January 4, 1998

Wasn't there so much you wanted to say about the hyped and touted books of 1998 but never found the courage to? Don't worry. We did.

Theroux vs Himself

Actually, the feud of the year began as: Paul Theroux vs V.S. Naipaul. Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents was travel writer Theroux's Kitty Kelly-type biography of the word perfectionist from Trinidad. By the time it ended, Theroux was the phantom of his own opera, at sixes and sevens with himself. He claimed Naipaul disliked current wife Nadira when he first saw her. Then he explained: years ago Naipaul had expressed his irritation at little sub-continental children who must have been Nadira's age. Next he turned to fairly pathetic pop psychology: "Every writer is dysfunctional ... Naipaul is, so'm I." Poor babbling Paul.

Swadeshi Sherlocks

In some ways, especially for the gushingly optimistic kind, this was the year the swadeshi thriller came of age. Shashi Warrier wrote The Orphan, to middling reviews amid a cutting one by Ashok Banker. Something like James Hadley Chase critiquing John le Carre? Only if you're wildly patriotic. Banker himself had a decent year with his Bombay Boys becoming a film starring Naseeruddin Shah. Jesse Kochar created Guptchar Vibhag III or GV III, which took on the Paki Wing 7, was the post-empire's answer to MI 6 and, in Spyder, did a so-so clone job on Smiley's blokes. The coup de grace was delivered by Armin Wanderwala, a Mumbai-based lawyer who wrote The Turning, the first adventure of Xerxes Avari and Scherezade Vatcha. A sort of Parsi Remington Steele.

Bowling Out La De

From Bishen Singh Bedi came the vox pop of 1998. Having spun maiden overs, he spun the Maiden over at Shobha De's reading from Selective Memories: Scenes from My Life in Delhi. Never one for niceties, the bored-looking Sardar simply wondered aloud: "Why are writers such bad readers? I prefer reading you to having you read to me." Shobha could only titter at the tut-tut. The deeper point: Bedi finds De readable. Says something about him.

Sweet Li'l Damp Squib

Kiran Desai, the formidable Anita's daughter, was the cognoscenti's darling. Her first novel, Hullabaloo in a Guava Orchard, dazzled the media. Lay readers, however, weren't all that impressed. Kiran's "uproariously funny" jokes were too laboured they complained. The consensus: the mother's a writer, the daughter's an also-wrote. Literature's revenge on the caste system?

Poor Man's Booker

So, I. Allen Sealy's Everest Hotel won the Crossword Prize, the Nobel for Indo-Anglian literature instituted this year. That must have been cold comfort for the man, given his baby was called in by the Booker jury before figuring nowhere. Will Amit Chaudhuri (Freedom Song) take the 1999 Booker hype route to the Crossword?

© Living Media India Ltd