittering in twee semi-English voices, grasping for a toehold in a publishing house or with some kinds of ties to the academy. Literateurs these days don’t seem to write for readers.

Regardless of their origins and location, they style themselves outside history, process and location as authors whom the common run of humanity fails to appreciate and who disdain the cut and thrust of the marketing people in the publishing world. The ones who do succeed in becoming popular are in a quandary to explain it. Their talent alone is their justification. Not for them the marketing or the tastes of the reading public. Good god, no, they're above all that. It's not a profession, we're told, but a labour of love against all odds and obstacles – ah, the poverty and the sacrifice — and their success is due solely to their single-minded pursuit of the higher arts where their merit has shone through. Never mind all the professional workshops they've attended, the networks they've worked hard to build, the professors, editors and writers they have ladled butter on, the words-of-mouth or the inbred referrals they've benefited from. All that doesn’t matter. It’s just a question of merit and dedication.

Why this disconnect between literature and its public? We know that in Iran the popularity of Hafiz's poems cuts across classes, so a butcher can recite his ghazals. How many ordinary Canadians can quote Canadian writers? Here probably pizza-delivery boys and taxi drivers with overseas PhDs or medical degrees can quote Dante, Rumi, Faiz or Broch. Academic theory and practice which has become as protectionist of its disciplines just as much as medicine or law with their self-reproducing, arcane terminologies, cant, trends and incestuous circles have as much to answer for as these writers.

Enough bile for a blog.

A law for reviewers

2006-05-14T19:21:00.000-05:00

Perhaps, we should name this Our Bilious Blog. There's more bile, alas. Is it too much to expect fewer clichés and more intelligence from assessors? In the spirit of John Gregory Dunne’s proscriptions, we propose that reviews that praise a book in terms alluding to aspects of the writer’s culture be outlawed. No more “as complex and nuanced as a qorma” referring to an Indian writer’s work or paeans to the “sights and smells of the bazaar” for an Egyptian quartet. What’s the point of reading of a text if it can be reduced to something that’s so stereotypical and that’s so easily reproducible and numbingly familiar? It behooves a critic to try to be as original as the writer.

A script for our times

2006-05-14T19:19:00.000-05:00

One can’t always reduce the value of a book to what it says or to its appeal to the times but there are still lessons to be learned from Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974). Katharina, the protagonist, is driven to a final act of desperation after she is arrested for sheltering Ludwig, a deserter who has robbed two Bundeswehr payrolls. After extensive surveillance, police stage an armed raid on her flat only to find that the suspect has escaped. They search the flat, interrogate, intimidate and harass Katharina, and tap her phone. In collusion with the authorities, the Springer-like tabloid press smears Katharina and her family in its pages as communist and anarchist sympathizers, a campaign that results in her ostracism and in her ill mother’s death.

The range and depth of characters on either side are subtle and the narrative is problematized but our sympathies lie with Ms. Blum as the author intended. “Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung,” Böll’s epilogue ran, “this is neither intentional, nor accidental, but unavoidable.” Following his objections to the mass hysteria fanned by Bild-Zeitung in its coverage of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the tabloid accused Böll of being a terrorist sympathizer. Like Katharina Blum, he was subjected to a campaign of innuendo, humiliation, suspicion and interrogation.

Film directors Volker Schlöndorff’s and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 screen version of the book is a powerful feminist examination of the interplay of power, ideology and patriarchy. This is not just a good guys-bad guys drama staged over the cold war ashes of east and west Germany. The frightening things is that these things could and do happen nowadays. Luedig, the Axel Springer-like owner of Die Zeitung in the film, delivers a funeral oration on the freedom of the press with clichés about civilization and its enemies that would not have been out of place in a speech by Goebbels at a Nuremberg rally or in a recent White House or Pentagon briefing.

The film is timely. The liberal-democratic state’s misuse of power and its collusion with mass media’s manipulation of the truth to override the rule of law and individual rights speak to all of us who have followed with some anxiety the post 9/11 triumph of “security” concerns over human rights. If, as Merleau–Ponty asserted, the discourse of the political is violent, the invasiveness and pervasiveness of mass media violates us. At the same time as it inures us to violence it overexposes us to it. The consumer is the one who’s consumed. As the film subtitle reads “Or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead.” A lesson, indeed, to all of us and well worth learning through Böll’s prose and through Angela Winkler’s astonishingly graduated performance as Katharina Blum.

