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Preeta Samarasan, photo by V.V.
Ganeshananthan
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I have yet to meet with Preeta
Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day; however, I do have two
connections. First, when Lovers and Strangers
Revisited beat out Preeta’s Evening is the Whole Day and Tan Twan
Eng’s The Gift of Rain for the 2009 Popular Reader’s Choice Awards here
in Malaysia, no one was more surprised than me.
I thought those two had a lock on the first two places and I was just
hoping to sneak into third place. The trophy, by the way, was pretty cool, with the cover of my book on it, so I
gladly accepted it. Still I feel
those two books — both novels published overseas — were more worthy.
The second connection is that I spent
a lot of time in Ann Arbor and on campus where Preeta did her MFA in Creative
Writing at the University of Michigan. Not
only did I set up a Kinko’s store there in the early 80’s (did the contracting,
hired and trained the staff and set a national sales record for the first month
out of 600 stores), I also had a brother who lived there for a couple of years. Growing up in Ohio I was naturally a big fan
of the Buckeyes over the Wolverines, huge football rivals, so I hope Preeta
doesn’t hold that against me...
Preeta Samarasan grew up in Ipoh. In 1992 she moved to the United States to
attend the United World College in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She received her undergraduate education at
Hamilton College and her graduate education at the Eastman School of Music
(University of Rochester) and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her first novel, Evening
Is the Whole Day, was a finalist for the Commonwealth
Writers Prize 2009. Her short fiction
has been published in various journals, including Hyphen, Guernica and A Public Space. She won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop/Hyphen
Short Story award in 2007 and was included in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories in
2010. She has recently completed a
second novel set in Malaysia in the 1970s, 80s and the present day. She now lives in the Limousin region of France
with her husband, their two daughters, and a cat named Milo after her favourite
childhood beverage.
Praise For Evening
Is the Whole Day…
“... a surpassingly wise and beautiful debut
novel about the tragic consequences of the inability to love.” Booklist, ALA,
Starred Review
"(a) delicious first novel...Samarasan's fabric is gorgeous. Her ambitious
spiraling plot, her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place, and her
psychological acuity are stunning. Readers, responding to the setting, will
immediately compare her to Kiran Desai. I think Samarasan's dialogue and
description are reminiscent of Eudora Welty, another woman who knew how to
write about family and race and class and secrets and heat." The New York
Times Book Review
RR:
Preeta, I loved how you played with time in Evening is the Whole Day,
how you flashed forward about Chellam and how you kept going further back in
time. Personally I felt the structure
worked, how each succeeding chapter depicts an earlier event and undercuts what
we had just learned, often destroying our pre-conceived ideas as to what we
thought had happened based on innuendo and snide comments made by the other
characters. We’re like, oh, so that’s
how it began and would feel guilty (at least I did) for jumping to
conclusions. It feels like you’re
peeling another layer off that onion to finally get to the core of the truth,
to the events that led up to the beginning.
Was this something you wrestled with as opposed to writing the story
chronologically? Was this your original
intended structure or did you change it while writing the first draft, or
immediately afterwards? (I would think
you would need to write the whole story before you could rearrange timelines in
the way that you did; either way, great effect!)
Preeta: I tried out a lot
of different structures before hitting upon that one. Of course the first thing I tried was the most
obvious and the most common (for good reason — it works well for many
stories!): a simple linear narrative
moving chronologically forward. But
really I had two stories to tell, the Now and the Then, and I wanted them to
unfold simultaneously so that they could inform and colour each other. So pretty early on I realised that I had to
alternate between those two timelines. And
then, fairly late into the process of writing the novel, I saw that I would
have to tell the Now story backwards, because I really just wanted to show the
reader what happens at the end, and I wanted them to keep reading in order to
find out why and how.
RR:
I heard it took you nine years to write Evening is the Whole Day. Of that time, how long did it actually take
you to write a complete first draft (no matter how rough that first effort was to
get to ‘the end’)? Other than the
structure and the time element, what other difficulties did you encounter
while telling the story over the subsequent revisions?
