{"id":11341,"date":"2011-02-09T08:30:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T13:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11341"},"modified":"2013-01-09T11:55:26","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T16:55:26","slug":"a-week-in-culture-jacques-testard-editor-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/09\/a-week-in-culture-jacques-testard-editor-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Testard\u2019s culture diary. Click here<\/a> to read part 1.<\/em> <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

DAY FOUR<\/h3>\n

9:47 A.M.<\/strong> I have a mild headache and I am only on life number three of Dalrymple\u2019s Nine Lives<\/em>. I\u2019m beginning to think that it\u2019s quite difficult to get any reading done at a literary festival. When we got home last night I asked Forty to pick me up at 9:30 A.M. He asked me for two cigarettes as a token of goodwill. I complied. He never turned up.<\/p>\n

\"\"10:34 A.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m attending a showcase panel on \u201cWhy Books Matter\u201d with Kiran Desai and Penguin CEO John Makinson. It\u2019s being filmed for the BBC and the spotlights are on the audience. It\u2019s quite painful on the eyes. According to Sunil Sethi, who presents the only literary show on Indian television, book sales are rising by fifteen to eighteen percent per year in India. I find that very hard to believe. One interjection from the floor offers an interesting insight into this phenomenon. \u201cIt is not true Mr. Sethi,\u201d says Mumbaikar. \u201cIn Bombay the Encyclopaedia Britannica is very popular but that is because it matches the furniture.\u201d That\u2019s more like it. <\/p>\n

\"\"1:15 P.M.<\/strong> It\u2019s lunch time. I\u2019ve just had my photo taken by a dozen journalists as a smiling Indian man with neat white hair placed a piece of naan bread onto my plate. I might be in the papers tomorrow\u2014his name is Javed Akhtar and he is a very famous lyricist for Bollywood songs, I\u2019m told. I was an extra in a Bollywood film once. I had to wear a tweed suit at a beach party and pretend to swig from a magnum bottle of vodka. <\/p>\n

7:40 P.M.<\/strong> Salman Ahmad has just taken to the stage. The Guardian<\/em> has described<\/a> him as Pakistan\u2019s answer to Bono. Kamila Shamsie<\/a> wrote a piece on the rise of pop music<\/a> in the Pakistan issue of Granta<\/span><\/em> last year on the emergence of pop music in the eighties which charted Ahmad\u2019s rise and his turn to Sufi Islam for inspiration. <\/p>\n

\"\"10:36 P.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m sharing a drink with Samrat, whose debut novel The Urban Jungle<\/em> came off the press yesterday. He\u2019s just given me a signed copy of it\u2014it\u2019s a modern rewriting of Kipling\u2019s The Jungle Book<\/em>. Samrat tells me that Sunil Sethi\u2019s statistics on the growth of the book market in India are inaccurate. An English language best-seller in India sells no more than five thousand copies, according to Samrat. I\u2019ve since been looking online and cannot find any information either way. Surely that\u2019s too low? <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DAY FIVE<\/h3>\n

\"\"12:06 P.M.<\/strong> Time for a heavyweight session on \u201cThe Crisis in American Fiction\u201d with Richard Ford, Jay McInerney and Junot Diaz moderated by Mr. Martin Amis. I\u2019m sure the topic was just an excuse to get these writers on stage together.<\/p>\n

12:07 P.M.<\/strong> Amis: \u201cHow does the crisis in American fiction manifest itself? Are there more panic attacks in the offices of The New York Review of Books<\/em>? Are there more brawls in the literary bars of Greenwich Village?\u201d <\/p>\n

12:08 P.M<\/strong> Ford: \u201cAmerican fiction is more diverse and successful with readers than it has ever been.\u201d Hear, hear. <\/p>\n

\"\"12:20 P.M.<\/strong> Martin Amis posits that Saul Bellow\u2019s Humboldt\u2019s Gift<\/em> would no longer make The New York Times<\/em> best-seller list because readers can no longer stomach work of that complexity. (By the way, Amis once wrote<\/a>: \u201cBellow\u2019s first name is a typo: that \u2018a\u2019 should be an o.\u201d) <\/p>\n

12:21 P.M.<\/strong> Richard Ford retorts that David Foster Wallace\u2019s Infinite Jest<\/em> is a prime example of the success of the contemplative novel. McInerney cites Jonathan Franzen\u2019s recent pantheonization as further proof of the success of literary fiction today. Junot acquiesces and says that the novel does not stop with literary fiction. Martin Amis shuffles awkwardly on his seat and begins to roll a cigarette. <\/p>\n

12:48 P.M.<\/strong> Junot takes center stage again. \u201cIs \u2018the crisis in fiction\u2019 not just the crisis of the white American male?\u201d he asks. \u201cGoddamn it! Black women! They\u2019ve fucked everything up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"3:30 P.M.<\/strong> Jaipur reawakens. J.M. Coetzee has just finished a majestic reading of a story about feral cats in front of an awe-struck audience. He has managed to keep an Indian audience completely still and silent for an entire hour. That aside, his reading was very strong. His prose is rhythmical, his diction is impeccable, and the story, as ever, was captivating. He also has an aura of greatness about him. It\u2019s probably because he never speaks in public so every time he does, the world listens. <\/p>\n

11:20 P.M.<\/strong> I am sitting with Satya Bhabha, a Los Angeles-based actor. We met in the queue for the toilet. His father is Homi K. Bhabha, the literary theorist. Anyone who ever studied literature at college will remember his books fondly, particularly The Location of Culture<\/em>. Satya is due to play Saleem Sinai in the forthcoming adaptation of Rushdie\u2019s Midnight\u2019s Children<\/em>, which is being shot in Sri Lanka next month. His nose is not big enough to play Saleem but I guess Salman can be sure that he at least gets the novel. <\/p>\n

