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“A Man of Two Faces” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Award-winning writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen is a name that many in the literary world are familiar with. As a Vietnamese-American, he is acutely aware of his two identities and the histories he carries within himself. This is one of the recurring themes of his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. He has written plenty of books, most notably his Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2016 The Sympathiser. It was recently turned into a TV series with Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr. His books are published in India by Hachette India.

In 2023-24, Viet Thanh Nguyen delivered the prestigious Norton Lectures. In the lectures as well as in the discussions that follow, he addresses many of the aspects of being an immigrant in the USA that are at the heart of his moving memoir A Man of Two Faces.

We have recorded more than 134 episodes of TOI Bookmark. Each one is special and memorable. Every conversation is unique. It was an honour and a privilege to record this episode with Viet Thanh Nguyen. He is exceptionally busy with a demanding schedule. Yet, once we had figured out a mutually convenient time to record, across time zones, days and dates, he was immensely courteous and gave us his focussed attention. It did not seem as if he had been in back-to-back meetings/interviews during the day. It was Memorial Weekend in the USA, but he was working.

It was a fascinating conversation about reading and writing memoirs while discussing his book A Man of Two Faces. Also, how he had to think through himself, think through the history of his family that he was dealing with, and think through the language he was going to use.

Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol.

Incidentally, 30 April 2025 marked fifty years since the conclusion of the Vietnam War.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 134+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

16 June 2025

Jeet Thayil’s “The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel”

16 06 , 2025 No Comments

Jeet Thayil’s new novel The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel is being released by HarperCollins India on 23 June 2025. Jeet has been incredibly prolific in the past few months. He has published two volumes of poems including his stupendous collection I’ll have it Here. There are poems in this volume that bear witness to our new world. Jeet’s poetry is outstanding. The rhythm and performance element are pitch perfect with the words he finds to express his emotions. Hence, his novels are equally fascinating. Always expect the unexpected from Jeet where prose is concerned.

Here is the Spotify link to the TOI Bookmark podcast that I recorded with Jeet earlier this year.

I have just received an advance copy of his novel from the publishers and look forward to reading it asap.

‘Mercurial, witty, luminous’ – DEVIKA REGE

‘Thayil’s masterpiece’ – WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans is a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.

From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation – both the ones who leave and the ones left behind.

A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention – an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.

‘The Elsewhereans is a wonderfully rich evocation of the era of decolonization and non-alignment, and the peripatetic lives and multiple perspectives that it made possible. Reading it, I felt like I was meeting many ghosts from my own past.’ AMITAV GHOSH

‘Like the “river of three rivers” at its heart, The Elsewhereans surges forward in multiple narrative currents: autofiction, Kunstlerroman, mourning diary. Dispensing with conventional notions of plot, Thayil draws on real and imagined archives, testimonies and anecdotes to trace the wanderings of a family from Kerala to places as disparate as Bombay, Hanoi, Paris, Elmau and Algeciras. But it is above all his sentences – mercurial, witty, luminous – that pull us through each new and unexpected encounter. The result is a hauntingly lyrical meditation on migration, belonging and grief. The Elsewhereans is Thayil at his finest yet.’ DEVIKA REGE

‘How can a book so melancholy also be so exhilarating? The Elsewhereans blurs timezones and timelines as it traces the wanderings of a family across rivers and oceans, across silences and stories. It is equally attentive to the politics of nation-building and family caretaking. The centre of this dazzling spiral novel is deep love, examined with ruthless poetic precision, and found to be flawed but essential for survival.’ SHAHNAZ HABIB

‘Jeet Thayil just keeps getting better and better: this is writing of great skill and precision, charm and warmth, beauty and wit, taut as a coiled spring, laced with pin-sharp, pitch-perfect dialogue. The Elsewhereans could well be Thayil’s masterpiece.’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Jeet Thayil is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy, he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, T.J.S. George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005, he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the DSC Prize, and became a bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. Jeet Thayil’s most recent book of poems is I’ll Have It Here.