Preeta: This is all so
long ago now that I am honestly having trouble remembering all the different
milestones! It doesn’t help that I have
now, for an equal amount of time, being working on a different project. But I think that I did not have a complete
first draft of Evening is the Whole
Day until the end of my time at the University of Michigan MFA
program, so that must mean I didn’t have a full draft until year seven….I think
the structure was the most challenging thing to figure out; the voice and the
plot were pretty well settled from very early on. The only other difficulty was trimming all
the extraneous material from the draft, because the novel was much, much longer
in its first incarnation. I had to
decide what to keep and what to discard, and for that I was extremely grateful
for the feedback of my excellent editor, Anjali Singh (who is now no longer an
editor).
RR: Many beginning writers, who are anxious to
rush their work into print, even to self-publish, don’t seem to realize how
invaluable a good editor really is. How
they can feel, almost instinctively, what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be
expanded, what needs to be cut for various reasons like pacing, plotting…they’re
thinking, “yeah interesting, even well written, but it’s a digression that detracts
more than it adds to the arc of the story.”
Or “why is she leading me away from the main story just when it’s
getting interesting?” And “what does that scene have to do with anything,
really? You could cut it and no one
would even miss it!”
Painful,
at first, for most writers to hear this, but after further consideration…you
think, “yeah, maybe she has a point.”
Or, “yeah, I never really liked that bit; don’t know why I left it
in. Thanks for convincing me to
finally get rid of it!”
I naturally assume people naturally
assumed that you’re writing about your family.
(I got that a lot from my stories, those with a Western character.) I’m assuming you’re not (based on comments
from other interviews), though I’m assuming you can relate really well to these
characters perhaps through extended families, friends, neighbors, people in
general you’ve had contact with; they all seen believable, this family, their
neighbors, as do the trial cases brought up.
I was seeing Malaysia through their eyes, a different side than I was
familiar with (mostly Malays in Penang and Perak). Did you catch any flack from anyone who
insisted that you were writing about your family despite your
denials? Any diplomatically way to
handle that or did you just ignore them?
Preeta: Actually, the
reverse turned out to be true, much to my surprise: people seemed not to recognise when they were
written about. Either that or they were
being extremely polite, ha-ha! Perhaps it would be more accurate to say: people chose not to come forward and confront
me about the recognisable elements of their lives that had made it to the page.
I think it helped that there is no
character that is based on a single person from real life. They are, at most, amalgamations. In some cases I took incidents from one
person’s life and made them happen to a character who is very obviously not
based in any way upon that person. So
no, I’ve had no awkwardness of that kind about my fiction, although I have had
plenty of it in response to my nonfiction — but that’s another story. The short answer is that one doesn’t always
get the chance to be diplomatic. Sometimes,
if you write your truth, people are going to be angry. That’s just how it is.
RR:
I know that anger. I once had five
people convinced that I wrote about them in one of my stories about a woman having
an affair with a married man in Penang. One
woman was particularly upset since she thought I was writing about her husband
(he shared the same name with the character, though he wasn’t Chinese). It started to get ugly until I was able to
prove that I had written the story years before I had met them by showing them the
original version from Her World. Needless to say, the wife (and the husband) were
quite relieved….Then another woman I only knew professionally was adamant that
I was writing about her! I wanted to ask, so which married man are you
having an affair with here in Penang?
I
was thinking, not so much your relatives (or friends) recognizing themselves, though
I could see them being coy about it if it painted them in a bad light, but
reviewers who assumed you were writing about your immediate family….In
one of your interviews you spoke about how the chief criticism from America
seems to be that your characters are unsympathetic, implying, in a way, that
no one wants to read a novel about an unsympathetic character which, I believe,
is pure nonsense. (Two agents made the
same comment regarding the protagonist from one of my Penang novels after three
chapters. The novel opens up at a low
point in the protagonist’s life but he turns himself around and becomes a hero
by saving all of these people’s lives.) Or is that just the American reading
public? Did your agent/US publisher
bring that up as a concern? (Hey, Preeta,
can you make this family a little more likeable?)