Terrorism and the rich

2006-05-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

Found on a clipping on our professor-friend's fridge: From Peter Ustinov, author of Dear Me, probably one of the two better-titled autobiographies (Simone Signoret’s Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be is the other), this gem: “Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich.”

Of writing and politics: the coming of non-fiction and urban realism?

2006-05-14T19:15:00.000-05:00

"Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters." — Stendhal (Henri Beyle)

Loathe as we are to admit it, we think that V.S. Naipaul is right in criticizing “the exaltation of the familial” and the trivial in recent desi fiction. So much for Fredric Jameson's much-exploded thesis that all third-world literatures have a public aspect and ought to be considered "national allegories."

Think of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Orhan Pamuk, Nuruddin Farah, Tayeb Salih, Sembene Ousmane, Hanan al-Shaykh, Abdelrahman Munif, Emile Habiby, Dai Sijie, Álvaro Mutis, and many other African, east and west Asian and new Latin American writers, all rooted in politics. Which desi writers come to mind right now? Taslima Nasreen, Vikram Chandra, and Siddhartha Deb in India and Amitav Ghosh, Vassanji, Rushdie, again to a certain extent, Mistry, maybe, in Europe or North America. We know that there are some excellent Dalit writers and probably equally good work in Indian languages other than English but what has happened to the new crop of Indoanglian fiction?

Let's face it: huge advances have been paid for what are really silly books. One longs for some substance, even a little grit, under all this newly churned froth. It appears that the booming economy's completely changed consumers' value of books. Reading has been reduced to a leisure activity which demands nothing more than escapist and poorly constructed bollywood melodramas about TV shows, mystics, call centres, cello playing, romance and arranged marriages. (The writer-friend who read Seth’s An Equal Music said “ah, one could make a novel out of this.”)

Amitav Ghosh thinks that fiction is holistic with its own totality. We know that the range of reading is expanding in India to include all sorts of interests but the novels that continue to command attention are somewhat denatured, depoliticized works. What has led to such pretence and an avoidance of serious issues in fiction from India which has seen the Bhopal tragedy, the 1984 pogrom of Sikhs, the post-Babri Masjid violence, the Bombay riots, and the Gujarat massacres and many other depredations?

You'd think that academicians would be tired of it too but we haven't seen much criticism. OK, we exaggerate a little but aren't we in danger of losing our idealism and belief in a better world to the point where the latest Maruti is more important than anything else? We need a profile of the reader. Who has time to read them? Who demands these books? Who refuses to publish political fiction? Who bothers to write them? Even more troubling for a blogger, why bother to write about them?

A formal consequence. Fact and fiction go together as writers contest reality. With the advent of urbanization in India, it’s unsurprising that the village story is no longer the commonplace form. At best, it's been replaced by more imaginative types of story telling. However, magic realism is already becoming a museum piece in Latin America, unsurprisingly at a time when the region is turning politically to the left. It'll be interesting to see if Indian fiction makes the same shifts to urban realism. Rupa Bajwa's The Sari Shop is an exception but I am not sure if it will start a trend towards a less bauble-ridden reality.

Maybe it was a sign when Arundhati Roy chose to give up writing novels. The upside to all this is that Indian non-fiction is making great strides. Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Amitava Kumar, Amartya Sen, Pankaj Mishra and Roy (although her critics allege that she is still writing fiction) are all thinkers worth reading but we are hoping for a sea change in Indoanglian fiction.

Two short novels

2006-05-14T19:13:00.000-05:00

Our rickety bedside table had been slumping under the weight of unread desi heavyweights. We put two short novels that we got from our professor-friend on one of the piles. The rightward tilt of the table was corrected at once. It seems the ocean of stories read our minds even before we wrote down our wishes. Out of the political ether emerge these two works which, although they don't have the avoirdupois of a Seth ramble or a Chandra tome, are certainly not lightweight, not by any means.