16 June 2025

“India’s Techade: Digital Revolution and Change in the World’s Largest Democracy” by Nalin Mehta

29 05 , 2025 No Comments

This is a small book about big disruptions.
Over two decades, and across two different political regimes, the world’s largest democracy combined the rise of cheap mobile phones, cheap data and a unique digital ID system to create an unprecedented revolution in digital public goods. This included the rise of path-breaking fintech systems like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the creation of a new kind of welfare state based on digital direct benefit transfers and interlinked e-governance systems that brought almost half a billion people who never had bank accounts into the financial system.
India’s Techade pieces together the story of how this digital revolution came to be. It is a crisp, yet comprehensive account of the systems, the innovators, the processes and the political will that drove the digital enterprise across India.
A must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the transformative nature of technology and its deep impact on Indian society, politics and culture.

Nalin Mehta is Managing Editor, Moneycontrol. Earlier he was Dean, School of Modern Media, UPES; President, EDGE Metaversity and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He has taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (ANU, La Trobe University), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (IIM Bangalore, Shiv Nadar University).
He was previously Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, where he led a number of AI-led tech innovations to redefine digital media. He has also served as Managing Editor, India Today (English TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. He is the author of five bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including India on Television (winner of the Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015), Dreams of a Billion (winner of the Ekamra Sports Book of the Year, 2021, co-authored) and, most recently, The New BJP: Modi and the Remaking of the World’s Largest Political Party.

We recorded a fabulous episode of TOI Bookmark in 2023. It was uploaded in two parts. Here they are:

29 May 2025

“My Friends” by Hisham Matar

28 05 , 2025 No Comments

Recording every episode of TOI Bookmark is an honour and a privilege. I get to speak with incredible writers and publishing professionals around the world. This interview with Hisham Matar was truly special. I have read every single book that he has written so far. My Friends was exceptionally good and I devoured it in one sitting.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

Going through… if you have ever lived through a moment of great political upheaval and rupture in your country and therefor you have experienced it beside and alongside people whom you know very well, whom you have grown up with, and known for a very long time. I am sure many of your listeners can find many examples in their mind of this. What’s fascinating is that some of those people will agree with you totally about you know what is a hopeful future and how might it look like but then you notice over the years that each one of you ends up in a different place. I think part of the question isn’t ethics or ideology or political persuasion but it is actually questions of temperament. And within political conversations it is impossible to talk about this because nobody knows what you are talking about, but we all know what is temperament. For example, some of our friends are excited by argument and they get really heated up, and I have other friends who grow poetic saying arguments will convince no one. They think that in order to get to the truth, you have to have a different kind of conversation. And they tend to be quieter perhaps and more reluctant. So those are questions of temperament. And I think, I have always thought of the novel really, the novel really is the place for human temperament. Here, I am focussing more on questions of politics, but of course these questions touch and they do deal with these characters, questions of belonging, what love is, friendship is, intimacy is. They affect all of these.

Listen to it on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 130+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaw, Deepa Bhasthi, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, David Nicholls, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, David Walliams, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazzak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

28 May 2025

“Indian Literary Historiography” (Ed.) Harish Trivedi / TOI Bookmark

27 05 , 2025 No Comments

. It is always a pleasure to converse with academic and bilingual writer, Prof. Harish Trivedi . Recording this episode of #TOIBookmark took us into new and unexplored areas of Indian literature. Our discussion revolved around the recently published Sahitya Akademi volume that has been edited by the prpfessor “Indian Literary Historiography”.

Here is a snippet from the podcast:

“The book contains a history of histories of literatures in our various Indian languages. One thing that I have innovated from the regular Sahitya Akademi model is that in any book that has statements and discussions in many languages that is from the Sahitya Akademi, it always began in the English alphabetical order. So Assamiya came first and Urdu came last and Tamil & Telugu towards the end and Gujarati towards the early part. What I did was because it is a book about historiography is that I said lets begin with the oldest language so that you proceed in a chronological perspective. But that is not easy to determine because everything is political.”