Preeta: My thoughts about
this have actually evolved immensely since Evening is the Whole Day was first published. I am in the process of trying to sell a second
novel now, and I’ve come to believe that this kind of response — “your
characters are unsympathetic” (which, actually, no editor has said about the
second novel so far); “we can’t relate to these people”; “we can’t connect with
these characters on an emotional level”; “we find this story/these people a
little distancing/alienating” — is entirely culturally ordained and one
hundred percent due to the fact that editors are white Americans and Brits (no,
really — there are almost no editors of colour in the mainstream publishing
industry) who themselves have white sensibilities and aesthetics (take, for
example, the very criteria that decide whether a character is “sympathetic” or
“unsympathetic,” or the question of how information is revealed between people
— what is said, what is left unsaid. These
are deeply cultural preferences.)
On top of this, these editors are
catering first and foremost to a white readership. This is not the same thing as saying “people
of colour don’t read,” obviously. I am
saying that the white readership comes first for the industry, still, now, in
2017. When editors talk about “wider
appeal” and “the audience,” this is what they mean, whether they know it or
not. And when both editors and readers
say things like “I found it hard to relate to these people,” what they really
mean — though they don’t know they’re saying it — is “this culture makes me
uncomfortable.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is
a solution other than to radically diversify the gatekeepers of literary
culture in the West. Until that happens,
Anglophone writers who come from countries without their own extremely
profitable, lively publishing industry (by which I mean India) are always going
to have to choose between several awful options: 1) write for white people; 2)
refuse to write for white people, therefore condemning yourself to an endless
struggle with editors not to sacrifice everything you’ve written for your own
people; 3) publish at home and give up the dream of a larger, more lucrative
career (of course, there are lucky exceptions who’ve published at home and then
had significant success abroad, but they are exceptions).
RR:
I agree there tends to be a “white” or
“Western” bias, maybe because they are the ones who are perceived to be buying
the most books, having grown up in cultures that support the reading
habit. Books in Malaysia are
ridiculously expensive, a luxury that far too many Malaysians can’t afford,
a real shame, something I’ve heard repeated over and over but nothing is done
about it. Blame the booksellers, or the
tariffs imposed on foreign books, but even the locally produced books for local
writers are damn expensive….A huge example of that exception, of a writer writing
in his home market, even in his native language, is Brazilian author Paulo
Coelho publishing locally in Portuguese.
It wasn’t until a fellow Brazilian living in the US offered to translate
The Alchemist into English and was
given permission to find a US publisher (in essence making him Coelho’s US
agent) that his career took off. Books
published here in Malaysia/Singapore rarely if ever break out onto the larger
market. Like yourself, Shamini Flint published
her popular Inspector Singh Investigates
series overseas, proving it can be done, that a local writer can find a much
larger audience at least for genre fiction which has a different market, of
course, than literary fiction. Still it
gives local writers hope. You guys, including
Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng, are paving the way…keep it up!
Contrary to some reviews, I didn’t see
your novel as anyone’s particular story (any more than the other family members);
I saw it as a composite of all of their stories as a dysfunctional family,
whereby the whole is greater than the sum of its individual characters. You would weave into everyone’s mind, we
would get their thoughts, their comments, their different perspectives as to
what was going on even with the same scene while it was happening; you made
the important moments so much bigger, which resonated with me because when I
met US writer Bharati Mukherjee in Penang, she told me that I needed to do
that, make the moment bigger at the end for my story “Sister’s Room”
(about child prostitution). But it
wasn’t until I read your book, that I thought, ah, this is what she meant. You had a masterful way of making your
moments bigger by adding all of these different viewpoints so we got far more
out of that scene than if it had been limited to one point of view. Was that something you had developed on your
own or something you had picked up as part of your MFA program?
