In the days just after the Mumbai attacks, reading is the last thing on my mind. Like most of the people I know, I’m reading not books but blogs, Twitter feeds, the newspapers.
In the course of time, we read the lists of the dead, dreading the moment when our eyes will snag on a familiar name, when a single line of type will bring grief surging into our lives.
Terror and war force a pause, a kind of mourning from even the most dedicated readers and writers. In the aftermath of an attack anywhere in the world, at any moment in history—Hiroshima, Bali, Madrid, Beirut, New York, Mumbai—we seem to veer briefly away from fiction. After 9/11, bookstores reported that sales of non-fiction on military affairs and terrorism soared, as though by reading about the enemy one could draw a circle of protection around oneself, one’s family.
Terror strikes too close for us to want to see our lives reflected in the mirrors held up by Dom DeLillo, Amos Oz, Claire Messud, Denis Johnson, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan and a score of others. We always go back to fiction, in the end, but after that necessary pause, that breathing space.
Many of my friends turned to ancient sources of comfort: the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, especially Ecclesiastes. The best-known lines from Ecclesiastes are from Chapter 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal …”
But further along, you come across these lines: “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.” It is a naïve thought, but it was at that moment it struck me: someone as human as me and you wrote the Bible. It may have been King Solomon, but he was no distant, magisterial author—like us, he had borne hapless witness to suffering and struggled to make sense of it.
Over this week, I have found my way back to fiction through poetry. I re-read W H Auden’s bitter ‘September 1, 1939,’ which was read so often in the US after 9/11. “Who can release them now,/ Who can reach the dead,/ Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden asks in an especially bitter verse, written for an earlier war. And then he flows into one of the most moving passages in poetry: “All I have is a voice/ To undo the folded lie…./ We must love one another or die.”
Auden led me to two poets closer to home. I had read Jeet Thayil’s ‘At Kabul Zoo, The Lion’ many years ago, in a different context. In this poem, Thayil imagines the devastation wreaked on the Kabul zoo (“So this is fear: tracers flaring/ above the pens, the fat thud/ of bullets…”), told from the point of view of one of its oldest inhabitants, Marjan the lion (“blind in one eye, / my jaw in shreds, my mane / singed to a useless crop, / I’m still here…”). Another place, another time: but his images hit home, almost painfully.
Then I went back to the late Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems. Kolatkar was never a sentimental writer, and in this collection what he captured about Bombay wasn’t the city’s famed, and overstretched “spirit of resilience”. His Bombay was inhabited by the Boomtown Lepers’ Band, by pi-dogs and drug-pushers, by the drunk who rails against this “shit city… one big high-rise shit; waiting for God/ To pull the flush”.
What do you look for when you read at a time like this? Not comfort, not just a mirror image of shared sorrows. Perhaps what you look for most is some kind of meaning, an unromanticised reminder of how things really were, an antidote to easy empathy, knee-jerk sentimentality.
Many will find their bearings in more concrete books: analyses of terror, treatises on the politics of South Asia. Some will find solace in older accounts of wars and battles, in the Iliad, in Herodotus, in Michael Herr. Perhaps my tastes—poetry and the ancient religious texts—will not be shared by all. But I have learned this week that if reading does not provide answers or salvation, it does provide a path back to some sort of acceptance.
(Published in the Business Standard, December 5, 2008)
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Speaking Volumes: Kill all the (wo)men
(This was supposed to be a gentle ode to the joys of reading books in connected series, rather than in isolation, but I got caught up with Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape and its predecessors. As sometimes happens, I discovered later that I'd drawn on information I'd first researched for a column written many years ago, but I think I put a different spin on it. As I get older, my memory shreds into tinier and tinier bits.)
Many readers often wish there was an accurate system of “book pairings”, in the same way gourmet chefs suggest wine pairings, just to enhance reading pleasure. We do our best, with collected editions dedicated to a particular author or genre, or with Amazon-style attempts to suggest books that might go together, but there just isn't enough out there.
