IN CONVERSATION
'Reading is a commitment'
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If his books are prolific and profound, his interviews are invariably monosyllabic. Author M.G. VASSANJI, now based in Canada, would rather be known for what he pens. Most of his writing is set in parts of Africa, where he moved to a s a child. In India recently after the publication of his latest novel, The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall, his sixth book to date, Vassanji spent some time with SUCHITRA BEHAL talking about his work and his views on the w orld of publishing. Excerpts:
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YOUR latest book, how different is it from your earlier work?
This book is the closest to me after my first novel, Gunnysack, which was based in a way on my childhood experiences. But this book felt as close when in fact superficially it is the farthest from my own background. It's about a Punjabi family and I am not a Punjabi. It's from the background of a person who comes in the 1900s to work on the railways in Kenya, whereas my background is that of a Gujarati trader. So from that point of view the background is very different. It felt very close and it's a mystery to me why I felt so much in touch with the character. I felt till the last days (laughs) this is a genuine character. Also it's a book that I felt was most complete after I finished writing it. I won't say honest, but I didn't have any inhibitions about it..
What is the book about?
It begins in a small town in Ontario where a person of Indian background has escaped. He is a businessman who is considered one of the most corrupt men in Africa — you have these people who've made not just millions but hundreds of millions of dollars in deals where the government people are involved. I suppose you have them in India too. But then he describes his own background, which is set at a time when Kenya was undergoing the Mau Mau upheaval which was really very brutal, very numbing. There is this character, Vikram Lal, who is with his Punjabi family: father, mother, sister, grandparents — so you have a childhood which is warm and secure and at the same time there is the other background of fear and terror in the night. When the attacks take place, the first part ends on a traumatic note when they move to another city.
There has been a lot of hype in the West about Indian writing now being passé. Is this because the market has moved on or because nothing significant has come out of India in a long time now?
The media hype up something and now they say it's dead. This is standard. To a writer it doesn't really matter. They are the ones who hyped it up and then they move on. They hyped European literature and then it was over, they hyped up South American writers in the 1970s... I don't know, this is something that one doesn't really pay attention to. It was a very superficial phenomenon — Indian writing, now what kind of Indian writing? You never saw the caste system, you only saw exotica. It was not the fault of the authors that they all wrote from their experiences — it was the media playing up. I never read reviews of my book — no, I think reviews serve a purpose, but to be worried about them or to be influenced by them doesn't serve any purpose.
There is a view in some quarters that a lot of writers' imagination has taken a beating after the 9/11 incident, specially because of the manner of the attack — it is felt that it has exhausted all the possibilities of imagination.
I think that's nonsense. It's a big blow to the American ego and to world security. Because of that we all live in a certain kind of fear now when we travel. May be for the American writer but one shouldn't take the American way of thinking as global. It's just an American thing. It happened to them, they got world sympathy. It was not the Holocaust, it was not Rwanda it was not Cambodia, Chile or Argentina. What are we talking about? Sure it was a symbolic thing but how can that change imagination? But what it can change is the response to the attack, global security, new alignments that have taken place — that can change the way we write about things.
In publishing today writers who are younger, more photogenic or telegenic are being preferred. Because it is easier to market such faces. Would you agree with this view?
Well it's possible... yeah, that happens...
No, what I am trying to say is that it happens more so now — if you are well packaged, then like a product it's easier to market you?
Yes, but then that product lasts a season. Of course that is there. I don't know if any publishing houses are doing that although they do exploit it if the writer is good looking but I don't know how that translates into readership. Because reading is a commitment. You can look at a sexy lady or man but to finish a 400-page book is a commitment. May be you'll sell a book the first time but if the book is not great... I don't know. People are not fools.
Has your publisher ever suggested a makeover ?
Not yet. No, never (Laughs).
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