Moby Dick, etc.
Here is a quick interview I gave to my friends at Tehelka:
A book that means a lot to you?
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. A pure assessment of power.How many books do you own?
Five thousand, limited by the size of the bookshelves that, at great risk to my health, I put together myself.Your favourite character from a book and, briefly, why?
Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. His desire to write, and his failure. Mr Biswas is me.An author or genre you hate?
I’m torn between my dislike for the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and the dull realism of Rohinton Mistry.Last book bought?
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.Last book read?
VS Naipaul’s A Writer’s People.A very overrated book?
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s — do you remember the name of the book?A book you wish you’d written?
When I think of the books that my friends have written, I often wish I had written them because I like those books, of course, but also because a part of me believes that if my friends can do it, I can too. Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread; Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World; Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return and Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut.Your favorite genre?
A realist novel that reinvents the world.A book you’ve always wanted to read but haven’t?
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
After I had sent the answers back to Tehelka’s Lakshmi Indrasimhan, I was thinking about the questions again. I have further thoughts only about two of them. The first question that Lakshmi posed is a difficult one, and I can easily think of more than one book. Biswas would be one example. When I was writing the first draft of my novel I’d read a few pages from Biswas nearly each day and was struck again and again by its comedy. (Something that I, of course, failed to achieve in my own writing.) I also have a comment about the question regarding a book I wish I had written. The books by my friends are great influences–just the other day, I was teaching Butter Chicken and realized, with a slight sense of dismay, that I had unconsciously borrowed a phrase from it in what I had recently written. Also, I have another answer for that question, and that is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Not because of its prodigious success but its extraordinary architecture. I have read no other book written by an Indian writer that has come close to achieving the narrative structure and flow of Roy’s novel. (I have claimed in this space before that Kiran Desai’s Inheritance seems inspired by The God of Small Things, but the resemblance is merely thematic and related to character types.) Others have also nursed narrative ambitions, but they aren’t like Roy–they’ve only produced either Chinese puzzles or detective fiction.