Is there a better modus of experience of India than by train? In Shama Futehally's Reaching Bombay Central (2002, Viking), a railway journey becomes a metaphor of nothing short of India's destiny. While Ayesha Jamal, the protagonist, hurtles towards Bombay in a heightening atmosphere of anxiety and fear, passengers appear, leave, and reappear, as if on stage. Various stories are played out as if in India's conscience. There's Ranjit, a journalist, on his way to interview riot survivors in Bombay to see if aid has reached them after all this time and if politicians have lived up to their promise. There's Charanjitji, an ex-MP and a Yadav, smarting over the insult of being denied an AC car. Jeyashree is a squirrelly little expostulant budding over with tart remarks. Finally, there's the unnamed bundi-clad ex-haute bureaucrat. He is willing to help the ex-MP get his AC berth but his motive, it soon appears, is to put him under an obligation for a high post after retirement. Unskeining in flashbacks in the middle of these conversations is Ayesha's story. She has been sent on a journey to ask the help of her uncle Zahid Mahood, a police inspector, for her huband who's been suspended unfairly on a vague, politically-motivated charge and is to be brought before a commission of enquiry. The train and, by extension, the nation hurtle towards darkness until the end when the sun breaks out suddenly with the news of the defeat of the Sangha.

Historiography is the site of conflict for contesting narratives in Githa Hariharan's intelligent In Times of Siege. The troubles begin when Shiv, a professor of history at Kasturba Gandhi Central University (IGNU is clearly meant), sends in a module for a correspondence course on Indian history. Basava, also called Basavanna (Elder Brother), a treasurer in the 12fth-century city of Kalayana which lay 300 kilometres north of the Vijaynagar kingdom, was a poet, a visionary, and a social reformer. Shiv's module includes an account of Basava's circle of mystics and revolutionaries who were veershaivas (warriors of Shiva) and came from all castes, even "untouchables." In this utopia in Kalayana, a marriage was arranged between a Brahmin bride-to-be and the son of a cobbler. Kalayana's priests and traditionalists objected to this mingling of castes that had resulted from Basava's egalitarian experiment. King Bijjala was persuaded to condemn the marriage. The pair was tied to a horse and dragged through through the streets. The remains were decapitated. Despite Basava's pleas for non-violence, his followers retaliated. The city burned and Basava left. The king was assassinated and Basava died mysteriously.

Arya, the departmental fundamentalist, sets up the reaction while Shiv, the professor, is away on leave tending to his ward who has broken her leg. Itihas Suraksha Manch (History Protection Society), a Hindu fundamentalist organization modelled on the RSS, objects to Shiv's account for highlighting caste divisions and for reducing Basava's role from mystic to social reformer, a view which they claimed was probably derived from "foreign" Muslim sufi traditions. The university authorities are mealymouthed in their genuflection to the objections of Arya and his goons. Shiv's injured ward Meena is an activist whose ideological commitment to fighting "fundoos" draws up the battle lines as she mobilizes the left. Conflicts mount and, to complicate matters, Shiv is drawn to Meena.

These slight novels achieve what the heavies don't. It's a parlous state of nationhood when fanatics, thugs and murderers start issuing diktats in the name of religion and morality. It's downright frightening whether they come to power in India, in Afghanistan or south of our border. These are cautionary tales for all our literary citizenry to struggle to keep religion and politics clearly separated. A peacable world requires our vigilance against theocracies. We have to be vigilant about who controls the project of writing the story of civilizations, of rewriting history. Futehally who died in 2004 and Hariharan were friends and have delivered us these truths in fictional form with pith, bite and elegance.

Crimson Gold

2006-05-14T19:12:00.000-05:00

We have just seen independent filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s 2003 feature film Crimson Gold for the third time; each viewing adds pleasure and wonder. The true events in which Crimson Gold is based were brilliantly scripted by director Abbas Kiarostami to show how inequities, slights and hypocrisies can drive an ordinary — almost a saintly — man played by Hussein Emaddedin under his own name, over the edge. The movie will be welcomed by those who associate Iranian films with just stories of children or with existential angst. A trenchant study of class differences and religious intolerance, Crimson Gold won the Jury Award at Cannes and was adjudged the best film at the Chicago Film Festival. This astonishing, near perfect, work is now available on DVD from Wellspring.

Joseph Macwan’s Angaliyat (The Stepchild)

2006-05-14T19:08:00.000-05:00

A Syrian filmmaker called his film "Extras" because, according to him, "in an oppressive society we are all extras." Joseph Macwan’s Angaliyat, which won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1988 but is yet to be translated into another Indian language, likens the Dalit community to the stepchild, condemned to remain "on the periphery of the stepfather's family," as it holds its mother's finger (angali) while she enters the new home. Prefaced with an excellent introduction, Rita Kothari's English translation for OUP notes that Angaliyat is the first novel in Gujarati written by a Dalit about the Vankars, a weaving caste, many of whom converted to Christianity like Macwan to escape oppression.

