Three writers who also draw, dance and make music discussed the call of many muses at the Calcutta Literary Meet, in association with The Telegraph, on Saturday.
The session started with tango music to set the mood. Kapka Kassabova then read from her book Twelve Minutes of Love, in which people of various ages say why they dance the tango. The reasons are varied: finding love, losing oneself, saying things with one's body.
"I stopped dancing in 1977 but I went to Buenos Aires to look at the tango there because all my friends who dance the tango go to Buenos to dance," said Alessandro Baricco, who performs and directs apart from writing.
Kassabova could not agree more. "The tango is special in Buenos Aires because it was created in the slums there by prostitutes and sailors. Tangoholics travel to BA and dance there all night. There are cases of tango mania and those afflicted with it settle in BA to a life of all-night dancing," she said. A few suffer tango burnout and give up the dance after three-four years.
Graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee, who lives in Berlin, said it was the "natural capital of the tango" and north Germans are skilled in the dance.
"We mixed many different things, like cinema, advertising and sport. We were a generation who could look at McEnroe playing tennis," said Baricco. He had co-founded a creative writing school in Turin, where the generation studying "are sons of iPhones and the Internet. For us it was just TV and McEnroe".
Banerjee asked Baricco if he found it difficult to choose a subject for writing, given the pressures from publishers. "I just exercise my freedom to choose my subject," responded the Italian author.
Banerjee, who feels Italy has a healthy publishing scene, brought up Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated encyclopaedia of an imaginary world.
Baricco said about the book: "It is the most crazy book that I have seen. The writing is encyclopaedic and in an unintelligible language. It is impossible to translate it. There are pages in the book dedicated to bottles; the author Luigi Serafini lists 12 different kinds of bottles, some of which have legs. He is a crazy man. He lives in a beautiful house in Rome and eats at a restaurant in front of it."
According to Banerjee, the future of books lies in playing with the forms of writing. "But it is not really encouraged. In art, if you have text or narrative, then they instantly call it illustration, which is down below in the hierarchy of art. Last year the India Art Summit and the Jaipur Literature Festival were held on the same day because they believe these two art forms will never meet."
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