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| "Writing can be a dangerous activity" | | |
Mukund Padmanabhan
Kiran DesaionThe Inheritance Of Loss, the Man Booker Prize, and the process of writing novels.
Kiran Desai: "Becoming an immigrant and moving around forces a certain kind of personality on you. It forces a certain distance from any subject and you are placed a little bit as an outsider."
Set in the Darjeeling Hills at a time when the movement for Gorkhaland challenges established ways of life, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance Of Loss revolves around the lives of an eccentric and embittered retired judge and his orphaned granddaughter. As the unrest threatens old habits, unsettles comfortable assumptions, and sunders seemingly secure relationships, Ms. Desai's Man Booker Prize-winning novel gently examines a range of issues such as inequity, violence, nationalism, identity, and exile.
In winning the Man Booker Prize, the 35-year-old writer, whose first novel Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard was published in 1998, became the youngest woman author to do so. Excerpts from an interview conducted a few days ago in Frankfurt, where she was present to attend the book fair:
If The Inheritance Of Loss is based on your experiences in Kalimpong, we are talking about pretty early memories here, aren't we?
Partly based on them. I was 14, 15 or 16 years old. And then I left.
Sai [the novel's central character] is a 16-year-old girl. So I guess you have already been asked the autobiographical question.
I suppose so. It is not my own story, but on the whole, there is a family thing. [Referring to the similarities between Sai's grandfather and her own] My grandfather was an IAS, he went to Cambridge, came from a village of Gujarat, made that huge journey, finally ended up in a High Court. So a lot of it overlaps. Of course, he wasn't such an ogre! (Laughs)
This novel took you longer to write than the first one.
Much longer. It was seven years of working and a year of trying ... of fighting ... to get it published. It was a much harder book to get published than the first one [Hullabaloo In The Guava Orchard].
Really? Why?
I don't know. It is surprising when I look back at the whole process, but it was much easier to get the first book published.
Rejection slips? That's hard to believe.
Oh my God! So many. The second time around it was incredibly difficult. It's been completely bizarre. The first book was ridiculously easy. I think it is because it's simpler to get a first book published. They pick you up as a young writer. They sell you much more easily. And the first book was much sillier and much more frivolous. And it was much more likeable. And it sold quite easily.
This book ... opposite reaction. I had already signed a contract with the American publishers but in England, for example, it was really hard. Everyone said no, except the one guy who is publishing it now [Hamish Hamilton]. It was a big nightmare. This book would have been published one year ago if it wasn't for all this drama and difficulty.
That is just one year. What about the other seven?
The other seven! That was really hard! I seemed to have entered a different time zone. And after two or three years go by, it is just easier to take four, five, six or seven ... it just doesn't seem to matter any more. Time passes in a completely different way.
I was living more and more poorly so it was important to finish. But it was a long journey, which grew bigger and bigger and spiralled out of control. At one point I realised, I'd have to reverse the writing process and start cutting and editing. Or it would never make a book at all.
I could have carried on [writing] forever if I didn't want to make a novel out of it. It's amazing to me when I write in this way ... it's so easy to exit the world. It's quite shocking really. The door is open and you go. Writing can be a dangerous activity if you really let yourself go entirely. Mentally, it is a strange place to be in.
Writing is very strange these days. You are expected to write something every two or three years. Yet, it is completely simple to spend seven, eight or ten years working.
The Inheritance ... seems like a more mature and assured work than Hullabaloo ... It's almost as if you found your voice.
I think I found my subject. In terms of my voice, maybe to some degree. The language is different. I think the structure is very different from the first one, which had a very simple structure.
In this regard, I am not entirely sure it [The Inheritance... ] has worked. In terms of the momentum of the work, sometimes I wonder whether it is soggy in the middle. That struggle still exists for me. I still think there are little dead bits in the book. But I cut 1500 pages down to about 300...
Now that this is over, have you started on number three?
No, not yet. I am very slow and I need lots of quiet and time. This really isn't the moment when I can sit down quietly and write. November perhaps. I will start working again. I will have to travel with the book all through October.
