July 27, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

The Writer and the Sea @ Link Wanderlust

One of the best literary news sites is without a doubt the Guardian Books section. So I thought I would pick a story from this rich repository of essays on books and writing. In Fatal attraction – Writers’ and Artists’ Obsession with the Sea, Philip Hoare talks about the symbol that starts with the womb we swim in, the strange mystery of life beneath the sea, storms, cetaceans and death by drowning. He cites the relationship that writers like Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch and Herman Melville have with water. The sea has all the components that a novel breathes on- vastness, mystery, life, death, dream; little wonder that it remains a fascinating metaphor for authors throughout history.

“In Woolf’s most elegiac work, The Waves, which weaves together six characters’ internal monologues, the sea is borne into the city itself. In the tube station under Piccadilly, Jinny feels the trains running “as regularly as the waves of the sea”. Neville reads a poem and “suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster” (an image which would be replayed in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, with its own Tempest-inflected story and its cracked actor, Charles Arrowby, who sees a sea serpent rising out of the Channel). And in a passage auguring her author’s own fate, Rhoda imagines launching a garland of flowers over a cliff, to “sink and settle on the waves” and her body with it, like the suicidal Ophelia. “The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under.” Those who have survived drowning speak of euphoria as the panic leaves them. “Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him,” as Shakespeare wrote.”

sea fish shark GIF

 

 

 

July 24, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Twin Paradox and Lost Umbrellas @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 4)

Now for some books with strange elements.

Ratnakar brought in an element of science fiction to the BYOB Party with  Time For the Stars, a book published in 1956 from Robert Heinlein’s Juveniles series, a series with young heroes set in the near future. Heinlein was one of the most important science fiction writers of the time along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. In this book, Heinlein examines the Twin Paradox, a thought experiment that explains how relativity works. The premise is if one out of a pair of identical twins is accelerated away from Earth and the other stays on Earth, more time passes on Earth and so the twin who remains on earth grows older while the space twin will not have aged that much. Twins are also said to have twin telepathy so they can communicate faster than the speed of light. Although the book may seem outdated today, the premise is strong enough to convince the hard-boiled cynic. Some interesting conversation did come up revolving around twins, communication and physics.

Watch this if you want to see what one of the world’s most foremost science fiction writers had to say about the Apollo 11 space mission.

Satish got a fantasy read. He’s a big fan of China Miéville and loves his YA books the most. Not many people in the room had heard of Miéville, a sensational science fiction writer who has won two Arthur C. Clarke awards and several other prizes as well.  Un Lun Dun or Un-London is a place below London. The story revolves around the adventures of Zanna and Deeba, two children who find a door to another London, one filled with old computers, obsolete technology and an army of umbrellas. Miéville’s linguistic prowess- his puns and nomenclatures- and bizarre characters keep the reader riveted. His illustrations add richness to the book. Satish read out a passage of the part where Deeba climbs up a ladder in a library. He saw her act of climbing in a library as allegorical in a way and this is typical of many of China’s novels. Another book of his that he mentioned was Railsea, an allegory of Moby Dick, where the search is for a white mole, rather than a white whale. Comparisons were made to another popular British author Neil Gaiman. You might like to listen to this fascinating interview of this writer who has also confessed his attachment to garbage and octopuses and trains.

 

July 20, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Mother Tongue and Loneliness @ Link Wanderlust

In her essay called Mother Tongue, Yoojin Grace Wuertz talks about her personal journey and it starts with the Korean songs her mother hums to her child, Emmett, and the meaning of her child’s name in her own language and in Hebrew. Like many of her friends and acquaintances in bilingual homes, she knows the value of knowing several languages but she is hesitant to speak in Korean to her child. The reason for this is personal. It isn’t that she didn’t know her language as she has grown up in a community that cherishes its roots, so she has imbibed a large vocabulary that embraces certain concepts like Christianity but ignores others like politics. She worries that her knowledge of the language is too fractured to make her an effective transmitter. She worries about her identity, about being an American mom rather than a Korean mom.