Here’s a classic instance of how it might work. If you're interested in Vietnam, start with The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s blackly funny dissection of US intelligence efforts in that country, then move on to Michael Herr’s tour of duty reportage in Dispatches (1977), and close with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007). All three books are Nam classics in their own right, but read together, they have an indelible, cumulative impact.
Or, to take another genre, start with Mary Shelley's horror classic Frankenstein (1818), where a scientist’s dream of creating life has monstrous results, move on to Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin, where an ordinary New York apartment building conceals Satan’s child, and close with Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998), about a secret that menaces generations of children.
As Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape came out last week, I found myself hoping that readers wouldn’t read this intriguing work of dystopian science fiction in isolation. I can’t comment on the literary merits of Escape for reasons of conflict of interest, having read a very early draft, but as one of the few works of modern Indian science fiction, it’s an important debut.
A brief plot summary: Escape is set in a world devoid of women, dubbed the “Vermin Tribe” by the generals who run the land. There is, however, a single woman left— a young girl called Meiji, who has been raised in isolation by her three uncles, and as she emerges into adulthood, must escape in order to survive. It’s a complex tale, where, as with much of 21st century science fiction, the development and growth of the characters is just as important as the futuristic setting.
To read Escape in a vacuum, however, would be to do both the book and yourself a disservice. It should be book-ended by a utopia and a dystopia— both written by Asian women. In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein published Sultana’s Dream, set in the relative utopia of ‘Ladyland’. Women rule this world, but view men with maternal affection, seeing them as helpless creatures at the mercy of their own appetites, who must be placed in purdah for their own protection. Rokeya Hossein was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and her gentle utopia is filled with touches of whimsy— the work day in Ladyland is only two hours long, for instance, because the men used to waste the remaining hours in smoking hookahs. Rokeya Begum continued her exploration of utopia and its challenges in a second novella, Padmarag.
Almost nine decades later, the feminist scholar and imaginative writer Suniti Namjoshi published Mothers of Mayadip in 1989. This fable was set in a far darker world than Ladyland, and Namjoshi set down a flatly didactic novel: what if a feminist utopia depended on killing off all men? How utopian would it remain, set on a foundation of fear and deliberate cruelty? What would happen if any one of the women decided to save even a single baby boy? Namjoshi’s world was the exact opposite of the world Padmanabhan evokes in Escape, but they share a common basis: in each, one gender's sense of identity is based on its fear of the other.
Mothers of Mayadip is much shorter and much less ambitious in scope than Escape; Namjoshi’s interest lay in writing a fable, not a full-length novel. Like Padmanabhan, Namjoshi offered no easy conclusions: a world minus men was not guaranteed to be fair, equal or free of fear, and would inevitably face its own troubles. Escape is far more interested in the question of what form a world inhabited by just one gender would take; Manjula Padmanabhan’s predecessors were more interested in the idea of a feminist utopia/ dystopia as a thought experiment.
Reading the three together— if you can find Padmarag and Mothers of Mayadip in secondhand bookshops— is well worth it, and not just as an academic exercise. It’s interesting to see how the same questions are raised by three members of very different generations of women, and how the answers become increasingly complicated over time.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 25, 2008)
Many readers often wish there was an accurate system of “book pairings”, in the same way gourmet chefs suggest wine pairings, just to enhance reading pleasure. We do our best, with collected editions dedicated to a particular author or genre, or with Amazon-style attempts to suggest books that might go together, but there just isn't enough out there.
Here’s a classic instance of how it might work. If you're interested in Vietnam, start with The Quiet American (1955), Graham Greene’s blackly funny dissection of US intelligence efforts in that country, then move on to Michael Herr’s tour of duty reportage in Dispatches (1977), and close with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007). All three books are Nam classics in their own right, but read together, they have an indelible, cumulative impact.
Or, to take another genre, start with Mary Shelley's horror classic Frankenstein (1818), where a scientist’s dream of creating life has monstrous results, move on to Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin, where an ordinary New York apartment building conceals Satan’s child, and close with Stephen King's Bag of Bones (1998), about a secret that menaces generations of children.
As Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape came out last week, I found myself hoping that readers wouldn’t read this intriguing work of dystopian science fiction in isolation. I can’t comment on the literary merits of Escape for reasons of conflict of interest, having read a very early draft, but as one of the few works of modern Indian science fiction, it’s an important debut.
