Dalrymple kickstarts fest, Orhan Pamuk adds glitter

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Deepika Padukone arrive for the Triumph Lingerie 2011 fashion show in Mumbai on Thursday. PHOTOS: PTI,AFP

A WELL-DECORATED, festooned, expanded and bursting-at-the-seams Diggi Palace threw open its gates to readers, writers and book lovers from around the globe who flocked to the five-day-long DSC Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday. The festival was formally announced with the festival co-director and author William Dalrymple’s speech, in which he described the literary show to be a fusion of the best minds from across the world. The opening ceremony saw senior Congress leader and culture connoisseur Karan Singh root for vernacular languages. Sanskrit scholar and author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sheldon I. Pollock delivered the keynote address in which he lamented the gradual disappearance of Indian languages and its classical texts that dated back to centuries. “India is on the verge of a cataclysmic cultural ecocide,” he said.
Day One, however, belonged to the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who was at the festival with girlfriend and author Kiran Desai. Pamuk, in conversation with author and critic Chandrahas Chaudhury, talked about his craft, in the light of his novels, like The Museum of Innocence, Snow and My Name is Red. His reflections on the art of writing and reading a novel, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist, was part of Hamish Hamilton’s titles to be launched at the festival.
Writing novels, Pamuk said, was about using stories to show that while human lives are different everywhere, the human heart is essentially the same everywhere. “Writing a novel helps you deal with thoughts that contradict and antagonise each other,” he said. In his latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk didn’t want to put love on a pedestal.
“I deliberately wrote a book that was about love, but didn’t put it on a pedestal,” he said.
Alluding to the novel’s intimate scenes in the beginning and its denouement, he said: “It is like Romeo and Juliet have sex in the beginning and then they are Romeo and Juliet again.”
In The Mueseum of Innocence, Pamuk wanted to explore the forgotten past which all of us want to preserve, but don’t know how to. “All my novels give objects an aura, depth and meaning through stories,” said Pamuk, terming himself different from Proust and Tolstoy who “dramatised” a great deal in their novels. “My writing is about objects, pictures, images, perhaps because I am a failed artist,” he said. Terming his occasional appearance in his novels, he said it was like Hitchcock’s brief appearances in his films.
“I want the reader to be conscious of who’s telling the story,” he said.