There’s a lot that speaking your language demands of you, which includes a social contract with the culture that the respective language represents. But then again, each language offers a different world to process. Suppose by being monolingual, you are missing out on the richness of experience? Wuertz talks about how she gets around to talking to her son in her mother tongue and how the hesitation seems worth the wait.

 

Another story I came across was by Lucy Scholes and talked about loneliness.

What is it like to be around thirty and unemployed and unattached? Scholes remembers one such period in her life. There was an offbeat lack of direction as reminiscent of Penelope Fitzgerald’s book Offshore. The words of several other women writers like Dorothy L. Sayers, Joan Didion, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Laing, Anita Brookner, etc help her find some merit in the ‘sanctity of solitude’ and the loneliness that women in cities inhabit on an almost daily basis.

‘I came to London to study literature, so perhaps it’s only natural that my existence here has always been tempered by the books I’ve read that are set in the city, a potent alchemy at work in the particular way in which the real and the fictional combine in my mind. My experience in this city has always been twofold, containing and dependent on both my lived experience and the very real topography of the streets, as well as the fictional versions of the same city I have read about in novels. They intertwine, and in doing so become indistinguishable from one another.’

Read the essay A Woman Alone in  London: On the Literature of Solitude. 

love vintage sad tumblr man GIF

July 18, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Readers can’t Digest-Week 142 (12-July to 18-July)

1.Spencer Johnson, ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ Author, Dies at 78

2.Press Association wins Google grant to run news service written by computers

ELFvid writing screenwriting take a break writers wish GIF

3.Bertelsmann Will Soon Own 75% of Penguin Random House

snoopy good luck best wishes GIF

 

4.Global publishing giant wins $15 million damages against researcher for sharing publicly-funded knowledge

season 8 episode 16 8x16 cecil underdunk terwilliger GIF

5.JK Rowling reveals she wrote unseen story on a party dress

Good Girls Revolt season 1 amazon video clothes clothing GIF

 

July 17, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

The Many Shades of Roy @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 3)

When Amrutha showed us the book that she was reading, there was a collective gasp of excitement.

Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Amrutha is very eloquent about her admiration of this writer. For her, The God of Small Things is nothing less than a Bible, compulsory reading on days when the world ceases to make sense. And now after twenty years of monochromatic non-fiction, Roy is back, and this made her pre-order a copy.

The book is now well-known for the number of reviews it has garnered. Amrutha has no complaint about the lyricism of the book. For the first two hundred pages of the book, Anjum the transgender character occupies center stage. At some point in the novel, Amrutha says that so many characters make their presence felt that you feel you are in a train into which a stream of people continuously flows into.

Unlike the India in the books by Khushwant Singh and Salman Rushdie, Roy’s India is easy to relate to, especially to millennials as it is the India of the Maoists, Kejriwal, Kashmir, Ayodhya, corruption, Anna Hazare and this becomes the problem with Anjum’s story for Amrutha. She fears that the book ends in propaganda and that Roy’s view is a little too uni-dimensional for a country as vast and complicated as India. “It was when the book stopped being fictional that I felt betrayed that she had masqueraded Anjum’s story as a fiction. If I wanted to read about the problems our country faces, I could read the newspaper!” she said.

So this is what a betrayed fan looks like.

As is the case in many BYOB Parties, readers subconsciously pick books that showcase similar authors. So Sonali got Annihilation of Caste by B.R. Ambedkar with an introduction written by Roy. Unlike Amruta, Sonali is more taken by Arundhati Roy’s monochromatic non-fiction.

The Annihilation of Caste shows two contrasting leaders- one the saintly Gandhi who removes his upper garment to identify with the masses and the other the maverick Ambedkar who wears a suit to challenge casteism. Both of them believe that they have the answers about how the country is to be led and what values should constitute the Indian rubric.

