Ruskin’s ghosts, and the silence of Coetzee

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Actress Zooey Desch-anel arrives at the premiere of My Idiot Brother at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah

RUSKIN BOND held court on Sunday, Day 3 of the on-going Jaipur Literature Festival 2011. The author, who was in conversation with Penguin’s Ravi Singh, regaled both his young and adult admirers with his flair for cooking stories. Most of his stories, he said, were rooted in his own nature. “If I run out of material, I resort to writing ghost stories,” he said. Asked by a young reader whether the author believed in ghosts, he said: “I don’t believe in them, but I keep seeing them.”
Bond is excited about his guest appearance in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Saat Khoon Maaf, starring Priyanka Chopra and Naseeruddin Shah, based on his short story Susanna’s Seven Husbands.
He also read out a “sensual” passage from one of his books. Children from different parts of the country queued up to get Bond’s books signed by the 75-year-old author.

J.M. Coetzee, the Booker-winner and one of the star attractions at the festival, along with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and Martin Amis, read out from his Booker-winning novel, Disgrace. The notoriously reclusive author, who was introduced by Patrick French, held the audience captive, prompting French to comment: “You have held the audience, the Indian audience, rapt and silent for 45 minutes. That’s remarkable. Thank you for entertaining us.”
Coetzee, a major draw not just for author-struck readers, but also for many writers who love his works, however, refused to emerge from his shell of silence.

In yet another interesting session of the day on the crisis of American fiction, Richard Ford, Jay MacInerney and Junot Diaz took the stage with Martin Amis to deliberate upon the shrinking fiction writing in America, which has seen the likes of Raymond Carver and John Cheever engage the imagination of global readers. MacInerney said the short story was in decline in the US as publishers were wary of publishing it, assuming that it was difficult for readers to discover a new world after every 20 pages.
“It is a difficult moment for the short story,” he said. While Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the story of a dysfunctional American family, has garnered enough attention, with Time having put him on the cover when the novel was released in 2010, the panellists pointed out that Franzen’s was not the only novel with an American setting as there were “tens of thousands of novels” being set in America in recent times.
According to Ford, the American novel has evolved radically with more and more diasporic brown and black writers whose writing is making it difficult to “typify” an American novel. Amis held that fiction writing in America was fertilised by new voices, referring to the “fusion” of Indian writers led by Salman Rushdie in the country in the ‘80s. That fusion, he said, lent a “colour” to the “white” writers. “It led to a little bit of a level playing field,” added Ford.

A session on Kashmir saw the panellists — Basharat Peer, Swapan Dasgupta, M.J. Akbar, Nitasha Kaul, Rahul Pandita and Mirza Waheed — wonder about its fate and the environment of fear, violence and suffering in the Valley. “The past has been bloodied in Kashmir. And it’s government is insecure about the fact that once the snow melts, the violence might recur,” said Peer, who questioned the seriousness of the Indian government vis-à-vis the immediate future of Kashmir.
Kaul, the author of Residue which deals with the longings of exile, said Kashmir, a complicated issue, is often grossly simplified into either India vs Pakistan or Hindu vs Muslim issue.