Preeta: I suppose I
developed it on my own. I don’t see it
as a very American aesthetic, and although it certainly wasn’t discouraged in
my MFA program, it was uncommon in that program, and I suspect would have been
uncommon in other MFA programs too. I
think what you are talking about has first of all to do with the choice of an
omniscient narrator. There is a higher
power behind the novel, a voice with omniscience and a power of judgment that
is almost divine. It’s that omniscience
that drives the novel; that, in fact, tells us what to think about each
character.
It’s interesting to think about that
choice now because I made a very different one for the second novel — I made,
in fact, the opposite choice, an unreliable narrator, a person who doesn’t even
know everything there is to know about himself, let alone about others. But that omniscient voice I used in Evening is the Whole Day came from
my lifelong love for Victorian novels. It’s
a very 19th-century voice, and some people have actually argued that it fell
out of fashion because humanity lost its faith in absolute omniscience.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I
grew up reading Dickens and Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot; omniscience
was my first literary diet, if you like. Virginia Woolf, of course, takes omniscience
to a new level, and in some ways what she does should be the highest goal of
every writer, if not every human being, to be able to slip into another
person’s skin like that. It is the very definition
of empathy. But I think the narrator of Evening is the Whole Day is modeled
more on the bombastic, masculine omniscient narrators of those big
19th-century novels than on Woolf’s technique in To the Lighthouse. I’m not
sure if I’ll ever write another novel in that exact voice, but the deep
commitment to dissecting every character’s motivations is something that has
stayed with me, and I think always will.
RR:
Looking back at your MFA program in the US — the insights you gained
from it and the connections that you made with other writers through the
program — would you have done anything differently? Also, would you recommend a MFA program for
young Malaysian writers (or any writer) just starting out, or do you think they
could spend their limited income more wisely by just reading and writing a ton
and finding their own natural voice (like Golda Mowe writing about Ibans in
Sarawak)?
Preeta: If, on a limited
income, you can manage to spend all your time reading and writing, then good
for you! Then you could certainly do
that. But I think it’s actually very
difficult to find time to read and write as much as an aspiring writer should
on a limited income. You will have a day
job, and the reading and writing will both have to be squeezed in after work
(when you will be tired) or at the weekends (when you will want to relax). It’s possible, of course; it’s certainly been
done before. But it’s very, very
difficult, and that’s where MFA programs save a lot of young writers. You should never attend an MFA program if
you’re paying for it out of your own pocket.
But the best MFA programs basically
pay you to read and write for two years. They buy you time, and that is an enormous,
magical gift for an aspiring writer. It
is the number one reason to attend a writing program: your actual job, for those two years, is to
read and write. Of course, all the icing
on the cake is lovely too: being part of
a community that loves words above anything else, that thinks about language
and storytelling constantly and rigorously; being able to talk about books and
how they work (or don’t) all the time; having willing readers for your work for
the rest of your life; getting to meet visiting writers, who are often among
the world’s best living writers; learning about the business of publishing.
RR: That’s a great argument. I like what you said, “It is the number one
reason to attend a writing program: your
actual job, for those two years, is to read and write.” Incidentally, about meeting writers in Ann
Arbor, I was in Borders in 1987 and met a guy who had just published an article
that very week about meeting Jay McInerney (Bright
Lights, Big City) at the same bookstore.
A steady diet of that would be good for the writing soul.
The Writer, as do other
writing publications, periodically runs a feature on the pros and cons of MFA
programs; for me, a road not taken. I
was on the road so much with Kinko’s managing and setting up stores (I set up
ten in three states). I had to decide,
become a partner, which was on the table, or buy myself time to read and write
by moving to Malaysia. But it’s not the
same by any means — a regret, too. You
made the right decision. Hopefully,
other Malaysian writers will be inspired to make that decision, too.