Listen on Spotify:

Indian Literary Historiography (book blurb): The history of Indian literature goes back over three thousand years but “Histories” of Indian literature began to be written only in the nineteenth century. This volume provides a history of these Histories as written by both Western and Indian scholars, and an analysis of the assumptions and preconceptions underlying them. The five essays in Part I outline the key concepts and offer general surveys of the subject. In Part II, fifteen of the essays take up the histories of one major language each, while the last essay looks at histories of “Indian Literature” considered as a whole, focusing especially on some histories published in the 21st century. Some major, and often contentious, issues that run right though the volume are: whether Indians had (or have) a sense of history; whether itihasa-purana or literary sources can be considered as history; whether there is an Indian mode of perceiving time and composing history which is at variance with the Western mode; whether the multilingual plurality and social diversity of Indian literature can possibly be encompassed in any history; and whether history (still) can make a truth-claim or is just another narrative. This volume is a compendium not only of fascinating historical facts but also of literary practices as they have evolved over millennia and the constant alternation of tradition and innovation.

27 May 2025

” A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

26 05 , 2025 No Comments

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. All of them have been published by Hachette India.

How do you even begin to describe a book that is gut wrenching, relevant, and absorbing to read? I read it more or less in one fell swoop, despite many false starts. It took a while to read the first few pages and get my bearing. But once I had figured it out, I just read and read and read. A Man with Two Faces is very moving, very thought-provoking and it truly helps decontstruct the concep of America as everyone seems to think that they know. It is told from the point of view of a Vietnamese refugee whose parents flee at the time of the Vietnam war. Viet Thanh Nguyen is fours-year-old. But he seems to carry within him the experience of being a Vietnamese and a successful American. He has broken many barriers by being accepted for who he is, his views, his writing, and his opinion pieces. He has been true to his identity and not allowed anyone to tell him otherwise. All the while he also recognises the intense sacrifices his parents made for the sake of their two sons. Both of whom ended up living the American dream, but at what cost. Their mother quite literally had had to be institutionalised not once, but twice, and finally passed away a woman trapped within herself. It is a heartbreaking account of her downward spiral. Yet, what is extraordinary is that her younger son, the writer, recognises with acute sensitivity what it takes for a woman to live many lives in one. He refers to her marriage at the age of seventeen as the first time she was a refugee when Vietnam was split into two and then the second time, when she fled Vietnam for the USA. Throughout the text, he is able to draw comparisons between the freedom she had in Vietnam, including earning her livelihood and being able to drive a car, but in the USA, she was handicapped by language and ultimately, her existence was circumscribed by the provision store that she ran with her husband and her domestic chores. It broke her, piece by piece.

There is much else in A Man of Two Faces. It is a combination of sophisticated criticism and a witnessing to modern events in the USA. Also, what it takes to be an immigrant.

The writing style at first is peculiar to engage with. But as one proceeds through the book it becomes fairly obvious that these were previously published essays that are now interspersed with present day commentaries and observations by the author. It makes for an interesting visual arrangement on the page, almost like literary art. At the same it, it is like the reader is privileged to be privy to a dialogue. Ultimately, it illustrates the very title of the book wherein the two faces of the author — the public and the private are in constant engagement with each other in the prose format. Fascinating!

Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol to coincide with the fifty years of the conclusion of the Vietnam War on 30 April 2025.

Read it and you wil not regret it.

26 May 2025

“The Book Censor’s Library” by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain / TOI Bookmark podcast

21 05 , 2025 No Comments

Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library was published in 2024 by Restless Books. It is described a perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government. In a near future where most literature is deemed dangerous by the state, a bureaucrat falls head over heels for the novel he’s supposed to ban. That leads to another book, and then another… soon he’s drawn into an underground movement of illegal readers laboring to save the stories they love. As the stakes go up, he must weigh his mission against the terrible risk posed to his family – particularly his young daughter, whose affinity for make-believe is already rousing suspicion.

This dark adventure is timely to the point of urgency, written in defiance of strict censorship laws in Al-Essa’s home country of Kuwait. It arrives in the U.S. amid a rising tide of restrictive legislation that targets schools, libraries, and marginalized writers. I’m thrilled to share this magical and important story.