A brief plot summary: Escape is set in a world devoid of women, dubbed the “Vermin Tribe” by the generals who run the land. There is, however, a single woman left— a young girl called Meiji, who has been raised in isolation by her three uncles, and as she emerges into adulthood, must escape in order to survive. It’s a complex tale, where, as with much of 21st century science fiction, the development and growth of the characters is just as important as the futuristic setting.
To read Escape in a vacuum, however, would be to do both the book and yourself a disservice. It should be book-ended by a utopia and a dystopia— both written by Asian women. In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein published Sultana’s Dream, set in the relative utopia of ‘Ladyland’. Women rule this world, but view men with maternal affection, seeing them as helpless creatures at the mercy of their own appetites, who must be placed in purdah for their own protection. Rokeya Hossein was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and her gentle utopia is filled with touches of whimsy— the work day in Ladyland is only two hours long, for instance, because the men used to waste the remaining hours in smoking hookahs. Rokeya Begum continued her exploration of utopia and its challenges in a second novella, Padmarag.
Almost nine decades later, the feminist scholar and imaginative writer Suniti Namjoshi published Mothers of Mayadip in 1989. This fable was set in a far darker world than Ladyland, and Namjoshi set down a flatly didactic novel: what if a feminist utopia depended on killing off all men? How utopian would it remain, set on a foundation of fear and deliberate cruelty? What would happen if any one of the women decided to save even a single baby boy? Namjoshi’s world was the exact opposite of the world Padmanabhan evokes in Escape, but they share a common basis: in each, one gender's sense of identity is based on its fear of the other.
Mothers of Mayadip is much shorter and much less ambitious in scope than Escape; Namjoshi’s interest lay in writing a fable, not a full-length novel. Like Padmanabhan, Namjoshi offered no easy conclusions: a world minus men was not guaranteed to be fair, equal or free of fear, and would inevitably face its own troubles. Escape is far more interested in the question of what form a world inhabited by just one gender would take; Manjula Padmanabhan’s predecessors were more interested in the idea of a feminist utopia/ dystopia as a thought experiment.
Reading the three together— if you can find Padmarag and Mothers of Mayadip in secondhand bookshops— is well worth it, and not just as an academic exercise. It’s interesting to see how the same questions are raised by three members of very different generations of women, and how the answers become increasingly complicated over time.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 25, 2008)
The Food Club: Changing palates
(Some time ago, the Business Standard asked me to do an offbeat food column. It's still finding its feet, but it's a lot of fun to write.)
Mention “eating healthy” to most normal people and they automatically think “deprivation”. The idea of dieting in any form, whether you’re a diabetic, a heart patient or a model, is linked with the idea of doing without: it’s easier to visualise the dark chocolate ice cream that you can’t eat than it is to visualise a healthy heart.
Never having dieted in my life, I was curious about how I would react to a month-long, ayurvedic and naturopathic diet. It’s astonishing how happy your so-called friends are to share their unpleasant diet experiences. The one who’d done the dismal cabbage diet (cabbage soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner) for ten days said, “Watch out for food dreams… I dreamt of wedding food and banquets and royal Mughlai cooking every single day, it makes you wake up crying.”
A recent heart patient spoke wistfully of his yearning for steak: “All I want is a very large slab of very red meat,” he said. “Kobe beef. Pork chops in apple sauce. Badam pasanda.” I said politely, “So, what’s for dinner tonight?” There was a long, pained silence. “Steamed vegetables and soya-flour chapattis.”
So I entered my ayurvedic retreat prepared for the worst. The day before I left, I treated myself to a steak in mushroom sauce with lightly steamed asparagus on the side, following that up with a double chocolate mousse. I figured I needed some good food memories to get me through the next month.
What is a healthy diet, exactly? I spent some time at a naturopathy centre and some time at an ayurveda centre, and came back with two contrasting opinions. Naturopathy and ayurveda both agree on an avoidance of “poisons”— both steer clear of meat as far as possible, eschew coffee, tea, alcohol, white sugar, refined flour and excess salt.