Did you feel there was any distinct
differences on how your novel was received/reviewed locally
(Malaysia/Singapore) versus US/UK? If it
was published locally, they might dismiss it as inferior in some way, a general
bias against local publishers, perhaps, as opposed to those like yourself being
published overseas with well-known publishers.
Preeta: I wrote this novel
(and I hope to write every novel) for Malaysians. I fought very hard not to sell out, not to
have to change things for a Western audience, not to explain, not to
compromise. And I did all that not to be
difficult, but because I truly believe that it’s impossible to write equally
for both audiences. Every step taken
towards that Western audience is a step away from my own audience. The explaining is not anodyne: in that effort to alienate white people less,
you do actually alienate Malaysians more. The explanations you put in for white people
are distancing to your original intended audience. Nothing anyone ever says about being able to
do both will ever change what I truly think about this. That said, I had decided to publish that book
abroad. That wasn’t because I wanted
money and fame and glory, but because I want the West to be reading about Malaysia,
but more than that, I want them to be reading about us ‘on our terms.’ I want them to be reading the kinds of
stories we tell about ourselves when no one is listening, except I want them to
be listening.
RR: I like that, the way you put that: “the kinds
of stories we tell about ourselves when no one is listening…” That was what I had felt while reading your
novel, as if I were eavesdropping on various snide comments and asides not
meant for my ears and saw this family in an unflattering, though, natural
light. They were being as they are for no
one else’s sake but their own.
Preeta: That, after all,
is the purpose of literature: for all of
us, including white people, to be reading about those who are not like us, and
to discover even in that not-likeness a shared humanity that underlies everything.
If we only read about people who are like
us in the important ways — by which I mean that their skin colour may be
different, but they still don’t ever make us uneasy; we still feel comfortable
in their presence — then the existing balances of power will never be challenged
by what we’re reading. I can’t get the
West to listen if I don’t publish abroad, so I have to negotiate this minefield
each time. Each time, I have to wonder
afresh if I will be able to pull it off, if I’ll be able to refuse to address
my work to white people, or to hold their hands as I gently guide them through
my world, and yet get them to read me.
RR:
It is a minefield, but it all comes down to the characters and story that
demands to be told, demands to be read, not so much where the novel is set, but
what resonates with the readers, what they can take away from it, what they can
learn about themselves even from a totally different culture, for example, in a
Nigerian-set story like Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart, which I recently re-read, whether you are white or nonwhite,
whether you are Western or Asian, whether you have an interest in Africa or
not...the story stays with you.
By the way, were Malaysians or the
Indian community, receptive to you writing about the May 1969 riots? Hey, this is between the Malays and the
Chinese, you Indians stay out of it! I
was here during the October 1987 crackdown which prevented another racial riot —
for months we could feel the pressure mounting all the way in Penang; then
came the clampdown of the press and all those arrests under ISA. My ex-wife was a reporter for NST and they
were given new strict guidelines what they could or could not report on — anything
remotely racial was a huge no-no. We had
close friends who wrote for The Star when it got shut down; a scary
time, but nothing close to what happened in 1969!
Preeta: For the most part,
yes, people were very receptive. Of
course I’m not the first writer to cover May 13th in fiction; most famous,
Lloyd Fernando wrote a whole novel about the riots. I can’t claim to have a clear idea of what
readers in general thought of my treatment of May 13th, but the few who spoke
to me about it were very positive, with one exception (but that person was Malay,
not Indian). It’s interesting that you
mention Operation Lalang, because the novel I’ve just finished deals with that
incident.
RR:
I must’ve been reading your mind.