Bothayna Al-Essa is the bestselling Kuwaiti author of nearly a dozen novels and additional children’s books. She is also the founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher of critically acclaimed works. Her most recent book, The Book Censor’s Library, won the Sharjah Award for Creativity in the novel category in 2021 and is her third novel to appear in English, after Lost in Mecca and All That I Want to Forget. It was on the Time magazine’s 100 Best Books of 2024. The Book Censor’s Library was translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. It was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction in their category for translated literature.

El Essa is a member of the Kuwaiti Writers Association as well as the Arab Internet Writers Union. She campaigned against censorship in Kuwait until it was abolished in 2020.

Al-Essa was author-in-residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation for the summer of 2023, and the recipient of Kuwait’s Nation Encouragement Award for her fiction in 2003 and 2012. She has written books on writing and led writing workshops throughout the Arab world.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bothayna for TOI Bookmark podcast. Here is a snippet from the conversation:

Well, I guess that was the whole idea of writing that book. The defining line between reality and imagination is also imaginary. Everything is blended together. I think the more we deny the reality of imagination… if we deny it, it will haunt us in ways that never occurred to us, in ways that are unexpected.

Listen to it on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 130+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA winners etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, David Nicholls, Cat Bohannon, Charlotte Wood, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, David Walliams, and Annie Ernaux.

21 May 2025

Notes:

Read an essay by Sawad Hussain. “Not all literary translators are created equal” Wasafiri, 29 May 2025

100 episodes of TOI Bookmark (5 Oct 2024)

19 05 , 2025 No Comments

I am sharing the text of a Facebook post that I created on 5 October 2024. We had crossed 100 podcast recordings. In December 2024, the podcast became available on Spotify as well. Today, we have crossed 130+ and growing every month.

An incredible milestone! We have recorded 100 episodes of #TOIBookmark. As the host of the show, I have interviewed a wide variety of authors, across genres.

We have recorded sessions with the winners of Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, Padma Shree, International Booker Prize, Booker Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, AutHer Awards, Stella Prize, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, BAFTA winners, etc. Also, diplomats, bestselling authors, debut writers, and legendary writers, across genres and languages. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are:Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Sonora Jha, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, and Annie Ernaux.

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. The podcast is not behind a paywall. It is free to listen anywhere in the world.

We began recording TOI Bookmark episodes about two years ago. Initially it was with long gaps in between as we were trying to figure out details. Ultimately, it became easier to figure out the programme. This is a massive team effort with lots of folks helping behind the scene.

19 May 2025

“Rosarita” by Anita Desai

19 05 , 2025 No Comments

Anita Desai’s novella published on 7 July 2024. Rosarita is about a young student from India called Bonita who is visiting San Miguel, Mexico to learn Spanish. One day, while sitting quietly, she is approached by a flamboyantly dressed elderly woman, swishing her skirt, who plonks herself down next to Bonita, insisting that Bonita is “my adored Rosarita’s little girl. You are the image of her when she first came to us as an Oriental bird!” Later, Bonita refers to this stranger as the “Trickster”.

In the pages that follow, Bonita is mystified by the story spun about her mother being an exceptional artist, who stayed in various artist communes and travelled around the country. The Trickster takes Bonita to the various locations, but most of the buildings have been reduced to rubble. Despite her disbelief at her late mother’s life before marriage to her father, Bonita accompanies the Trickster to find out more. She doesn’t find much else. But she does find a sense of belonging in this distant land and realises she need not search any more.

When this book goes out into the world, there will be much said about motherhood and memory. Perhaps, even about grief and finding one’s own space and identity. Whereas, my understanding of reading this stupendous story is the energy criss-crossing generations. It is also making visible the lives women, especially married women, put in one lifetime. Their younger selves and their histories are blanked out in their marriages and thus, to their children too. It takes a special effort to make one’s life visible and share details of the past. Bonita feels bewildered about her mother’s past and her exceptional talent as a painter but she does nothing about it. Instead, she gets caught in a whirlpool of memories that do not help her in any way. She seems to recall her mother publicly being a good wife, hostess, and mum but who was in private, resentful of the chores that fell her way. It’s not said explicitly but mentioned.

The gaps in a mother’s life, before and after marriage, is a violent break that few talk about openly. In Rosarita it is merely displayed but at least it is made visible. Such an important task.