But naturopathy believes that most foods (read vegetables) are best eaten as close to their natural state as possible — juices and salads will predominate over curries and cooked dishes. Ayurveda believes that lightly cooked, bland foods are best for the system. In addition, ayurveda prescribes three different kinds of diets depending on your “dosha”.
The naturopathy diet was, for me, the more austere of the two. I dreamt of foie gras for three straight nights in a row, and began to miss desserts and sugary drinks about three days into the diet. Feeling deprived on a full stomach — the naturopathy meals were filling and the portions large — was an odd, disorienting experience. I knew after a week that however healthy this regimen of juices and salads might be, it wasn’t something I wanted to follow in my daily life.
Perhaps the ayurveda diet was better geared to my system, but I actually thrived on it. Meals were simple but excellent: fruit and either steamed idlis or moong-dal dosas for breakfast, a choice of three perfectly cooked vegetables with dalia khichdi for lunch, an occasional dessert, and more organic, locally-sourced vegetables for dinner. It sounds bland, but the variety in the vegetable dishes was extraordinary, and one never felt either hungry or too full.
I went out once to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and after nearly three weeks of healthy and tasty eating, it was a bizarre experience. Everything tasted too intense — too strongly flavoured, too salty, too spicy, too oily. I ate two bites of the beef curry I’d been craving, and stopped: it wasn’t what my palate wanted, though it was superbly cooked.
A month down the line, eating “normally” still feels wrong and food at parties seems too heavy.
I like some things about getting back to a normal diet — mostly the little treats and surprises, the lemony explosion of a perfect Tom Yam, the smoky silkiness of braised eel, the homely, memory-laden taste of a simple meat-and-potato curry.
But the change in my diet has changed the nature of my cravings: I dream of fresh fruit and of beetroot thoran, I find myself wanting green tea and fresh-caught, lightly steamed fish with just a bit of ginger and lime. Eating healthy, it turns out, isn’t always incompatible with eating well.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2008)
Mention “eating healthy” to most normal people and they automatically think “deprivation”. The idea of dieting in any form, whether you’re a diabetic, a heart patient or a model, is linked with the idea of doing without: it’s easier to visualise the dark chocolate ice cream that you can’t eat than it is to visualise a healthy heart.
Never having dieted in my life, I was curious about how I would react to a month-long, ayurvedic and naturopathic diet. It’s astonishing how happy your so-called friends are to share their unpleasant diet experiences. The one who’d done the dismal cabbage diet (cabbage soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner) for ten days said, “Watch out for food dreams… I dreamt of wedding food and banquets and royal Mughlai cooking every single day, it makes you wake up crying.”
A recent heart patient spoke wistfully of his yearning for steak: “All I want is a very large slab of very red meat,” he said. “Kobe beef. Pork chops in apple sauce. Badam pasanda.” I said politely, “So, what’s for dinner tonight?” There was a long, pained silence. “Steamed vegetables and soya-flour chapattis.”
So I entered my ayurvedic retreat prepared for the worst. The day before I left, I treated myself to a steak in mushroom sauce with lightly steamed asparagus on the side, following that up with a double chocolate mousse. I figured I needed some good food memories to get me through the next month.
What is a healthy diet, exactly? I spent some time at a naturopathy centre and some time at an ayurveda centre, and came back with two contrasting opinions. Naturopathy and ayurveda both agree on an avoidance of “poisons”— both steer clear of meat as far as possible, eschew coffee, tea, alcohol, white sugar, refined flour and excess salt.
But naturopathy believes that most foods (read vegetables) are best eaten as close to their natural state as possible — juices and salads will predominate over curries and cooked dishes. Ayurveda believes that lightly cooked, bland foods are best for the system. In addition, ayurveda prescribes three different kinds of diets depending on your “dosha”.
The naturopathy diet was, for me, the more austere of the two. I dreamt of foie gras for three straight nights in a row, and began to miss desserts and sugary drinks about three days into the diet. Feeling deprived on a full stomach — the naturopathy meals were filling and the portions large — was an odd, disorienting experience. I knew after a week that however healthy this regimen of juices and salads might be, it wasn’t something I wanted to follow in my daily life.