While the whiplash of the derogatory Charotari term "dedh" (now banned) used of some groups cannot be conveyed in English, Kothari does a good job of limning the struggle of four "transgressive" Vankar lives on the outskirts of a village run by the landowning Patidar and Thakurs in the Charotar region of Gujarat. Teeha, brave and unstinting, is in love with Methi whom he rescues from the harassment of upper-class louts in the village where he and Valji have gone to sell their cloth and, as a result, suffer for his presumption. There are surprises: the wronged Vankars see the British in India as an impartial authority free from casteism and corruption and, despite the presence of Gandhians among the Vankar elders, a Congress-led independent India is feared for the coming "ram rajya" which would mean elevation of the higher castes to national office and further repression of the Vankars, and for the loss of livelihoods through the resulting industrialization. In the story, Valji and Teeha are killed, mourned by Methi, who has stayed devoted to Teeha even after his marriage to someone else, and Kanku, Valji's wife, who then remarries in defiance of upper-caste norms.

According to the editor, the suffering and the experiences of the Vankars have not been accommodated within Gujarati mainstream literature which has been distinguished by a "privileging of the literary over the political and substantive." Macwan's complex novel with its many forms of storytelling is "a tale of a culture that is extinct and pushed into oblivion." It is not written to re-establish "its prestige but to acknowledge and sing of its strength and character." A poignant claim, alas, given the upper-caste BJP's success in communalising Dalit youth (not necessarily the Vankars) as its stormtroopers in its violent campaigns against Muslims in Gujarat. Nevertheless, we found Angaliyat new and humbling as we bowed under the weight of the experiences of the oppressed in pre-independence India. We'd like to re-read it but we fear that our professor-friend is anxious for the return of her book.

How Opal Mehta got stuffed

2006-05-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

Apologists for Kaavya Viswanathan over her plagiarism case are crawling out of the woodwork: her youth, her presence at Harvard, her photographic memory (which obviously skips title pages), the way writers "internalize" other works, it’s formula fiction after all. KV had seemed to be curiously unrepentant herself before she made herself unavailable. No doubt, this is good grounding for a corporate li(f)e. The Grumpy Old Indian Man says it best.

According to Random House, the number of passages lifted from McCafferty was up from 13 to 45. However, someone's pointed out that KV was not the sole copyright owner of Opal Mehta. That was shared with 17th Street Productions/Alloy Entertainment who are book "packagers" and had been implicated in a wrongful copying case before. Another sees Little, Brown's $500,000 handouts as less of an advance, and more of a publicity stunt to exploit KV's youth and Harvard connections while yet another columnist suggests that LB fully deserved all it got. "Many parties had their fingers in this pie, and while Viswanathan is the public scapegoat, behind her are publishing professionals who are either complicit or ignorant — neither prospect appealing."

Little, Brown changed its mind. Kaavya Viswanathan's publisher announced that it would recall all copies of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life and that it wouldn’t issue a sanitized edition. Book collectors who have already snagged a copy must be salivating. Robert Zelnick argues that stiffer penalties be imposed on those who plagiarise, as students do. He says "banish them from jobs or contracts in their field for a year" but surely something stronger is merited. Since this misrepresentation was a commercial activity that Ms. Viswanathan would have profited by, it ought to be treated as fraud. However, Ms. McCafferty won't claim damages. One presumes that the advance will have to be returned. No news of the movie deal but there isn't any doubt that if Opal Mehta gets [verb of choice] anywhere, it won't be on the silver screen.

As if McCafferty and Kinsella were not enough, according to The Harvard Crimson, KV's now said to have pilfered bits from Meg Cabot and, gasp, even Salman Rushdie.

Some samples given by The Harvard Crimson:

Page 12 of Meg Cabot’s 2000 novel “The Princess Diaries” reads: “There isn’t a single inch of me that hasn’t been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized. [...] Page 59 of Viswanathan’s novel reads: “Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized."

Page 35 of Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “If from speed you get your thrill / take precaution—make your will.” On page 118 of Viswanathan’s novel: “If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution—write your will.”

It's time to give up on this chase and to start on another. How about DesiLit readers look for sentences in Opal Mehta that have *not* been copied? It's almost enough to make one buy the book.

