The Paris Review

Last year’s Jaipur Literature Festival was exciting and boring at the same time—a death threat is exciting, but thirty death threats are boring; as Dostoevsky wrote, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything.” Salman Rushdie was scheduled to attend: Islamic groups agitated to deny him a visa, which he does not need in order to enter India, but never mind. It was suggested that instead Rushdie might address the festival via video conference: the government itself advised against this. Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil, Amitava Kumar, and Ruchir Joshi read aloud in protest from The Satanic Verses, still banned in India, but, after the gravity of their collective transgression had been brought home to them, they left the festival.

We know what comedy is: life is increased. Think of Rodney Dangerfield addressing the crowd at the end of Caddyshack: “Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” And we know what tragedy is: isolation increases. I used to think that life was about winning everything, Mike Tyson once said, but now I know that life is about losing everything.

But what is India, with its boundless affirmation of life in general that befouls so many lives in the particular, with its joyous proliferation unto overcrowding, need, and misery? I did my small part, during my brief month there, to maintain those inequalities: Give me your shoes, I know you have other pair, you not need these, give them me, said a man as he tried to pull my sneakers off while a second man tried to pin my arms; and what he said was true, somewhere on the other side of the world I did have another pair of shoes, four shoes and only two feet; all the same, unhand me, my little friend, before I pick you up and throw you like a javelin.

I attended the 2013 JLF. It began in the same way. Read More »

The Omnivore brings us the Hatchet Job of the Year Awards 2013. In their words, this pan-centric prize rewards “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months” and “aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote integrity and wit in literary journalism.” View the shortlist here: few will be surprised to find Zoë Heller’s NYRB evisceration of Salman Rushdie’s Josef Anton, or that Naomi Woolf’s Vagina rated a few screeds. But who will win the year’s supply of potted shrimp? And has Adam Mars-Jones, 2012 winner for his Observer takedown of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, done justice to his prize?

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