Perhaps the ayurveda diet was better geared to my system, but I actually thrived on it. Meals were simple but excellent: fruit and either steamed idlis or moong-dal dosas for breakfast, a choice of three perfectly cooked vegetables with dalia khichdi for lunch, an occasional dessert, and more organic, locally-sourced vegetables for dinner. It sounds bland, but the variety in the vegetable dishes was extraordinary, and one never felt either hungry or too full.
I went out once to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and after nearly three weeks of healthy and tasty eating, it was a bizarre experience. Everything tasted too intense — too strongly flavoured, too salty, too spicy, too oily. I ate two bites of the beef curry I’d been craving, and stopped: it wasn’t what my palate wanted, though it was superbly cooked.
A month down the line, eating “normally” still feels wrong and food at parties seems too heavy.
I like some things about getting back to a normal diet — mostly the little treats and surprises, the lemony explosion of a perfect Tom Yam, the smoky silkiness of braised eel, the homely, memory-laden taste of a simple meat-and-potato curry.
But the change in my diet has changed the nature of my cravings: I dream of fresh fruit and of beetroot thoran, I find myself wanting green tea and fresh-caught, lightly steamed fish with just a bit of ginger and lime. Eating healthy, it turns out, isn’t always incompatible with eating well.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 2008)
Speaking Volumes: A legend at lunch
Getting older has its privileges, if very few of them. One is the pleasure of meeting an author who has shaped your world view over the course of decades.
Back in the 1990s, Nadine Gordimer had an unexpected effect on the narrow world of Delhi University’s students. She was often cited, her works were passed from hand to hand and discussed in fierce tones, and her politics informed our lives as we dissected apartheid and looked at India’s own unspoken policies of discrimination anew.
Many of us could quote portions of her Nobel speech by heart. She had won the Prize for literature in 1991, and I still remember the electrifying shiver that ran down my spine when I heard the first line: “In the beginning was the Word,” she started her speech, borrowing from the Bible and making those ancient words her very own.
She spoke powerfully of what it was to grow up in the South Africa of the apartheid years: “Only many years later was I to realize that if I had been a child in that category — black — I might not have become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible for me was not open to any black child.” Gordimer’s books were often banned, though unlike her contemporaries—Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Jaki Seroke among others—she was not sent to jail.
At a private lunch hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi to celebrate her first visit to India in 14 years, Gordimer is relaxed and open. The lecture she gave in Calcutta was something of a triumph, the event attended by over 700 people; a quiet reading in Delhi will attract over 150 squeezed into a small hall. Her apparent fragility is misleading; at 85, she has the energy and curiosity of a much younger woman. She’s looking forward, she confides, to a trip to Mexico later this year to attend the birthday celebrations of her friend, the writer Carlos Fuentes, and expects to spend her own birthday on a plane.
It gives her great pleasure to know that censorship no longer exists in South Africa; she comments wryly on the excellent taste of the government’s censors. Of her more than 14 novels, the South African government had seen fit to censor four—The Late Bourgeois World, The Conversationist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. It’s something of a tribute to her powers as a writer that the last three of these haven’t dated and still remain relevant today.
Over lunch, the discussion ranges across a number of subjects. Gordimer has a sharp, alert birdlike presence; she’s an intent listener, picking up the unspoken nuances in our questions. She finds parallels between South Africa and India, and speaks of how the younger writers in South Africa mine the question of race relations and discrimination from an entirely different perspective. “We were three separate nations for so many years,” she says, “white, black and coloured; we are still getting used to being one country.” Her years of struggle are touched upon lightly; she insists that despite the many bans on her books, she never suffered as much as others did.
Like many writers who have lived through times of suffering and repression, Nadine Gordimer remains intensely attuned to injustice. There is passion in her voice when she speaks of how Salman Rushdie’s proposed visit to South Africa had to be aborted—Rushdie is a personal friend of hers, and over the years, Gordimer has spoken up against the fatwa that kept him in hiding after the Satanic Verses controversy. She had, she says, very much wanted him to come to South Africa, but the visit was cancelled after the Muslim community erupted in protests and made death threats against the writer. Her voice is laced with indignation as she speaks of this, after all these years.
