Great novels are about life, not writing qua writing, not ideology, not programs. The great novelists did not have degrees.
The fight between Airbnb and New York City is heating up Recode. “What about regulation don’t you understand?”
How corrupt are judges at musical competitions barter markets in everything?
“The City of the Emerald Moon”
Buddha took some Autumn leaves
in his hand and asked
Ananda if these were all
the red leaves there were.
Ananda answered that it
was Autumn and leaves
were falling all about them,
more than could ever
be numbered. So Buddha said:
“I have given you
a handful of truths. Besides
these, there are many
thousands of other truths, more
that can ever be numbered.”
in his hand and asked
Ananda if these were all
the red leaves there were.
Ananda answered that it
was Autumn and leaves
were falling all about them,
more than could ever
be numbered. So Buddha said:
“I have given you
a handful of truths. Besides
these, there are many
thousands of other truths, more
that can ever be numbered.”
by Kenneth Rexroth
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996
‘The Point Of Cold River, The bear Pit and Latitude Writer Is To Be Unpopular’
Tim Lewis in The Guardian:
Arundhati Roy does not believe in rushing things. With her novels, she prefers to wait for her characters to introduce themselves to her, and slowly develop a trust and a friendship with them. Sometimes, however, external events force her hand. One of these was the election of the divisive Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi as Indian prime minister in May 2014. At the time, Roy had been working for about seven years on her second novel, the successor to her stunning, 1997 Booker prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things. But Modi’s victory forced her to “really put down the tent pegs” on what would eventually become The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. “It was just a moment of shock for people like me,” says Roy, twirling an elegant, checked scarf around her neck like spaghetti around a fork. “For so many years, I’d been trying to yell from the rooftops about it and it was absolutely a sense of abject defeat and abject despair. And the choice was to get into bed and sleep for five years, or to really concentrate on this book. I didn’t feel like writing any more essays, although I did write one, but I felt like everything I had to say had been said. It was time to accept defeat.”
It may have felt like defeat to Roy, but the arrival of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness last year was a cause of celebration for nearly everybody else. The novel, now out in paperback, opens in Delhi, in what appears to be the 1950s, and introduces us to Anjum, a Muslim hijra or transgender woman. In the second part of the book, the story moves to Kashmir and we follow a new protagonist, Tilo, an architect who becomes involved with a group of Kashmiri independence fighters. The strands eventually converge, but along the way dozens of odd characters dip in and out of proceedings. It’s not always immediately clear what purpose they are serving; it’s only at the end of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that you realise what an extraordinary and visceral state‑of‑the-nation book Roy has created.
“What I wanted to know was: can a novel be a city?” says Roy. “Can you stop it being baby food, which can be easily consumed? So the reader also has to deal with complexities that they are being trained not to deal with.”
