Maud Newton, who is the Pauline Kael of the literary blogosphere and gets a lot of my affection and respect, wants to know “what’s the last book that made you skip work, or stay up half the night, or forget yourself at stoplights?” I’ll come to the books in a second; what I first want to know is this: was it ever the book I was reading that made me forget my subway stop? I have done this five hundred times, and the reading matter has been so diverse, and my need for solitude so consistently the same, that it hardly mattered what I was reading.

Now, let’s take-up Maud’s question. I’m afraid that once again the answer is haunted by the same pale specter of the self. V.S. Naipaul fascinates me as a writer because he can be writing about a town in Iran or about the council homes in England—and I still feel that what I’m reading is an essay about the triumph over the difficulty of writing. I don’t exactly know why this should be so. Perhaps because it was Naipaul’s autobiographical fragment Finding the Center that gave me, during my late adolescence, my first narrative of a writer’s life. Whatever be the reason for this state of affairs, by the time I have read a few lines by Naipaul I have already slipped into a universe that is fully-realized. It is a world that exists solely to illuminate a literary life.

A few months ago, I read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I gave the book a concentrated and yet expansive attention because it grappled with a writer’s response to faith. I wouldn’t have bothered with it if the novel’s protagonist was a butcher, or a doctor, or even an artist, dealing with the same questions of belief and doubt. Recently, when quizzed by the Guardian about his recommended summer reading, Pamuk mentioned Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism. I don’t remember the words exactly but Pamuk said something to the effect that when he had finished Appiah’s book he felt that he was a better person.

I was struck by Pamuk’s response. It seemed to me he had emerged at an enviable place: reading about tolerance had made him more tolerant. But I have to confess that even as I read those lines, I thought of what my own response would have been. For me, the questions of a writer’s response to a book are distinct from a citizen’s. They can be related, they often are, but they’re also separate.

One writer who understands this well is J.M. Coetzee. So many of his books, like Naipaul’s, are about writing. Several of his books often appear to be explicit rewritings of books by other writers; yet others have writers as their protagonists. Coetzee is among the foremost writers today not because he deals with the difficulty of a writer’s life: rather, it is because he always seems to be taking note of, measuring, dealing with or failing to deal with, the tensions between the life of a writer and the life of a citizen that his books retain their enormous intellectual appeal.

Apart from recommending writers like Naipaul, Pamuk, and Coetzee (and there are so many others–Baldwin, Sontag, Roth, Franzen, and even Carey who so often has approached the literary by dealing most squarely with those who are regarded unliterary and even illiterate), I’d like to mention that this summer I intend to read Colm Toibin’s The Master. I have read barely forty pages but am struck by the narrative about a writer who, even in the midst of anguish, struck by failure, retains a wonderful stillness. That is what allows him to be so observant. Discerning. It is a quality that would also provoke in the reader a corresponding sense of calm. Perfect for the subway, don’t you think?

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Ms. Ila Kumar, now nearly three, before leaving yesterday for a visit to the home of her maternal grandparents, asked her father many times, “Will you miss me?”

The father says, “I do, I do, I do.”

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The World Cup in numbers

16 Number of hours German police officers in Dachau spent learning useful phrases in English for dealing with England fans, such as ‘you are under arrest’ and ‘I need to search you’.

50,000 Number of two-and-a-half pint glasses in the shape of the World Cup trophy bought at Tesco in the past three weeks. ‘The most patriotic place seems to be Tunbridge Wells,’ says a spokesman.

8.8 Average mark (out of 10) that visiting supporters have given Germany for their hospitality during the World Cup.

45m Number of sausages sold by Tesco to lightly char on the 7.5 million disposable barbecues bought at the store since the competition began.

20% Reduction in people shopping at 4pm yesterday compared with a normal Saturday.

4m Number of cans and bottles of beer bought at Sainsbury’s yesterday.

Akash Kapur comments in the NYT Book Review on the recent publication in the U.S. of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August. The review is of particular interest because it frames Chatterjee’s novel, first published when we were a lot younger, in terms of a debate on authenticity. Here are the opening lines:

A specter haunts Indian writing — the specter of authenticity. In the pages of magazines and journals, at soirées and (sparsely attended) book parties in New Delhi, literature is being judged by a specious metric of cultural and national loyalty. According to this standard, it is in the work of writers who live in India and write in an Indian language (and thus have trouble finding a Western publisher), and not, to quote one critic, in sell-out “export-quality prose,” that the country’s authentic voice is to be found.

Kapur’s advice is that we give up the ghost of authenticity. This is partly because to go on celebrating English, August as the representation of ‘real’ India would be ahistorical and we’d be forgetting how much the India in that novel has changed; at the same time, interestingly enough, the opposite is also true, and the qualities that make Chatterjee’s novel so wonderful and endearing should persuade us to transcend the narrower debate about authenticity:

Indeed, Chatterjee’s prose is cynical, witty and frequently bawdy; it brilliantly captures a generation and a nation struggling to reorient themselves in the early days of what we now call globalization. “They’re turning modern without warning, these bastards,” a friend of Agastya’s exclaims while struggling to open a cylinder of cooking gas that has a new kind of seal. One character strolls around with a Walkman, and likes to call rupees “bucks” and himself Mandy. “He’s the sort who’d love to get AIDS just because it’s raging in America,” is another character’s withering verdict.

There’s something quaint about such descriptions, reminders of a time when a Walkman was still a totem of modernity and AIDS was an American problem (rather than, say, a rural Indian one). “English, August” is filled with cultural references — Maruti cars, Nirodh condoms, Campa Colas — that are from another era, as are many of India’s insecurities and uncertainties about the West. Today’s India is very different from the nation Chatterjee captures here: more modern, more globalized, more self-confident. Yet “English, August” has worn remarkably well. Agastya’s story is convincing, entertaining, moving — and timeless. It merits an accolade that’s far harder to earn than “authentic.” It’s a classic.

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