2003: The best and the worst

SPEAKING VOLUMES

If there's one word that sums up the year, as far as desi authors writing in English are concerned, it's 'overhyped'.

None of the year's anticipated releases lived up to expectations. Pico Iyer's Abandon, I Allan Sealy's Brain Fever Bird, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake all drew applause, but of the polite rather than thunderous variety.

Among debut authors, Aniruddha Bahal's Bunker 13 attempted to push the envelope and won itself a Bad Sex award; Indrajit Hazra's The Garden of Earthly Delights was innovative, imaginative but uneven.

Brickbats from Brick Lane: And if the world was busy saying wonderful things about Monica Ali's Brick Lane, the views of mainstream western critics weren't shared by the Bangladeshis who live in that area.

The Greater Sylhet Council for Development and Welfare wrote an 18-page letter to the Whitbread panel, the Booker panel and UK newspapers explaining why they begged to dissent.

Under Siege: Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege was a prescient title. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards renewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Romila Thapar was accused of not offering a rightwing version of history, and Taslima Nasrin's Dwikhandita was banned in Bangladesh and Calcutta.

The P word: Pottermania provided some silly season relief, as the sixth volume in the Harry Potter saga was released to worldwide hysteria.

Enterprising Bengalis plagiarised the Potter stories and transplanted his adventures to Kolkata before Rowling's lawyers pulled the books off the shelves.

Love's Labour, To Be Continued: It's been in the pipeline for over four decades now, but 2003 was the year that an ambitious project, to compile the first truly comprehensive dictionary of Sanskrit, drew media headlines.

The brainchild of a bunch of lonely, unassisted, persevering scholars headquartered in Pune, the Sanskrit dictionary still has a long way to go "" another four to five decades.

A Few Good Men, RIP: We bid goodbye to two towering luminaries of Hindi literature; Harivansh Rai Bacchan died in February, leaving behind generations of schoolchildren who know Madhushala by heart.

In July, Bhisham Sahni died; but Tamas has earned an unassailable place in the pantheon of Partition literature.

The Flavour of the Month...: Changed faster than you could say, "What's new?" Chick lit, the growing genre of Bridget Jones-inspired froth aimed at women's hearts, minds and pocketbooks, discovered new permutations and combinations. The Bible Belt in the US came up with Church Lit "" sanitised romances for the true believer.

Flavour of the Month, the Sequel: Was the unfortunately named but irresistible Dick Lit, overflowing with testosterone, and led by the Boy's Own Just Grew Up fiction of Chuck Pahlaniuk.

The verdict by end-2003 was that the genre was even more ephemeral than an ice-cream on Delhi asphalt in mid-summer.

Flavour of the Month, the Son of: Was provided, not surprisingly, by moments of bitter and lifedefining global crisis. The spate of September 11 books eased up to make way for Iraq books.

Meanwhile, In India...: Military memoirs slowed, but thanks to the tireless efforts of Roli and other publishers, the potted biography ruled.

If one publisher owned the children-of-famous-parents subgenre, another attempted to seize the market in bios-of-the-moment.

Few of the books in question were heard of once the clicking sound made by a dozen Page 3 photographers going off simultaneously had died down.

Thanks But No Thanks: And the hottest literary trend appeared to be either the Return of the Prize for Reasons of Conscience, or the angst-ridden Prize Speech.

Hari Kunzru caused shock waves across the UK firmament when he turned down a major literary prize on the grounds that its sponsor, the Daily Mail, was racist and anti-immigrant.

Poet Benjamin Zephaniah caused as much consternation when he refused an OBE on the grounds that he hated Empire and all that it stood for.

Stephen King accepted a controversial Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBA in America, and made a speech pleading for the world to recognise the genius of non-literary writers.

Literary Booms, oops, Busts: This may have been the right year for King to make his pitch. J M Coetzee won the Nobel Prize but baffled readers and fans galore with a speech where he hid behind the façade of one of his characters.

The Booker-prize winner, DBC 'Dirty But Clean' Pierre, drew scathing reviews for Vernon God Little; critic James Wood asked the Booker panel to cut the crap, in slightly more polite terms.

And Martin Amis drew the year's worst reviews with Yellow Dog, of which the kindest comparison drawn was between his new novel and dog puke.

Starlight Express: Not that the alternative looked any better. Celebrities queued up to write children's books, with Madonna well in the lead.

Her English Roses was hugely derided, but shifted the required number of copies. Hillary Clinton's autobiography was damned with faint praise, but sold in record numbers.

The publishing industry seemed to have discovered the mantra that's been ruling the music industry for years: find either boy band or girl band, or aging rocker or aging prima donna, promote like hell, and roll in the moolah.

It worked for them, as it had worked for the music industry. Cautionary tale: But then again, the music industry eventually had to face a teensy threat called Napster and the wrath of millions of ripped-off fans.

Recommendations of the Year: Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Teheran takes us into the heart of dissent and repression via a circle of women reading forbidden books.

Leila Seth's On Balance was that rare thing in Indian writing "" a candid biography that had no interest in settling scores, only in telling the tale of a woman who broke gender barriers in the courts and whose children include the writer Vikram Seth.

But perhaps the only book written this year that deserved to be called a classic was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of his memoirs.

He uncovers memory as if it had happened yesterday and lets you into a writer's mind, with glimpses of a country in intellectual and political ferment.

nilroy@lycos.com