The premise of the book is a story in itself. A Hindu reformist group invited Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to deliver a lecture but since they knew that the man was audacious they requested for an advanced copy. Their doubts proved true. Ambedkar had planned to use the lecture as an opportunity to denounce Hinduism and its caste system. Since this was unacceptable to them, they de-invited him and true to Ambedkar’s fiery nature, he published the speech instead. He also responded to the Mahatma’s justification of caste.

What Sonali admires about the book is the coherence of the arguments that Ambedkar presents. He provided a scholarly critique of the Shastras and disagrees with Gandhi’s sugar-coated version of casteism. Even today Ambedkar’s views remain controversial and some of his opinions border on scandalous.

Watch this video where Roy debunks what she calls the Gandhi myth.

Visual Friday: Children’s Books+Dessert Pairing Guide

July 14, 2017 by Neelima | 0 comments

Chocolate chip cookies, peach milkshakes, Turkish Delight, any of these mouth-watering foods remind you of children’s books? Shari’s Berries has created an infographic which shows you the right kind of sweet tooth that goes with the book you read. Tell us which one on this yummy list is your fave book or read or both!

All you writers of children’s books, remember the appeal that food has when it comes to grabbing kids’ attention.

Please include attribution to www.berries.com with this graphic.

Children

July 13, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Editing and Translating @ Link Wanderlust

Anna Pitoniak, an editor at Random House, talks about what editing taught her about the writing trade. So can an editor write? Pitoniak believes that it was her experience of reading good books and tweaking them that gave her the courage and the know-how to write a book of her own. She gives some great tips on what works when it comes to writing. Foremost is revision and then it’s flexibility. You’ve worked on multiple drafts and as an editor you would understand better when you were asked to work on a change that could alter the entire story. Check out What being an Editor Taught me about Writing for more useful tips.

What about a translator’s point of view when it comes to writing? Charse Yun examines Deborah Smith’s flawed yet remarkable translation of The Vegetarian. This book by Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize last year and is a remarkable story indeed but in Korea there has been a wave of criticism about the authenticity of the translation. It is surprising how many errors have actually been cited grammatically and even in terms of meaning and style. However, Deborah Smith has nailed it with her literary interpretation and that seems to be what translation is all about- getting a piece of otherwise unknown literature out there and being faithful to what it represents:

In the end, everyone has a different metaphor for translation. For me, it’s cooking. You have a brilliant sous chef who attempts to recreate the original chef’s recipe abroad with ingredients not found in her country. She misreads the directions. She confuses “broil” for “boil”; she adds “lemon” instead of “melon.” She also pours in a generous dollop of dressing found nowhere in the recipe. But ultimately, she is able to come up with a remarkable version that millions of new diners find delicious. Several Michelin judges (in Han’s case, a five-member jury) happen to taste it and award it three stars.

The original chef is pleased and gives her approval (for the record, Han Kang has read the translation and fully supports Smith’s version). Both chefs gain much renown domestically and abroad. Interest in the home country’s cuisine soars globally. Everyone is invited to the feast.

Read You Say Melon, I Say Lemon and tell us if you have ever read a translation that is flawed but enjoyed it all the same.
google results speed translation GIF

 

July 11, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Readers can’t Digest-Week 141 (5-July to 11-July)

1.Hilary Mantel says final Wolf Hall book likely to be delayed

no the office michael scott no way hell no GIF

2.Sudanese author Bushra al-Fadil wins Caine Prize

excited yeah motivation congratulations fist pump GIF

3.J.R.R. Tolkien’s estate and Warner Bros settle Hobbit and Lord of the Rings lawsuit

Matt Cutshall done finished shut it down matt cutshall GIF

4.Lost Maurice Sendak picture book to be published next year

ali mac bird hooray yass friyay GIF

5.Blind and visually impaired people will benefit significantly from the new EU rules on copyright

lionel richie GIF