21.10.2012 : The Weekend Rant

I remember during our discussion on the Book Club (oh there is a post due on my con job - how I disguised myself as a blogger and made it to the Bloggers' Meet), Lekshmi mentioned during conversation there were some events slated to happen over the weekend. By the way , this is an excellent first hand account of the Kovalam Literary Festival that she attended.

Thankfully this weekend didn't carry the prospect of being called to the office again on the weekend, so I just shot a random mail to her asking if she would know of anything that might be happening over this weekend by any chance? And the good lady replied promptly saying there was a book reading by Manu Joseph on his second book "The Illicit Happiness of Other People" to happen at some place near Statue at 5:30 PM and also told me to check the Events Section in The Hindu Supplement. My untrained eyes though couldn't find anything in the Friday Review.

Manu Joseph. I had surely heard the name during the days when we used to subscribe to Hindu here at home. His book was one of the contenders for The Hindu Literary Prize (which it ended up winning) and some of the supplements carried reviews, interviews and the like. The book had even made it to the holy grail that is my flipkart wishlist. Here is the introduction of the author on the back cover reproduced verbatim "Manu Joseph is the editor of the Indian newsweekly, OPEN, and a columnist with the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times. His debut novel Serious Men was translated into several languages and won him The Hindu Literary Prize and the American PEN/Open Book award. It was also shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize and the P G Wodehouse Prize for the Best Comic Novel."

That he is the editor of OPEN Magazine was news to me, and this was all the more fascinating. The OPEN is an interesting magazine, and is on my staple reading diet on the way home - after Tehelka, of course.

So, noob that I am, I thought Lekshmi meant the event was to happen on Friday evening, and didn't give much thought upon that. I checked here for any interesting events on Saturday and found out something was going on at the Vailoppilly Samskruthi Bhavan (I ended up really enjoying a Mohiniyattom recital by Miss Lakshmi K J which.. oh later. Else this will turn into a postinception) and made plans. It was indeed a pleasant surprise when at around 5 PM, I found here that the book reading was slated to happen on Saturday, and that it was to commence in 30 minutes. I started out immediately from home, and boy didn't fresh oxygen work wonders. There was heavy traffic on the way, but I weaved my way through and reached the place around 15 minutes late.

The event had already started on time (Well what else was I expecting? That they'd wait for me?) There was a month-long book fest by DC Books going on, and this was an event associated with the same. The venue was just a makeshift space in the bookstore, and there were some chairs put on. The crowd was quite less, and there were at the most around 20-25 people there. The setting was peaceful and humble. I entered, and my favorite aroma of fresh books greeted me.
(Like the Amortentia-struck Hermione Granger said, "I can smell freshly mown grass and new parchment and.." )

There he was, sitting along with a lady who was reading something from the book. I didn't know who the lady was then, but she turned out to be Dr Meena T Pillai, an academic who is the Director of Centre for Comparative Literature at Kerala University.

Now thanks to my memory of a 90 year old, I don't remember much to actually make a first hand account on the whole thing. I have these snippet images from yesterday in my mind, most of them incomplete, but what the heck I will postaa however I feelaa.

The function was underway, and Meena was speaking. She remarked that she found the book "wickedly funny" and she quoted from the book to exemplify. These were a couple of them :
"Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men."
"And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created language to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions came from ancient comic writers. And that the ultimate goal of comics is the same as the purpose of humanity - to break free from language"

I didn't have a clue about the novel, but from what was being transpired I gathered that the characters were from a Kerala setting, and Meena was going on about the central character named Unni.

"..Unni suffered from a single malady - absolute sanity. He had so much clarity of vision and thoughts that it was dangerous. Absolute sanity is such a dangerous thing to possess. We all should be happy that we are insane at some levels... It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity"

I remember her to have made a good point afterwards. After going through many of the Indian English Literature of the present, she said she felt so disenchanted and jaded but Manu's novels once again gave her the thrills of losing herself in the quicksand of language - and made her find again that sheer joy of drowning in the language.

When she was done with the reading, it was Manu's turn to speak/read from the book - He said he preferred taking questions and then agreed to read just a paragraph from the novel - to introduce the novel and set the tone of it to the uninitiated.
It went like this :  

 As things are, it does not take much to be a spectacle on this narrow tarred lane, It waits all day to be startled by the faintest hint of strangeness passing through. Such as a stray working woman in the revolutionary sleeveless blouse, who has the same aura here as a divorcee. A man with a ponytail. A north Indian girl in jeans so tight you can see the daylight between her legs. It is as if such apparitions are a sign that the future, which has arrived in other places, is now prospecting the city. Here now is the final stand of an age, the last time one can profile a street in Madras and be correct. Men are managers, mothers are housewives. And all bras are white. Anglo-Indian girls who walk in floral frocks are Maria. 

(If you thought that I remembered that whole paragraph then you don't know me. At all.)

He then took questions from Meena and the audience.