*****

When Pan Macmillan India announced that they were publishing in South Asia #AnitaDesai‘s forthcoming novella “#Rosarita“, it caused quite a stir. I read an ARC and enjoyed it immensely. Later, I was fortunate to record a conversation with the legendary writer. It was late at night for us and at her end, Mrs Desai and her daughter had been battling the aftermath of a terrible storm that had cut off their telephone lines and caused a few other inconveniences. Yet, there they were at the other end, bright and chirpy, ready for this special edition of #TOIBookmark podcast, a Times Special offering on books and literature. It was truly an honour and a privilege to speak with Anita Desai.

*****

Here is a snippet from the recording:

“Yes, I suppose we all do but maybe we only find a little key to that story, that is all and if you have that lingering in your mind, when we have so many encounters, we meet so many people, forget them, forget their names even, others you may have only spent two minutes with but they linger in your mind and that gives you a little key to unlock what you do not know about them. So, like all fiction writers I have to invent their stories for them which of course involves some research like I had to do for Baumgartner, his Jewish European past to do no research for the family in Clear Light of Day. It was a familiar world, I knew everything about it.”

19 May 2025

“The Book of Guilt” by Catherine Chidgey/ TOI Bookmark

18 05 , 2025 No Comments

This podcast was recorded at the beginning of 2025. Hence, the reference to the book being forthcoming. Now it has been released in various parts of the world. On 9 May 2025, Catherine wrote on Facebook that the New Zealand edition of The Book of Guilt was reprinted before it was even published! A dream come true for all writers.

We have had a fascinating range of guests on the weekly #TOIBookmark podcast. 124+ guests! The guests featured have been national and international authors including Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, & Padma Shri awardees, Nobel Laureates, Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, BAFTA awardees, diplomats, bestselling authors, debut writers, and legendary writers, across genres and languages. But the conversation was Catherine Chidgey was extra special. For years, I have been hearing about her incredible work and never got a chance to read her books. Thanks to the New Zealand High Commission to India, Bangladesh & Nepal I not only managed to read a pile of Catherine’s incredible novels but got to interview her as well. She has garnered a pile of awards over the years but has also generously given back to the literary community by instituting the Sargeson Prize for short stories in recognition of Frank Sargeson’s influence on New Zealand literature. At NZD 15,000, it is the country’s richest short story award.

Her debut In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book (1998) Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia/South Pacific,1999), as well as the Betty Trask Award (1999) in the UK. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize (1999). Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters (2002), the Katherine Mansfield Award (2013) and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize (2017). Her novel Remote Sympathy was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (both in 2022).

Her forthcoming novel “The Book of Guilt” (Hachette India) is a compelling work of dystopian fiction. It sparked two international bidding wars and is published in May 2025 by five different English-language publishers! John Murray (UK, in May), Hachette (US, in September), Knopf Canada (September), Penguin Random House Australia (May), Te Herenga Waka University Press (NZ, in May).

Catherine really explores the dark spaces in life, while seemingly not to. She does it well. In the conversation, she says that she really pushes herself hard. If anyone does that, then they squeeze the best out of themselves. It was such a pleasure to chat with “one of New Zealand’s greatest living writers” (Radio NZ).

Here is a snippet from our conversation:

“My life is very busy. So, I teach creative writing full time at the University of Waikato and we have a nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter and somehow around that I also seem to write full time. So the true answer is that I have no social life when I am in the generative phase of a novel rather than the late editing phase. I write first thing in the morning and I take my daughter to school and then I go into the university campus and then I come home and we have dinner and then we get our daughter to bed and then I write again. I do the evening shift. Morning and night, seven days a week. I am pretty hard on myself. I have a daily word count that I have to meet. There is no option of not meeting that. If I exceed it, which I most often do, it doesn’t mean that I get to go easy on myself the next day. The clock resets itself to zero and I have to start again. [Laughs]”

I highly recommend Catherine’s new novel. It is truly unforgettable. It has the incredible knack of popping up in one’s memory while reading other contemporary literature and discovering unexpected threads between the books. Utterly gorgeous!

18 May 2025

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