"Kaavya was my student last spring (in a section where I was a TA). I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful-- I had given her low grades on her papers.

I feel bad for her, even though she was always falling asleep in section (as if you don't notice a snoozing person sitting at a conference table for ten). Plagiarizing from chick lit has to be some kind of double whammy against artistic integrity."

Read more reactions.

The latest is that DreamWorks has halted work on the film. But don’t feel too sorry. I am sure that, in the true American cultural tradition, KV is bound to get $$$ to go on a lecture tour on how she plagiarized her way to a huge advance. A TV spot later, anyone?

Novels for younger readers

2006-05-14T18:51:00.000-05:00

We grew up in a manner of speaking with Enid Blyton, Satyajit Ray’s Goopy and Bagha, Akbar and Birbal stories, fables and folk tales from round the world, PG Wodehouse, the Panchatantra, DC comics, and Illustrated Classics. These days, under the pretence of checking our reading habits, we feel compelled sometimes to revisit our youth. Salinger and the YA crowd never did it for us as we aged. Neither did formula fiction but then again most of our youth was spent in high company (Mann, Flaubert, Tolstoi, et alia) but we relent and regress at times even now. What is it about writers as disparate as Alison Pick, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Irvine Welch, Banana Yoshimoto or Murakami (before he started parodying his whimsy into a formula) that can evoke the struggles or sweetness of young adulthood so well? Is it the selfless innocence blighted by the discovery of the compromised and unjust adult world, by betrayed ideals, by emotions rent for the first time, by violence, or by the loss of friendships? Or is just about ruing lost opportunities and the blighting of promise (there's a whole school of English juvenilia and nostalgic school memoirs of which Cyril Connolly is an exemplar) that appeal to us? Even cynical old writers try to be open to being moved by bittersweet experiences of lost innocence as we totter on towards the inevitable.

Canadian writing

2006-05-14T18:46:00.000-05:00

On the Guardian’s blog on national literatures, we note that, aside from the blahness and blandness of the Canadian old guard, we were sure that someone would mention Mistry and Ondaatje but we'd also recommend MO's poetry. We are glad that someone mentioned Dionne Brand but you may want to take a look at John Thompson, a removed Mancunian and a brilliant poet who met with a tragic end. Lots of emerging talent from the South Asian community: Anar Ali has just made her debut along with Anosh Irani and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarsinha. We still think Moyez Vassanji's The Book of Secrets remains his best novel and Jaspreet Singh is worth looking at although we found the early Shauna Singh Baldwin, Nazneen Sadiq and Anita Rau Badami overrated (their later works are much better). And where did Ajit Bose go to? Picked up in a book of world poetry but ignored in the official Canadian anthology, quite a judgement. Priscilla Uppal may be a better poet than a novelist but there's no doubt about Anne Carson's poetry creds. Drew Hayden Taylor is notable for the Métis voice; he has published many books, he says. Eden Robinson from the Hausla community in BC has written three; her Traplines is a powerful collection of short stories and we'd recommend One Good Story, That One by Thomas King who teaches at Guelph. That collection is marvelous as is Shyam Selvadurai’s Storywallah gatherum.

Take a look at the CBC website for past and new Literary Award winners. Alison Pick from this year's crop has written a fine novel and is a poet too. Catherine Bush, one of the fiction jurors this year, has a well-written novel Claire's Head (we wonder if it derived from Rohmer's film Claire's Knee). There are many French Canadian writers whom others more qualified than we can speak more of (can we claim Lisa Appignanesi and Nancy Huston?). Škvorecký's The Cowards and his detective novels remain his best even if many -isms crop up there. We must say we disliked Cohen's novels and most of Layton's verse. Among the pluses, we like Cecil Foster's prose, Austin and George Elliot Clarke (unrelated), Donna Bailey Nurse, Clifton Joseph, Lillian Allen, Shani Mootoo, and Rabindranath Maharaj. Sheila Heti, a young writer, has just published her first novel. Many others on our to-read list include Alootok Ipellie, Camilla Gibb, Larissa Lai, Patrick Lane, Ross Leckie, Don Mackay. Life is short, as we keep repeating.