Now the novel must have a momentum of its own. Found the publishers who want to translate it?
Now I don't have to push it so much. (Laughs)
So being on the Booker shortlist has helped?
In America, it doesn't help. If the book wins, then the Americans will pay attention to it. But only sometimes. Life of Pi was hugely popular, became a huge bestseller, after it won the Booker. But D.B.C. Pierre — Dirty But Clean Pierre — sank like a bomb. The Americans really hated it.
So now that the Booker award ceremony is just days away, tell me how you actually feel about it? And don't give me a boring, politically correct answer.
I am sure I will have to behave myself. [In jest] But I hope that I don't behave myself. If you lose and all the cameras are on you, perhaps you should at least rise to the occasion and make a drama of the thing, don't miss your chance to be on television. Now and again, you hear of writers who have lost their tempers and thrown down their napkins and stormed off ... so maybe I should behave really badly. (Laughs).
I don't know what it is going to be like. It seems like such a distance away. My mother said ... you know she's been there three times. And once she went to this dinner, which I have to go to. And, she said, it is really awful. That [even if] you don't care, they make you care. By the time you are there, they start the drumbeats, they bet on you ... the talk show, it's like a sports thing ... A friend of mine called up and said, "You are a horse now. You better eat some oats and apples and take care of your hooves." (Laughs).
The publishers get scared, the agents get scared, so you are sitting down on a table full of terrified people unable to eat dinner. So God alone knows what it is going to be like ... I am sure if I win I will be incredibly pleased and happy.
Coming back to the novel, at one level it is a pretty bleak story. In the end, you have a lost dog, a lost boyfriend, a part of a house is lost, or at least occupied. Everyone seems to suffer ...
But the cook's son comes back.
But without his belongings, even his clothes. But despite all this, it surprisingly escapes being totally bleak. Perhaps this is because of the irony. Does it read like a dark novel to you?
Not to me. Bits of it are funny to me. I laugh at my own jokes. But it was darker. Then I realised there was a falseness in making it that dark. It was too much. You can't hit people over the head when driving home a message.
The story unfolds against the background of the Gorkhaland movement, but it still doesn't read like a political novel. Most of your main characters — with the exception of the maths teacher — are on one side.
I think I didn't want to emphasise that movement in particular. It could have been any movement. It is the only way I could think of writing the book.
The book doesn't take an ethical position [about the movement]. I think they [the Nepali-speaking population] had a point. And I think it also turned violent, pretty bad at moments. And this is true of most such movements.
I wanted to see how people deal with it, how they survive, who goes under, who comes out alive, who pays the price for what is happening. Of course, there is no question of anything being fair, simple or easy in these situations.
Are you most comfortable with this kind of realism as a fictional genre?
Well the first book was totally different. We are in strange times. It seems like literature is not literature anymore. Magic realism has become a dirty word. I am sure Marquez would be published no matter what but anyone less could be attacked quite severely. In many ways, this makes me sad because literature should be anything — imagined or otherwise.
Would you agree that there is a certain similarity between your prose and your mother's [Anita Desai]? The voice has a certain refinement, a certain elegance ...
Well, it is very nice of you to say that. (Laughs)
Do you believe refinement has its limitations? Or is a novel's beauty always created by the possession of such a sensibility?
When you talk of refinement in this way, are you suggesting it could put a distance between the writer and his subject? Well, you may be right. The reasons for the way I write could go deeper. Becoming an immigrant and moving around forces a certain kind of personality on you. It forces a certain distance from any subject and you are placed a little bit as an outsider. There is a certain lack of being unable to entirely relax, because you are not in your own country.
I look at my father who never left India, sitting there with his friend, the kind of wild humour, the happiness in that way ... as an immigrant, you tend not to do that. I think it forces certain curbs on you. There is a loss of a certain language and a certain ease. I realise it has gone. So it probably does show in the books as well. How could it not?
And my mother is half German, so she probably grew up in a similar way.
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