[Random Shots: Journalist and novelist Tarun Tejpal interacting with his readers at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2013]
24
January 2013
On the first day, I attended
three sessions: the Art of the Short Story, Ismat and Annie, and the Novel of
the Future. I did not take any notes. I wrote down the following the next
morning (from whatever I could remember). If some statements sound weird and
don’t make sense to the readers, I take the blame for sloppiness and apologize
in advance.
We don't tell novels, we tell short stories
The Short story: The
Art of the Short Story panel had Nicholas Hogg, Richard Beard and Yiyun Li and
Anjum Hasan was the moderator.
- Yiyun Li said show
and tell is a wrong advice
- Bring the narrator
back
- She said she represents
only herself (not any group or community as a writer)
- Length in a story does
not matter; she refused to reduce the length of a story just to get into The New Yorker
Anjum Hasan referred
to the Chekhovian Little Man (mentioned Frank O'Connor's book on short stories)
- Why do you write
short stories: The panelists said that one is able to explore other lives
through short stories
- Short stories are
great as a genre as they allow great room for experimentation (for example, the
stories of Georges Perec)
The panelists were of
the opinion that short story as a genre is not dying; it will live as long as
there will be human beings. It is very natural for us—we don't tell novels, we
tell short stories
Ismat and Annie
This session was
about two famous Urdu fiction writers: Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Haider.
In this session,
Javed Akhtar and Ameena Saiyid (head of OUP, Pakistan
Javed Akhtar: Both Ismat
and Annie (Haider) were rebels in their own way. Annie was from an aristocratic
background and was scholarly; if she was confident about something, she would
put her foot down. Otherwise, she would say I don't know anything about it;
tell me about it. She would quote from magazines and books. She would think in
terms of centuries.
Ismat was more from a
middle class background. She was a fighter and was so dogged that even if she
had said something wrong and she knew it, she would stick to her point. She
thought in terms of mosaic, short stories.
In this session,
Javed Saheb said some very interesting things about the Urdu and Hindi divide,
which he considers an artificial divide. He said that what we commonly speak in
India
He exhorted people to
learn Urdu if they wanted to enjoy the works of genii like Ismat and Annie.
“Learning Urdu is not that difficult,” he said. “Learn the script. Don’t just
look at the script and run away scared. Doosre ki galiyan hamesha tedhi medhi
lagti hain.”
In the futuristic scenario, everybody is a writer, no one
is reader
“The Novel of the
Future” was a very interesting session. The participants were Howard Jacobson,
Nadeem Aslam, Linda Grant, Zoe Heller and Lawrence Norfolk and the moderator
was Anita Anand. Mohammad Hanif was supposed to be a part of the panel but he
did not show up. Later on, I found out that he got his visa too late in the day
and cancelled his plans to come to Jaipur.
The discussion opened
with a reference to the famous Naipaulian claim that the novel is dead. Long
ago Naipaul had declared that the novel is dead.
Nadeem Aslam: The novel's
health is not exhausted in my study. If
you say the novel is exhausted, it means you are exhausted.
Howard Jacobson:
Looking at the success of Fifty Shades (the trilogy by E L James), we are
doomed.
The problem is with
readers, not novels
Everyone wants to
write, not read
Meeting authors has
replaced necessity to read
We need novels. It is
an argument, not a single voice of dictatorship.
In the futuristic
scenario, everybody is a writer, no one is reader.
Anna Karenina is a
young adult novel.
Don't change your
writing to suit the market; stick to your style, at any cost, and your audience
will change
Zoe Heller: What is
worrying is that kids are losing the art of reading long fiction; they have short
attention spans.
What's happening in
the US India US India
Howard: Don’t read
novels for information. Novels have no information to provide.
Others
Someone asked: What about
the novel in the e-form, with embedded video and all that jazz we could do with
the form in a digital age? Answer: Novels will change—like a parachute, with
trimmed strings. Will the parachute remain the same and will provide the same
functionality if you trimmed it strings?
E-books are not same
as the hard copy novels.
Nadeem: You don’t
need video and music to be embedded in the novel’s pages. The words, the
sentences, they should evoke the music and picture in your head.
1 comment:
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