Some Japanese writers

2006-05-14T18:19:00.000-05:00

The Guardian has been running blogs on national literatures. Never mind the Vermont version of the Canadian maple which goes on our flag. Other colours are flying high. It's Japan's turn. That gave us some time to think about the few we have read and enjoyed. The Tale of Genji, Oe, Abe, Yoshimura, Mishima, Tanizaki, Soseki Natsume, Yamamoto, Murakami, Endo, Kawabata, some Noh plays and poetry that's been Englished. Ishiguro is English, no matter his antecedents, just as much as Kogawa and Adachi are Canadian.

Originality and authorship, copying and creation

2006-05-14T18:16:00.001-05:00

“Yeh masail-e tasavvuf, yeh terah bayaan, Ghalib” (these problems of mysticism, this discourse of yours, Ghalib!).

The poet sometimes refers to himself or herself by name (taqallus) in the last couplet (makhta) in Urdu ghazals (example above). In western culture, works can bear the imprimatur of the creator. Artists sign or initial their paintings. A vase shows the mark of the potter. A holograph MS can be proof of a work’s authorship. Some thing is created by someone.

Occasionally, the originator can be discovered in another’s artefact. Derek Walcott’s Omeros can be read as a re-telling in terza rima of the Iliad and the Odyssey (not to mention The Divine Comedy). Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (which we have yet to read) is supposedly a bow to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Not all retellings are obvious. Just as Voltaire’s Zadiq inferred the presence of a lame camel, or was it a horse, by looking at its hoofprints — the earliest form of Holmes’ style of literary detection that we know of — we can infer the presence of an author in secondary works. In South African novelist David Galgut’s The Good Doctor, we find everywhere the unmistakable footprints of The Ugly American. In turn, when he cast Monsignor Quixote as a priest who travels with his friend, the marxist mayor, Graham Greene signalled his debt not just to Cervantes but also to Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo series. Shakespeare borrowed from Holinshed, Virgil from Catullus, Dante from Virgil. Kathasaritasagar, which later found its way into Europe through some spin offs, is itself a derivative of the Hitopadesa which can be traced through several works all the way back to the Panchtantra and Kalil-wa-Dimna.

There’s a fine line between tribute and outright theft. However, there’s a belief that a work that incorporates excerpts from another writer should be treated as bricolage (in Indian popular music, it’s called “remix”) rather than as an instance of plagiarism. Pocopomo critics believe that “intertextuality,” the embedding of secondary texts, is a legitimate property of literature. Martin Amis had no such qualms. He accused American novelist Jacob Epstein of lifting sentences straight from his novel The Rachel Papers. Chinese bestselling writer Guo Jingming was found guilty of plagiarizing a Zhuang Yu novel to whom he now owes 210 thousand yuan. We can’t seem to get away from the decisions acquitting Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling of plagiarism. At home, Booker prizewinner Yann Martel admitted, after he was pressed, to being inspired by Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar’s story about a boy on a boat with a panther after they are shipwrecked. Martel’s Life of Pi tells the story of a Indian boy in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after his ship sinks. Someone whose name we forget but who edited a book by Nega Mezlekia, winner of the Governor General’s award in 2000, claimed that she had actually written a lot of his work. (Why a professional editor worth her salt would do wholescale rewriting rather than structural editing is a question only she can answer.) Things can get bad. Ken Adachi, a Toronto Star writer, killed himself after he faced a second accusation of plagiarism.

Literary figures have hidden their authorship under someone else’s moniker. James Macpherson put together bits from Gaelic folk songs poetry into his "Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gallic or Erse Language" (1760) by “Ossian.” This was popular even after the hoax was exposed. In 1769, the boy-poet Thomas Chatterton faked the 15th-century poetry of Thomas Rowley. Poor Chatterton killed himself in his room after he was found out. Other latter-day hoaxsters in the news: James Frey, Nasdijj, and J.T. Leroy belong in the same class as today’s email hoaxsters or the sellers of holy relics in earlier days.

Laurence Sterne complained about plagiarism: “Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?” but an article proves that he plagiarised this from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. (“As apothecaries, we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another…Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.”) The article goes on to cite Claude Lévi-Strauss from The Savage Mind on the distinction “between the ‘bricoleur’ who happily assembles constructions from a heterogeneous array of materials, and the more scientifically minded ‘ingénieur’, who is driven by the search for abstract concepts.” (Needless to say, most of this blog section was lifted from other sources.) Formula fiction, such as Harlequin or young-adult novels, run true to outlines of specific plot types. A recent victim of such mechanical reproducibility was Kaavya Viswanthan who shared her copyright with book packagers.

