The year 2009 may have been the year of Dan Brown and, courtesy Stephenie Meyers, chaste vampire lust, but it was also the year of interesting trends on other fronts. (For readers who’ve written to ask about the best of fiction/non-fiction lists, these were covered in the December 19 BS Weekend section.) Here’s a look at what ruled in 2009:
Reports of the death of novel/paperbook were grossly overexaggerated: Despite doomsayers, the e-book did not kill off the paperback, the novel is still alive, and comrades Brown and Meyers didn’t usher in a deluge of bad, purple prose. The Kindle and its rivals among e-book readers have found surprisingly high acceptance levels among many readers; with a lower price point, the e-reader could become as ubiquitous as the iPod because of its utility value. It will be a while before we dispense with paper books, but the really interesting trend will be to see which genres and categories of books go directly into e-book format without a dead tree release.
But the short story has risen from the grave: With Alice Munro winning the Man Booker, and new collections of work by Ishiguro, Updike, Hemon and a score of others bringing in critical applause, it seemed that the short story was in flourishing form. It’s a trend echoed in India, with writers like Palash Krishna Mehrotra and Mridula Koshy finding acceptance with short stories before they get down to the Big Fat Novel.
Twitterature…: on the other hand, is likely to share the same fate as the hypertext novel and the SMS novel; literature-in-easy-tweets is fun for a while, but it palls. Like the SMS novel, this might find a small niche of its own in time, but otherwise it’s not quite #fail but definitely not @awesome.
Bad sex…: in writing is alive and kicking, not to mention writhing, moaning, screaming and trembling. With Philip Roth, Paul Theroux and Richard Milward providing stiff competition, Jonathan Littell won with an unfortunate comparison between sex and soft-boiled eggs. And the long list of contenders over the years raises an as-yet unanswered question: with a predominantly masculine shortlist every year, does this mean that women write good sex, or not enough sex? Discuss.
Writers, RIP: John Updike, considered one of the greatest and most prolific chroniclers of American life, died in January, leaving a vast corpus of work behind him. He’ll be remembered for the Rabbit series of novels; his last work was a collection of short stories on ageing, the later part of life, and death.
Kamala Surraya, also known as Kamala Das, left behind her poetry and memories of her often tumultuous life. Her poems explored, among other things, the internal lives of women and often celebrated, and examined, the longings of the body. In the latter part of her life, she converted to Islam and weathered the controversy that followed.
Marilyn French intended to be a literary scholar, but is best remembered for The Women’s Room, which explored the lives of women and chronicled a key phase of the feminist movement. It became notorious for a line spoken by one of her characters, Val: “All men are rapists,” and is still widely read.
Dilip Chitre was as celebrated a poet as he was a translator, his English language versions of poets as different as Namdeo Dhasal and Tukaram are testimony to his linguistic dexterity. The Maharashtrian writer left behind a massive corpus of his own work, and a history of civil rights activism.
Frank McCourt came to writing late, after a lifetime as a teacher; his tragicomic account of an Irish family’s struggles with poverty, Angela’s Ashes, is still a bestseller. His gentle humour saw him through a great deal before he found success and fame in his late years. Fellow Irishman, Christopher Nolan, who also died this year, became famous for his searing poems and the Whitbread-winning Under The Eye of the Clock. Nolan spent his life in a wheelchair because of his cerebral palsy, and could type only by using a pointer attached to his forehead — one of his heroes was the disabled painter, Christy Brown.
JG Ballard was remembered for his memoir, Empire of the Sun, and for the vivid imagination that fuelled his often-dark pulp fiction. Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series created a fictional universe whose inhabitants all have near-perfect 25-year-old bodies, allowing Farmer to set up a complex exploration of moral issues.
Critic Meenakshi Mukherjee left behind the last of her influential books on Indian literature and Indian historical figures — a biography of RC Dutt — and a host of memories in the minds of two generations of students.
The poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus died this week, at 85. Jailed along with Nelson Mandela, his poems were often recited in the days of the fight against apartheid. He remained politically engaged till the end; one of his last letters addressed climate change in the larger context of exploitation, and was written on December 10, a few weeks before his death.