DAY SIX<\/h3>\n

11.30 A.M.<\/strong> It\u2019s the fourth day of the festival and I have just woken up. I still haven\u2019t interviewed Dalrymple and I still haven\u2019t finished his book. It\u2019s official: no-one reads at literary festivals. I blame Dalrymple himself for imposing a free bar every evening. <\/p>\n

\"\"12:40 P.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m just catching the tail end of a talk on Tamil pulp fiction. Apparently it\u2019s very popular down south. One writer, Rajesh Kumar, has written and published more than 1,250 novels and 2,000 short stories. In 90s, the boom years of Tamil pulp publishing, he sold millions of books every year. The covers are excellent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5:05 P.M.<\/strong> While Candace Bushell holds forth in the main tent, Coetzee and Zagajewski get under way in the lesser Mughal Tent on the topic of imperial english accompanied by Ahdaf Soueif and Mrinal Pande. The Mughal Tent has been erected next to the palace\u2019s stables and smells accordingly. I wonder\u2014has Coetzee read Candace? <\/p>\n

\"\"5:35 P.M.<\/strong> Jaipur is silent again as Coetzee declares: \u201cI cannot say I feel at home in English. When I write in English I write in someone else\u2019s language, in someone else\u2019s mother tongue.”<\/p>\n

9:20 P.M.<\/strong> All meals here are buffet-style. You pick up a plate, help yourself to Indian food and dart for the nearest table space. Tonight, I\u2019m randomly sitting with writer and editor Gabriel Moro, the editor of Norway\u2019s biggest literary magazine, Bokvennen<\/em>, and Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting<\/em>. Last time I was in Jaipur I shared a beer in a bar with a Californian artist and some Japanese graphic designers. I\u2019m not sure which is most incongruous. Jaipur is the eleventh biggest city in India\u2014the equivalent of Detroit in the US, Saint-Etienne in France and Coventry in Britain. What\u2019s the closest thing to a literary festival in Detroit? <\/p>\n

12:04 A.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m being driven home by a different auto driver this evening. He has offered me hashish, heroin and girls. I told him that Jay McInerney was speaking in the morning. I think he might attend. <\/p>\n

DAY SEVEN<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Another talk featuring Martin Amis has just ended, this time on \u201cThe New Non-Fiction.\u201d A quick look at his biography tell me that Amis has written one non-fiction book in the last decade\u2014The Second Plane<\/em> (2008)\u2014and that he is sixty-one years old. Other panelists include David Finkel and Basharat Peer, author of a gripping memoir on growing up in Kashmir, Curfewed Night<\/a><\/em>, which I cannot recommend more highly. William Dalrymple slips away before I can collar him. <\/p>\n

\"\"11:07 A.M.<\/strong> No sign of last night\u2019s driver as Amis (again) and McInerney get under way on the topic of \u201cWriting the 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n

11:24 A.M.<\/strong> Jay McInerney says cocaine is an interesting metaphor for that decade which he describes as an endless treadmill of consumption: \u201cNo matter how much you consume, you are never satiated.\u201d I don\u2019t think cocaine exists in India but consumption is certainly on the up. I wonder if the Colombian cartels are plotting a mass invasion of the Indian market.<\/p>\n

2:55 P.M.<\/strong> Tehelka<\/em> editor and novelist Tarun Tejpal is on stage: \u201cI don\u2019t want you to go home and sleep well after reading my work. I want you to stay awake and be really unhappy,” he says. Incidentally, has anyone seen Gaspar No\u00e9\u2019s Enter the Void<\/a><\/em>?<\/p>\n

\"\"4:35 P.M.<\/strong> The festival has just ended with Vikram Seth reading a selection of his poems in front of enraptured schoolgirls and aged Sikhs alike, ending fittingly on \u201cThe Frog and the Nightingale.” He\u2019s a very personable character and likes to drink hot buttered rum. He\u2019s also writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy<\/em>. He explains<\/a> the delay: \u201cI\u2019m actually a very lazy person. Most of the time, I\u2019m happy to sit around and stare. Or watch bad TV soaps.\u201d<\/p>\n

6:12 P.M.<\/strong> I\u2019m at home, packing. I\u2019m catching the 6:00 A.M. train back to Delhi in the morning and then I fly home to London the next day. On my way home, I stop by the festival bookshop and pick up a copy of Donald Barthelme\u2019s Forty Stories<\/em> introduced by Dave Eggers. It cost me 300 rupees (just over $6). How it made its way here I shall never know. <\/p>\n

Jacques Testard is the cofounder of<\/em> The White Review<\/a>, a London-based arts and literature quarterly.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment of Testard\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:47 A.M. I have a mild headache and I am only on life number three of Dalrymple\u2019s Nine Lives. I\u2019m beginning to think that it\u2019s quite difficult to get any reading done at a literary festival. When we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1844,1048,829,1841,1599,1268,1838,1845],"class_list":["post-11341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-candace-bushnell","tag-india","tag-j-m-coetzee","tag-jaipur-literature-festival","tag-jay-mcinerney","tag-martin-amis","tag-the-white-review","tag-william-dalrymple"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Jacques Testard, Editor, Part 2 by Jacques Testard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 9, 2011 \u2013 This is the second installment of Testard\u2019s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:47 A.M. 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