While it may seem proper, given copyright laws, to be able to dispute claims of authorship, literary theory poses a challenge. In Barthes' account of the death of the author, he argued that the ultimate meaning of a text and the author’s intention could not be deciphered as there were reading codes that allowed for open interpretation in bourgeois western culture. Besides, language displaces the author as a “person” for a “subject.” It seals up referentiality: discourse turns back on itself. Intertextuality and découpage entail the primacy of discourse over the real.

Barthes went on to say that “the author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation.” Previously, one presumes in oral traditions, although he used the term “ethnographic societies,” there was a commonweal of stories and telling traditions that were transmitted by “a mediator, shaman or relator” who mastered their narrative codes. Stories travelled across borders more effectively than people or goods. There was widespread borrowing across cultures. The debate over Homer’s identity, whether he was one or many “singers” still goes on in places. Of course, the unreliable narrator and multiple "authors" have been devices common to European novels since Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Work has been done, not just by poststructuralists, on mapping writerly and readerly codes. In another blog, we mentioned Ramanujan’s folklore typologies. Similarly the elements of storytelling such as motifs and units of meaning were plotted by Propp, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson & c. There are theories that reduce all novels to six basic plot types and so on. Great users of narrative strategies to create authorial distance, Flaubert and Joyce both used the image of an author remote and indifferent from the work “paring his fingernails.” (Flaubert though also said “c’est moi” when someone asked him who the original for Madame Bovary was). Henry James in The Turn of the Screw traces the origins of his story through several transmission points. Brecht, though, would try for the opposite effect through his “alienation” technique to disrupt the story with reality to show its artificiality (in the sense of "artifice").

It would be interesting to trace the origins of these ideas. The most influential theory of artistic creation is Plato’s. For him, the act of creating is mimetic: it consists in copying "realistic" versions of true “ideal forms.” The metaphor of the dwellers in the cave who see shadows and infer the world from them can be extended to the creative process. Sensate reality itself is a copy and artefacts become copies of copies of originals that are at some remove from the ideal. In his interpretation of poeisis, Gilbert Murray, though, said the stress should lie on the creative process of “making” of the copy.

Leaving our simplified discussion of Platonic metaphysics, we see that as part of their apprenticeship to their art many artists started by copying the greats. Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, “lived in an age and a culture when it was normal for the authors of poems or essays to renounce the vanity of authorship and to ascribe their works to more famous names, in order to secure a greater circulation for what they had composed.” “The ‘Khayyam’ of the Rubáiyat is really a collective pseudonym.” (source forgotten). This was certainly the case in painting. Cervantes said “Los buenos pintore imatan la natureleza, pero los malos la vomitan (good painters imitate, bad ones vomit it). Rubens copied Michelangelo and, according to one account, even improved a figure. Modern writers have followed that process too. T.S. Eliot went on to say that "immature poets copy, mature poets steal." Joan Didion honed her craft by typing sentences from Hemingway.

So when does imitation change from flattery to pilfering? Raymond Williams notes that “original” acquired the sense of being “authentic” (an original work of art) and “the sense of a singular individual.” There was an extension of its meaning to “the first work (not the copy)” to “new” in the 17th century. In the 18th century, “original” also meant “singular” or “rare” (Williams, again). In answer to our aesthetic poser, he says that “‘originality’ then became a common term of praise of art and literature” as being “distinguished by genius” and not mechanical, the product of mere skill and labour.

What if one were to make an absolutely identical copy of Michelangelo’s David, flaw for flaw, chisel stroke for chisel stroke? Would the copy be a lesser work? Is a lithograph series unique as each number has been reproduced? What makes a piece of art unique? One could assert that the lithograph series itself is a work of art taken together or individually. The second David is different because it was produced under specific conditions by someone else in a certain age. Therein lies its uniqueness. There is a famous literary analogue. In Borges’ story. Pierre Menard closets himself with the books that were found in Cervantes’ library. His object is to write not another Don Quixote but “the” Don Quixote. The reviewer then compares passages from the two Quixote which are identical. However — and here Borges' genius comes to the fore — he interprets them differently in the light of what was known in the age of the creator. He deems Menard’s version richer as it has insights that only came after the age of Cervantes had passed.

