Penguin Fever: Early spring for book lovers

A special edition of Penguin Fever to mark the 30th anniversary of the publisher got some of its best writers together in Delhi

Winter is late this year in Delhi, but spring seems to have come early, at least for book lovers, with a special edition of the annual Penguin Spring Fever to mark the 30th anniversary of the publishing company in the country. The six-day event which began last Thursday had eight well-attended sessions, where the audience was treated to conversations with and interviews of some of Penguin’s finest — Ruskin Bond, Arundhati Roy, Perumal Murugan and Shashi Tharoor, as well as Shobhaa De and Vidya Balan.
 
Roy, whose novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, made it to the Booker long list this year before failing at the final cut, described how she always wanted to write a visual novel but not one that could be made into a film. “It is a novel that wants to be an essay, it is not a novel that wants to be a film, all it wants to be is a novel,” she told interlocutor Shohini Ghosh.

 
In between readings from her new novel, 20 years in the making, she also revealed how her agents would tell her that Hollywood filmmakers wanted to make a movie of her previous novel, The God of Small Things, which had won the Booker in 1997, but she had refused. A curious stance because she had written the script for the acclaimed independent TV film, In Which Anne Gives It Those Ones (1989). “I wanted them to grovel and then I want to say no,” is what Roy reportedly told her agents trying to sell her books to filmmakers in Los Angeles.

 

“Roy spoke about her new and old books with much charm — and it was her interlocutor Shohini Ghosh’s sharp and erudite interventions that kept the session buoyant,” said Sudeep Sen, poet and prize-winning author of EroText. He added: “I followed this year’s festival closely, either in person or via their live podcasts (on social media). Festivals like this tend to focus mostly on celebrities and crowd-pullers. So whilst pulp and crime fiction, environment and economy were given space — pure literature (apart from translation) weren’t highlighted. No theatre, poetry, short story, creative non-fiction or literary fiction (Roy apart) — even though the advertising banners and decorations hinted at these.”

 
Roy also discussed how her training as an architect has helped her craft as a novelist and dwelled on the difficulties of a writer in our contemporary world.
 
Perhaps no one knows more about these difficulties than Tamil poet and novelist Perumal Murugan, who had, following a controversy over his novel Madhorubagan (translated as One Part Woman) declared himself dead in 2015. He has made a comeback with a book of poems, Songs of a Coward, also published by Penguin Random House. He was part of a session that also featured NITI Aayog member Bibek Debroy (translator of Sanskrit classics) and Rana Safvi (translator of Dastan-e-Ghadar). The session was moderated by Namita Gokhale, writer and co-founder and director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

 
Polish writer and translator Adam Zdrodowski, who is in Delhi with a translation project, was in the audience for this session. He later told Business Standard about the difficult literary exercise: “The act of translation is a paradoxical endeavour as its product is both identical and completely different from the original. Translation celebrates language and diversity, enables communication and cultural exchange, and discussing translation has vital political consequences.”
 
It was perhaps only appropriate that the event ended on Tuesday with a panel on the rise of the Indian economy, even as our nation climbed to the top-100 club of the World Bank Doing Business 2018 list. As Shashi Tharoor and Gurcharan Das engaged in a good-humoured verbal duel, the audience got a rare insight into the contours of the economy. Others on the panel were Sonu Bhasin, Sanjeev Sanyal and Shereen Bhan.