Is she still writing? At 85, many authors would have settled back and rested on their laurels, but Gordimer cannot imagine a life that didn’t involve writing—her most recent collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, came out in 2007. She rarely discusses current work, but confirms that she has something in the pipeline.
I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to tell her what this casual meeting means to me. For my generation of readers, Nadine Gordimer opened up a much larger world than any of us could have imagined, and I like to think that she also stirred our consciences. There are authors whom you love, and there are authors who change your life. And sometimes, the same person can be both things to you, as Nadine Gordimer has been for so many of us.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 18, 2008)
Back in the 1990s, Nadine Gordimer had an unexpected effect on the narrow world of Delhi University’s students. She was often cited, her works were passed from hand to hand and discussed in fierce tones, and her politics informed our lives as we dissected apartheid and looked at India’s own unspoken policies of discrimination anew.
Many of us could quote portions of her Nobel speech by heart. She had won the Prize for literature in 1991, and I still remember the electrifying shiver that ran down my spine when I heard the first line: “In the beginning was the Word,” she started her speech, borrowing from the Bible and making those ancient words her very own.
She spoke powerfully of what it was to grow up in the South Africa of the apartheid years: “Only many years later was I to realize that if I had been a child in that category — black — I might not have become a writer at all, since the library that made this possible for me was not open to any black child.” Gordimer’s books were often banned, though unlike her contemporaries—Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Jaki Seroke among others—she was not sent to jail.
At a private lunch hosted by the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi to celebrate her first visit to India in 14 years, Gordimer is relaxed and open. The lecture she gave in Calcutta was something of a triumph, the event attended by over 700 people; a quiet reading in Delhi will attract over 150 squeezed into a small hall. Her apparent fragility is misleading; at 85, she has the energy and curiosity of a much younger woman. She’s looking forward, she confides, to a trip to Mexico later this year to attend the birthday celebrations of her friend, the writer Carlos Fuentes, and expects to spend her own birthday on a plane.
It gives her great pleasure to know that censorship no longer exists in South Africa; she comments wryly on the excellent taste of the government’s censors. Of her more than 14 novels, the South African government had seen fit to censor four—The Late Bourgeois World, The Conversationist, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People. It’s something of a tribute to her powers as a writer that the last three of these haven’t dated and still remain relevant today.
Over lunch, the discussion ranges across a number of subjects. Gordimer has a sharp, alert birdlike presence; she’s an intent listener, picking up the unspoken nuances in our questions. She finds parallels between South Africa and India, and speaks of how the younger writers in South Africa mine the question of race relations and discrimination from an entirely different perspective. “We were three separate nations for so many years,” she says, “white, black and coloured; we are still getting used to being one country.” Her years of struggle are touched upon lightly; she insists that despite the many bans on her books, she never suffered as much as others did.
Like many writers who have lived through times of suffering and repression, Nadine Gordimer remains intensely attuned to injustice. There is passion in her voice when she speaks of how Salman Rushdie’s proposed visit to South Africa had to be aborted—Rushdie is a personal friend of hers, and over the years, Gordimer has spoken up against the fatwa that kept him in hiding after the Satanic Verses controversy. She had, she says, very much wanted him to come to South Africa, but the visit was cancelled after the Muslim community erupted in protests and made death threats against the writer. Her voice is laced with indignation as she speaks of this, after all these years.
Is she still writing? At 85, many authors would have settled back and rested on their laurels, but Gordimer cannot imagine a life that didn’t involve writing—her most recent collection of short stories, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, came out in 2007. She rarely discusses current work, but confirms that she has something in the pipeline.
I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to tell her what this casual meeting means to me. For my generation of readers, Nadine Gordimer opened up a much larger world than any of us could have imagined, and I like to think that she also stirred our consciences. There are authors whom you love, and there are authors who change your life. And sometimes, the same person can be both things to you, as Nadine Gordimer has been for so many of us.
(Published in the Business Standard, November 18, 2008)
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