There are several takes on creation: philosophical, cosmological, theological, psychological, neurological and literary. What about the various creation myths in different cultures that embody the maker as an artist creating the universe out of gap, void or chasms? Early materialists, however, such as Lucretius saw the world as a combination of atoms – creation was not ex nihilo — and death simply annihilation and not to be feared. Among the pre-Socratics, Pythagoras, whose views were quite influential, found the “cosmos” composed in a perfect harmonic combination of “arithmoi,” very much like a musical piece, which extended to “the music of the spheres.” (The perfection of the universe was assumed.) Within the western philosophical tradition, teleological proofs, the argument of design, the ontological argument were used to prove the existence of a creator, a ruse that’s still in currency. Neurology lies beyond our compass just as much as discussions of eternity and infinity but it’s interesting to look at creativity. The artistic creator takes on a divine parallel with its attendant mysteries. In a book long suppressed for conflicting with the teachings of the patristics, Aristotle, that grey sheep of the islands, had claimed, we believe, 32 prime movers for the universe. An article that we read but can’t seem to find claims that Marsilius Ficino’s De Vita Triplici (1489) “the first book to treat of melancholy at any length, not only rehabilitated the ‘Aristotelian’ notion of the gifted melancholic, but expressly tied it in with the Platonic notion of ‘divine frenzy’, thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man, the ‘homo literatus’ or tortured genius, pitched back and forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair.” The suffering artist is hardly unknown to any of us, genius or not.

Write and despair.

The power of no

2006-05-14T18:15:00.000-05:00

Not a self-help blog on assertion. Quite the opposite unless you call in Bartleby. For reluctant writers who dislikes the inbred snobbisme of the writing profession, the pretensions of academia, and the vulgarism of the publishing world, our writer’s friend’s recommendation of Vila-Matas’ Bartleby & Co. will be manna. Vila-Matas, part of the new wave of Spanish talent that includes Javier Marías and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, has produced a work of literary and invented authorities on the refusal to write. For those of us who have resisted the urge to write for over 30 years and have only recently succumbed, Vila-Matas provides enough factual and fictional justification to down one’s pen forever. The only thing that's left to write about in this blog may be the figurative and literal deaths of the author. Until then.

The death of Toer

2006-05-14T17:47:00.000-05:00

Pak Pram, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, author of the Buru Quartet, who spent 15 years in prison for his writings and activism, died in Jakarta on 30 April 2006. Toer was a left-wing intellectual and writer of fiction whose politics angered the ruling Dutch and later Suharto in Indonesia. In his tribute, Tariq Ali quotes Toer as saying “Just as politics cannot be separated from life, life cannot be separated from politics. People who consider themselves to be non-political are no different; they've already been assimilated by the dominant political culture — they just don't feel it any more.”

Read more on Pram, the conscience of a nation in The Independent … The New York Times ... The Guardian ... The Financial Times … Sun2Surf … and in The Pram Page.

Writerly fragments

2006-05-14T17:44:00.001-05:00

Nihal de Silva, the author of The Road From Elephant Pass, A Far Spent Day, and The Giniralla Conspiracy, all of which we have yet to read, was killed by land mines during a visit to the National Park with six others...On the 25th anniversary of Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie reminisces about his struggles as an artist and his tussle with Indira Gandhi...Amit Chaudhuri is making his name as one of the finer literary critics from India. Check out his essay on Rabindranath Tagore and orientalism. Unlike many Indoanglian writers, Allan Sealy continues to live in India...Outlook India polls Sealy on his views on Naipaul, Wilson Harris and Ruskin Bond, his readership, and his new book Red in a candid interview...Amartya Sen's new book is picking up accolades as is Manju's Kapur's Home and her A Married Woman...Orhan Pamuk on, what else, the freedom to write and Julian Barnes, whom we always look forward to reading, on Flaubert...Londonstani is earning readers' notices...Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter "e." Christian Bök's Eunoia, on a cool Coach House site, has separate entries, each written with only one vowel...Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue shows that south Asian writers can write equally well about other cultures. Read a story excerpted from Ali's latest...Michael Billington, drama critic of The Observer (UK), describes the multilingual south Asian production of Shakespeare's Dream as "sexy," "savage" and "primitive." Charmed, we are sure...Outlook examines the fact and the legend of Bashir Badr who claims to be the greatest Urdu poet, ahead of Ghalib, Mir or Faiz...