Blog Posts by Sanjay Sipahimalani

Pity the poor book reviewer. Not only does he or she have to plod through novel after novel, but then, racing against deadlines, compress sparkling insights into a limited number of words. Yet, after this toil, there are those who raise eyebrows and ask if book reviews matter, going on to enquire if the novel is dead. Others unkindly point out cliches found in reviews: words and expressions such as "lyrical", "fully realised", "panoramic sweep", and "X meets Y". As in, "James Joyce meets James Hadley Chase in this lyrical, fully-realised work that offers a panoramic sweep of human relationships".

On behalf of the reviewing tribe, then, I propose a radically new way of talking and writing about books, an inspiration that came to me while scouting for plonk at the local bodega. Yes, it's time for the bibliophile to borrow from the language of the oenophile.

After all, when a serious-looking chap sips from a glass of wine and says, "A bit light but pleasingly nutty, with fruity notes and

We live in Serious Times. A period when families, faith and finances, or so we are told, are crumbling all around us. Today's committed novelist tries his or her best to reflect this: witness the so-called 9/11 novel, the family sagas, and stories of malfeasance and corruption that you'll come across in the new releases section of your neighbourhood bookstore.

All of which is as it should be. If journalism is the first rough draft of history, novels are nothing less than a nuanced, polished version of our times. But sometimes, I can't help wondering whether your garden-variety novelist, in being so respectful of reality, is missing a trick. We need more playfulness, more illogicality. More absurdity.

When it comes to literature, the word 'absurd', of course, has connotations other than the state of being ridiculous. It also refers to the way of thinking that posits human life as meaningless, with each of us adrift in an unreasonable world. Anyone who's awakened with a hangover on a

I recently read two debut novels by Indian authors in English that left me musing once again on the aspect of the novel that allegedly causes much heartburn to those who write them. As the dictionary so breezily defines it, it's "the main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence". In a word: plot.

The two novels in question couldn't be more dissimilar. Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills is full of over-romanticised episodes stretching over decades, owing more than a little something to The Far Pavilions and Gone with the Wind. Plot, here, exists in the grand narrative style. Anjali Joseph's Saraswati Park, however, is a quiet meditation on the lives of those on Mumbai's margins. Very inward-looking, with incidents that- especially when compared to Tiger Hills - can be termed small in scale: pebbles falling into the pond of existence.

Be they tiger-sized or pebble-shaped, when it comes to life's events, scientists of the

If a Martian was to send a postcard home about what he'd learnt of the human race after a study of its novels, we'd be singled out as a species marked by sorrow, dissatisfaction and frustration.

Fictional characters are, in the main, unhappy. Seeking love, acknowledgement or riches - sometimes all three at the same time - they blunder from incident to incident, and getting thwarted only makes them strive further. It's not for nothing that when it comes to novels, the word "happy" is almost always paired with "ending". More often than not these days, one that's bittersweet.

As a matter of fact, if you spot a title with the word "happy" or its equivalent, you can be sure that what follows is anything but happy. Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" deals with a weakling disdained by his wife who stays with him only for his money and who is, directly or indirectly, responsible for his death. Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter" is about the bitter

Almost from the moment I received a book for review a few weeks ago, I knew that I didn't like it. Lest you jump to the conclusion that I write reviews without reading books, let me hasten to clarify that it's not the contents I was referring to but the actual state of the book itself. One of those large-format trade paperbacks, it had a longitudinal crack down its spine, which meant that whenever I picked it up it fell open at a page halfway through. Quite annoying, not to mention that my fingers kept touching the spine to assess it as I was reading, like a tongue that cannot be kept away from a cavity.

This is also one of the reasons I dislike the monsoon, for the moisture-laden air makes pages curl up in a most distressing fashion. I recall once, years ago in my callow youth, actually ironing a paperback in the hope that this would straighten it out. Big mistake: the pages turned a jaundiced yellow and remained as undulating as ever. (It felt nice and toasty in my hands for a while,

"Life is calling," insists a TV commercial for a brand of vodka, going on to enquire: "Where are you?" More often than not, my answer is: "Do go away, I'm reading."

The problem with such a rejoinder is not so much that avid readers have no social life - they don't -- but that they come to a sorry end. That's if you go by the fates of fictional characters who happen to be readers.

There aren't too many of that breed nowadays. Novelists appear to have no problem in creating characters who are writers - from the luckless Edwin Reardon in New Grub Street to alter egos such as Henry Bech and Nathan Zuckerman to Manhattan's louche litterateurs in Lit Life and All the Sad Young Literary Men. But when it comes to those who read, one has to go back a few centuries to find two of the most renowned. The first, a man from La Mancha and the second, a bored housewife from provincial Rouen.

It was the inability to distinguish between life and literature that was behind the antics of Alonso Quixano,

A few weeks ago, I was afflicted by a nasty ailment. Reader's block.

Try as I might, I was unable to concentrate on a book - any book - for more than a paragraph or two, sometimes not even that much. The last time this happened to me was, as I recall, eons ago, after studying for a grueling bachelor's degree. (In commerce, in case anyone's asking).

Then, of course, it was because of reading too much about the many advantages of double-entry book keeping, combined with several unsuccessful attempts to tally balance sheets. This time around, I was at a loss to ascertain a cause.

Perhaps it was because I'd recently raced through too many novels in an attempt to meet review deadlines. Perhaps it was that, under the solemn influence of Literature with a capital L, I was picking up books with no semblance of plot. Perhaps it was just too hot to read.

A friend wrote to say he'd treated a similar ailment by swallowing a dime western or two. This cured him completely, but with the unfortunate

An American author once told me of his former professor's reactions to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The first time he read it, said the professor, he was in his early teens, and was mesmerised and heartbroken by the outcome of Anna's liaison with the dashing Vronsky. The second time, he was in his thirties and much married. Now, he sympathised with Anna's cuckolded husband as well as with the tale of Levin and Kitty. And the last time, in his late 60s, he felt like throwing up his hands at the characters' actions and saying, "Oh, you young people, what melodrama you fill your lives with!"

Well, they do say that a definition of a classic is that it reveals new things to you every time you read it. Classic or not, re-reading a work that has given pleasure the first time around can be a mixed blessing.

Usually, the books re-read most often are those first encountered when young, when shades of the prison-house haven't begun to close in yet. In one of her essays, Virginia Woolf observes that a