After hearing that you had been working on a second novel for a number
of years, I’m glad to learn it’s finished. Does the long gap between your first novel and
a second worry you as it often does many writers; this fear that, this may be
it, that I’m a one-book writer. (Of
course, there are tens of thousands of writers who have written a novel or
even several but have yet to reach that one published novel stage — I know one
gentleman who has nine unpublished novels fully written....Personally I would
love to see a novel about Uma in America, heavily burdened with guilt knowing
that despite Aasha’s assertion, she may have been the one to have killed Paati;
guilt for Uncle Ballroom’s falling out with her father; guilt for allowing
herself to be manipulated by her grandmother against her mother; guilt for
abandoning Aasha…with plenty of flashbacks, further illuminating events that
took place in the first book, plus her reaction when she learns of Chellam’s
brutal death at the hands of her father…
Preeta: Yes, I finished the
book earlier this year and it’s in the long process of (I hope) being sold. Of course the long gap worried me, even as I
continued to slog through the writing; I worried I wouldn’t or couldn’t finish
it, I worried everyone would have forgotten who I was by the time the second
novel made it out (and perhaps they have!), I worried the second novel would be
too different from the first, so that those few readers who ‘hadn’t’ forgotten
me would be disappointed. But in the end
you have to set those worries aside and keep working, or risk devoting your
life to worrying instead of writing. In
response to your speculation, I do have to say: this novel is not a sequel to Evening is the Whole Day. It isn’t about an Indian family; it is
different in possibly every way (style, structure, tone, voice, point of view
as I previously mentioned).
RR:
Perhaps in the future, after enough time has passed, you’ll consider the
idea….Just curious, do you prefer being called a novelist, an author, or a
writer? Since we’re on the subject of
identify, after having lived overseas so long, do you consider yourself as an
expat writer, or a Malaysian writer, or part of the larger India Diaspora of
writers? Why?
Preeta: I can’t say that I
have any strong preference! I refer to
myself as a writer, because I also write short stories and essays. But I’m not offended or annoyed to find myself
referred to as a novelist or an author by others. As for identity: I consider myself a Malaysian writer. I realise that my living overseas means some
people will contest this identity, arguing that I can’t be an “authentic”
Malaysian writer if I haven’t lived in Malaysia for a quarter of a century. But Malaysia continues to be the only place I
write about and the only place I want to write about in my fiction. To me, living overseas makes it easier for me
to see and to articulate some things about the country that I don’t think I’d
be able to if I were living there. I’m
speaking only for myself here, and not claiming that Malaysian writers who live
in Malaysia are less able to see what I see or write what I write. I only mean that for me, personally, distance
is crucial. As for the Indian Diaspora
question: I admire many Indian writers,
but I don’t consider myself one of them because Malaysian culture is distinct
from Indian culture on the subcontinent; South Asia and Southeast Asia are two
quite different regions.
RR:
Distancing is a way that allows you to see things up close….I keep
finding myself writing about America even though with each passing year as an
expat I know it less and less, but it is still home; it is where I am from; it
is what I am still trying to make sense of even more so in this age of Trump with
its disturbing undercurrent of half truths, blatant lies and white supremacy.
When you gave up your music dissertation
to write your novel that must’ve been a major turning point in your life. Looking back, do you wish you had made that
decision a few months (years) sooner? Or
even later? Any regrets? (For me, I had serious second thoughts about
the timing when I left my career in the US to come to Malaysia to teach myself
how to write; another year or two would’ve made a huge difference financially,
but then, I may never have left or had the experiences that I had that led me
to write LSR…)
Preeta: Yes, I do
sometimes I wish I’d made the decision several years sooner, but then again, I
don’t think I would have been quite the same person if I’d followed a different
trajectory, and a different person would be a different writer. So in many ways, it’s pointless to speculate
about these things. The writer I am, the
person I am, is the person who had all these experiences, and although I don’t
analyse the effect of those experiences on my writing, I can’t help but believe
that they exert their influence on my writing in some way. Not at all in the most obvious way that people
always ask about: do you think your
musical training plays a role in the way you use language? Because my answer to that question is a fairly
certain no. The way I use language comes
much more from the writers I read as a child and as a young woman than from
anything else. But I think that my years
as an academic did give me a certain kind of rigour in my approach to history,
memory, and language that I didn’t have before.