One of the first questions were as to how did he zero in on the title "The Illicit Happiness of Other People". Was the story developed around the title, or the other way around ? He said he choose to have the title beforehand, and develop the story around it. He also revealed his first chosen title was "Mariamma Wins". That would depict the battle between a husband and a wife, "the only battle that really matters", as he put it. This was an initial thread he toyed with, in which Chacko is a journalist - an alcoholic journalist, "if there is such a thing as a non-alcoholic journalist", he quipped. Chacko did a regular column in paper when he would interview one miserable person - people perceived as or rather, expected to be miserable by the society that is - a cripple, or an invalid, or a prostitute for example, and he proved in his columns that the person was happy. But then, he said, he would have had to write all of Chacko's columns in the novel, and that would take a serious toll on the pace of the novel, which he was particular to maintain and hence he changed the course.

"My first chapter is called the Underdog Family. Every lane would be having an underdog family - whose job is to make the others happy by their own misery". The lot which others look down upon and derive a certain sadistic happiness which he calls the "Illicit Happiness of Other People."

At some point someone asked him whether at any point of time during the evolution of the novel did he think about not killing off the character Unni Chacko. (Which means Unni Chacko dies at some point in the story, which, as I found out now, isn't a spoiler at all). Now I was pretty still much clueless about the story at around this time and I didn't know how or why the question was significant. Manu responded saying it was an excellent question, and that he felt exposed. He answered with his, and the general obsession among the writers about pleasant and happy endings for the story. He admitted he too prefer happy endings. "Serious Men was accused of being of too low stakes", he said. "But", in his own words, "as writers we cannot escape the unpleasantness. We can tell powerful stories only if we don't run away from them". He also revealed he considered putting Unni in a coma, but since the story's present is about 3 years after the death of Unni, putting a 17 year old boy in a coma for 3 years is more tragic than letting him die.

Meena asked him about his literary influences, if any, and Nietzsche and Shaw by any chance? God why is that lady obsessed with Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw? I remember her trying to draw out parallels between Manu's characters and some of these celebrated philosophers' works while she was doing her first reading as well. He politely replied in the negative saying there was no literary influences, and joked that he, a student of literature would not want to have to do anything to do with Shaw. (My wild guess is that it was a reference to the course curriculum of which Shaw might be an integral part of. Pretty much like many of the literature students end up hating Shakespeare as opposed to being able to appreciate him more.) He told about his influences from Cinema though. The structure of his stories, he said, would have been influenced by Tarantino films. He also talked about the characters in the story, where instead of having a central character who would be researched into to minute details by the author and would be so vividly sketched and portrayed but would be hogging all the limelight, he liked to bring in short-lived cameo characters having an impact on the story.

"I find most of the heavy stuff boring. I am very suspicious of the Nobel Prize books, especially. I mean we need not be judgmental just because some Scandinavians decided to award it a prize."

"Writers should not be afraid of being tagged 'interesting'. The false notion is that 'interesting' is not art"

So did he have any plans to make it into a movie script, was one question. Frankly from what was being discussed I didn't think the book was movie material, and I mean it as a compliment. Manu laughed and said "No." He revealed there was a time when he used to seriously experiment with movie scripts as well. He also said he had even done a script for a Hindi movie which he jested, was not going to reveal because it will lie down in his murky "dark past". He reasoned that movie scripts were more time consuming to him, and demanded more commitments, with regards to selling of the movie and all.

Some point later he was talking about the "online" media versus print. He remarked that the evolution of the media was a natural thing, and there wasn't pretty much anything you can do to withhold the process. He might have seen the stack of fresh copies of his books lying nearby and then laughed, "Oh I shouldn't be saying this".
With reference to the bibliophile argument regarding the smell of the pages, he joked, "You can smell kindle also. Probably they will come up with a perfume for that."
So will the books as we see it now die?.
"I think it will take a long time to if it does eventually. I believe it will co-exist with the online medium, albeit in a much diminished state, perhaps."

Meena observed his books of being too "manly" and even in this book, apart from a couple of female characters, it was the same. "I'm thankful that the accusation is that I'm a man", was  his reply. He admitted he has struggled with female characters to get them right, to get inside them and think like them. There is only a point till which conjecture works, and all what he has written is what he has heard from the female characters in his life.

The last question was more of a general one. I didn't like the loud and rude way the person who asked it though. He took a copy of the book, and showed the back cover of the book and pointed out that all books nowadays had these glossy back covers which more or less had the same quotes saying Hindustan Times says its awesome, The Deccan Herald says its not to be missed, etc. His question was that weren't these reviews trying to create a preconception and weren't the media actually trying to influence the decision making and judgement of the reader? Manu replied saying he didn't think reviews are such a powerful medium as we imagine it to be, and that at the end of the day we take recommendations from only people/friends we trust. He also added that reviews are helpful in publicizing the book. (Who are we kidding? The OPEN Magazine has a regular column for book reviews. ;) )I didnt expect him to speak against the system either.

Manu Joseph came across as a pretty chilled out bloke, resembling one of your cool professors in college. He spoke freely and with an undercurrent of humour which made him all the more pleasing, without really being conscious about the need to be politically correct.

And then, after it was all done, I grabbed a copy and went to him, who signed graciously. There is my first one to the signed-by-author collection.
"Thanks", I said.
"Thanks for coming", he smiled.
I stood there awestruck and mumbled "Pleasure..", after a good two minutes to the guy who brought tea.