Sunday, May 22, 2011

What Novels Tell Us About Life (And About Themselves)

I write to you from a slightly tilted position on the sloping streets, under the low-hanging clouds, and above the twitters of the early-rising birds of Thimphu, where I'm going to give a lecture tomorrow afternoon at the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival called "What Novels Tell Us About Life (And About Themselves)".

Among the writers I'll be discussing are greats such as Willa Cather, Irene Nemirovsky, Ashvaghosha, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, high-grade novelists from our own time like Orhan Pamuk and David Mitchell, and some of my own contemporaries in Indian literature whose work I admire, such as Manu Joseph and Jahnavi Barua.

1 comment:

Aditya Mani Jha said...

Pamuk has been a favourite for a while now, but David Mitchell has been a relatively recent discovery.. in the context of the topic of your talk; I discovered that I was gaining a whole new perspective on many of my childhood episodes after reading Mitchell's "Black Swan Green". Also, my elder brother had a dreadful stutter for a long long time as a kid.. and the aforementioned novel handled this aspect of the central character amazingly well.. after reading "Cloud Atlas" and "number9dream" I'm convinced he is right up there with Pamuk, Murakami, McEwan, DeLillo and the other contemporary giants.