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Monday, May 09, 2005
Between incompetence and malice
Tarun Tejpal says about book reviewers:
Tejpal is so upset at Indian reviewers that he offers us a review of his own book, The Alchemy of Desire. He writes:
Or a soda of cadness. (Link via Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, a fine reviewer herself, not the kind Tejpal described.)
Postscript: A debutant novelist recently told me of how another recent novelist warned him that many Indian reviewers would trash his book "because it was a book". That is, because they hadn't written a book, they would resent anybody else who had. Sounds plausible to me.
I think between incompetence and malice, almost no decent reviewing takes place in India. Mostly it is the clever, collegiate 'quiz competition' kind of notices that pass off for book reviews. Media journeymen -- out of work journos, copy editors in publishing houses, peripheral academics, precious column writers -- these are the ones who are handed out books. Most of them lack the skill, the craft, the heart, the understanding of the tradition, to assess serious books. They lack the ability to inhabit the intent or ambition of a book. They praise bad books, damn good ones -- all without understanding or reason.
At best, some of the more enterprising ones trawl the Internet and acquire some jargon and some familiarity -- the quiz-master kind -- with arcane literary names. And worse, they mostly write for small backslapping coteries -- again the same kind of collegiate sensibility, strongly reflective of half-knowledge mostly acquired through a few books and having nothing to do with adult lived lives.
Tejpal is so upset at Indian reviewers that he offers us a review of his own book, The Alchemy of Desire. He writes:
It is full of the joy and vitality of passion, love, desire, ambition, lived lives of the most ordinary -- in fact, my publisher in London has described it as a book that "burns with the fullness of life." Yes, there is perhaps a melancholy strain running through it. But then life is like that -- no matter how vibrantly we construct it, there is a coda of sadness always waiting for us.
Or a soda of cadness. (Link via Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, a fine reviewer herself, not the kind Tejpal described.)
Postscript: A debutant novelist recently told me of how another recent novelist warned him that many Indian reviewers would trash his book "because it was a book". That is, because they hadn't written a book, they would resent anybody else who had. Sounds plausible to me.
