Kiran Desai: Exclusive interview
Fresh from her South African tour, Desai tells of her incredible year
Desai tells Perspective about her incredible year
It’s been nearly a year since you won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. What impact has winning the prize had so far?
It isn’t easy to be a young writer, you have to convince others, convince yourself. So much attention has been paid to this book after the Man Booker, and I’m grateful for that, but the greatest impact on my life is feeling I might be more eccentric in my work in the future, that I should play more. I feel (I hope this continues when I actually begin working), less uptight and rigid about the process. I was quite stern and mean-spirited while writing “Inheritance of Loss,” fearful of the risk I was taking.
You mentioned in an interview shortly after winning the prize that you would like to have been in India - where “they care for the Booker so much”. Have you had a chance to go to India since you won the prize?
Yes, I was there quite soon after. Indians have always followed the Booker — an old link, I suppose, and the fact that the prize is often given to books particularly pertinent to us. On book tour, I was constantly reminded of how precious books are in India. I grew up with that being an absolute tenet. India was quieter then, with a closed door economic policy, the world arrived only through books, and they meant everything. I remember reading with an intensity that seems lost to me now. Rushdie writes of how we grew up kissing any book that fell on the floor as if they were sacred objects. Now, living in New York City with barely any space to put books, an overflowing desk, I sometimes put books in piles on the floor, and feel… evil.
Where else in the world has winning the prize taken you?
It really has been a lot of travel, albeit in cartoon form. It sometimes feels as if a joke is being played on me: the world at last, but moving too fast to see it. Yet, of course, it is the greatest luck to meet book people from around the world. I’ve been from Hay on Wye in Wales to Copenhagen to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Cape Town, Galle in Sri Lanka, Parati in Brazil. I’ll go to Europe again, hopping between countries, to Canada, to Indonesia….
In your acceptance speech you thanked your mother for her support and help with your writing. Have the dynamics altered since winning the prize?
No, I think they go too deep to be altered. I’m responding to these questions from her house. We were talking of what she’d recently written about Primo Levi and his translating Kafka, of the holocaust that was anticipated by Kafka, experienced by Levi. What this did to an intelligence (Levi’s) writing about people on the other side of the world, writing about how one tribe fails another. Very different from other Europeans observing the colonial world at that time. When I walk into her home, it is almost as if another dimension opens up, a magic space in which I can work and think like nowhere else. It is the peace of it, the stillness of the light, the flavour of exile that seems essential to writing, the fact that everything seems to bend to the fact of it being a writer’s home. It’s the rhythm of a writing life that comes from 50 years of working, and from that older time of being a writer in India when you wrote for writing’s sake alone, not for the cocktail samosas.
You’re the youngest female writer to win the prize. Do you feel as if you now need new literary aspirations to work towards?
“Youngest female” makes me feel like a biological specimen! Well, I don’t think younger, quicker, fatter etc. really matters. A good book can come from the location of youth or of old age, don’t you think? I know a writing career goes up, goes down to its own rhythm — some are welcomed books, others despised books, but that’s the public side. The important thing is the journey of thought, of experimentation. I feel very much at the beginning of that process.
You live in America but you have retained your Indian passport. Do you feel more Indian than American?
Being part of the Indian diaspora gives one a precise emotional location to work from, if not a precise geographical one. This book was a return journey to the fact of being Indian, to realising the perspective was too important to give up. America might give me half a narrative, but I had to return to India for the other half of the story, for emotional depth, historical depth. I don’t care about passports. Literature is located beyond flags and anthems, simple ideas of loyalty. The vocabulary of immigration, of exile, of translation, inevitably overlaps with a realization of the multiple options for reinvention, of myriad perspectives, shifting truths, telling of lies — the great big wobbliness of it all. In a world obsessed with national boundaries and belonging, as a novelist working with a form also traditionally obsessed with place, it was a journey to come to this thought, that the less structured, the multiple, may be a possible location for fiction, perhaps a more valid ethical location in general.
The Inheritance of Loss was admired for giving the reader a vivid sense of place. Where is your next novel set?
I think I was fighting to create a sense of place while also undoing anyone’s claim upon it as being sole, firm or integral. Working on this book I became aware of the novelistic moments that come from many stories overlapping, of realising that one’s place in the world is incidental, it is just perspective, the location isn’t really firm at all. Past, present, or future. There will be other books on the shelf. I think the next book will also be a mish-mash of locations for the sake of being able to explore the truth and lies that exist between places.
Having won the prize, do you feel a different kind of pressure surrounding your next novel?
No. I don’t notice outside pressure if I’m really working. My self-consciousness vanishes. In the end, there is only myself and my book keeping each other company, alone together, perverse and happy. The pressure is only that of making the book work for it seems impossible to write a perfect book. Yet, of course, as a reader, I hunger for it. It’s a constant desire and I know I’ll write another book for that reason. There is always the feeling that something got away. Where is that thing — the sublime novel? What would it feel like to hold that in my hands? Whenever I come across it as a reader, I read trembling. Like any art form, when it works, the person experiencing it exists in a form of grace. I hunger for that feeling as a writer as well as a reader.
Have you been inundated with novels to endorse since winning the prize? And do budding novelists try and contact you directly for support?
Yes. Books are piled all over my home. I fear I’ll fall over them, get my head stuck in between, and suffocate. Most of my recent reading has been for blurbs. I was helped by many generous writers. I feel I should be generous in return. For that and for knowing that publishers are often timid — as a writer one is concerned about one’s own bookshelf. I don’t understand authors who refuse to help. I know one has to do it in moderation, or that is all one would do. Still. Everybody has a little time….
Will The Inheritance of Loss be made into a film?
No. Maybe it is too much of a mess for a filmmaker?
Which title would be your ‘Booker of Bookers’?
Naipaul’s Bend in the River and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (which was named ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993) together changed the way I wanted to write about being Indian in the world. They are often seen as coming from two opposing camps, but I’ve learnt from both. My generation owes Rushdie that confidence, that attitude of saying we are not ashamed, that it is ok to write from our own centre, in our own English. We owe him his lushness and humour. The fusing of folktale and myth with history and politics. His insistence that history is always someone’s story. His creative stamina — just when you think there couldn’t be more rabbits out of the hat, there are more rabbits out of the hat. Naipaul I admire for that brutal honesty, the width of his perspective. He’s the first fiction writer I know of who wrote of the parallel experience of people from African, Latin American and Asian countries, their relationship with the West. For him no story is seen in isolation, the big wars pervert the smallest places.