RR:
If you were interviewing yourself, what one question would you ask and
how would you answer it?
Preeta: I’m terrible at
answering questions like this! Every so
often I read an interview in which a writer is asked a question I really wish
someone would ask me, and then I promptly forget it. I suppose I’ll just offer something that’s on
my mind right now: lately, I’ve been
seeing a lot of positive reviews or blurbs of books that say “This book made me
miss my subway stop!” There’s nothing wrong with a good, gripping page-turner,
but it bothers me that this has become our one criterion for judging
literature. So I think I would ask
myself, in this hypothetical interview, what other kinds of pleasurable or
important or even life-changing reading experiences there are, and what some
examples might be of books that would never have made me miss my subway stop,
but changed my life and the way I think. I think that in my long reading history, I’ve
found that the book that is a challenge, even an ordeal, to read — the book I
have to put aside for days, weeks at a time, the book I have to take a break
from every hour or so, the book that is dense and slow and unwelcoming,
forbidding, at first — can sometimes be the most rewarding book of all.
Or the book that doesn’t grip and suck
you in with great force, but instead invites the reader to digress in his or
her mind, to launch into many enriching reveries of his or her own between the
paragraphs. In that first category —
the dense, challenging book that reshapes my brain — I would put the fantastic
novel Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk;
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities;
Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake (in what strange universe would Finnegan’s Wake make someone miss their
subway stop? Would that novel even be
published today?) In the second category
— the book that invites languid internal digressions — I would put most of Tove
Jansson’s novels for adults; To the
Lighthouse (you probably won’t miss your subway stop when there’s no plot
to speak of!); In Search of Lost Time;
Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of
Time. Of course this is all highly
subjective, but these are books that I think are fairly unlikely to make anyone
miss their subway stop. And yet: where
would literature be today without them? I
was listening to Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech yesterday, in which
he says, towards the end:
“We must widen our common literary
world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite
first world cultures. We must search
more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary
cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own
communities. Second: we must take great
care not to set too narrowly or conservatively our definitions of what
constitutes good literature. The next
generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell
important and wonderful stories. We must
keep our minds open to them, especially regarding genre and form, so that we
can nurture and celebrate the best of them.
In a time of dangerously increasing division, we must listen. Good writing and good reading will break down
barriers. We may even find a new idea, a
great humane vision, around which to rally.”
But how can we do any of this if the
only thing we’re all looking for is a book that will make well-meaning
middle-class New Yorkers miss their subway stop?
RR:
Nicely said. I’m glad you
answered that very apt question!
What one advice would you give yourself
(and others) if you were just starting out to write a novel?
Preeta: Write the kind of
novel you yourself would want to read.
Write for a person who already knows and understands the things you know
and understand (about the place you’re writing about; about history; about
human nature). Don’t explain
yourself. Don’t give in to the
temptation to take your reader by the hand and make them comfortable. The best books don’t try to be everyone’s
best friend. The best books unsettle
people, push them out of their comfort zones.
Trust your readers to do some work.
The ones who aren’t willing to are not worth it anyway.
RR: I know where you’re coming from, but I feel all readers are worth it. If a reader has invested his or her money and
invested their time they are worth it.
Some just need to read the book or certain parts more than once. Most books, after a second reading, are
richer. Stuff you may have missed or
didn’t feel was significant the first time around suddenly made sense in light
of what comes later, plus underlying themes that may have been missed while
caught up in the plot can resonate in unexpected ways, but as you said it does take effort. I do like what you said about
writing the kind of novel you want to read.
I could add, write the story that only you can tell; if you don’t, it’ll
never get written, a loss for all of us.
My other Interviews with First Novelists:
Ivy
Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner
of the 2016 Proverse Prize.
Ivy Ngeow, who I recently interviewed and who interviewed me was asked to write 500 words about her book, Cry of the Flying Rhino.
