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Literary Review
Some remarkable things
THE editors of Granta 78 (£5.99) can congratulate themselves, having had the literary prescience to publish a short story by Jon McGregor, who was then a mere dishwasher in a Nottingham restaurant working on a novel as many a cultured dishwasher does.
Guardians of literary taste in Britain largely ignored McGregor's novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury), when it was published. Even the book's own publisher (Oh ye of little faith) quailed at the thought of entering a debut novel by a 26-year-old writer, for the Booker. The judges asked for it to be entered — this had been the case some years ago with Allan Sealy's novel The Everest Hotel — and it has emerged as the big surprise on the Booker prize longlist.
Both McGregor's other occupations — not his dishwashing, but movie-making and writing poetry — show in the Granta story "What the Sky Sees". Through a series of rapid cuts between evocative descriptions of an ancient landscape living out its timeless cycles of growth and decay, and the immediate, unfolding disaster in the life of a 17-year-old boy, the story probes such big Life Questions as death, trust and love. If the novel is as moving and memorable, it might astonish enough to beat the Brookners and Boyds to the Booker post.
Surprises in Granta 78 include an excerpt from Milan Kundera's forthcoming novel Ignorance: flashes of the maestro illuminate the extract but it isn't a catherine wheel explosion of playful ideas, as in his earlier novels. Perhaps the whole will be better than the part. There is also a spiky extract from a novel by Todd McEwen that demonises food and cooking in entertaining ways one would not have thought possible.
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Small is publishable
THEY are there in their hundreds at all the book fairs: one unstable table crushed between two mega-stalls, or a few shelves hoping for attention in a bigger publisher's stall, often containing multiple copies of the same 20 books. These are the small publishers, two more of whom have recently begun operations.
The first, based in Kerala, seems to have searched high and low for a name sufficiently distant from anything Keralite: it is called Yeti Books. Unlike the abominable snowman, however, we know Yeti Books actually exists: it has several books in print and plans to carry on publishing "a book a month". With a manifesto that claims to read "texts not authors", they are determined to go where no other publisher dares go any more — into the realms of poetry and to the unknown but gifted writer, Indian or foreign. Their first books include An Anthology of Post-Modern Poetry, edited by Noah Hoffenberg, and a volume of Anita Nair's poetry, Malabar Mind. www.yetibooks.com has more information.
The other publisher that recently began operations is as curiously named: it is called Three Essays. The name reflects what the press wants to do, according to one of its editors: publish "three (or four) essays that go together to make a book, introduced in a way that addresses the intellect as well as the conscience of the reader." They might, the editor goes on cautiously, perhaps publish really small monographs. Obviously they take being a small press seriously.
No poetry here, only works of scholarship, and the line-up of authors in their first few titles is formidable: Vasudha Dalmia, K.N. Panikkar, Aijaz Ahmed, Shereen Ratnagar and others. For information on titles out and forthcoming, go to www.threeessays.com
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Book values
NORMAL people may not believe it, but there are those who spend the better part of their lives puzzling over whether you should write "data are... " or "data is... ", and 1980's or 1980s. Why bother? Christopher Hurst, another small publisher who has been in the business for 35 years, calls book-making an "invisible art" because "while its absence is extremely noticeable, its successful application will pass unnoticed... [though] it may impart a warm glow... " Someone, with reason, compared editing to toilet-cleaning: noticeable only if badly done.
Hurst (whose column this paper has been publishing for many years) has compressed the knowledge gathered in his years as a publisher into a slim little book. A publisher often has to be "the Jack or Jill of all trades"; this books offers help in all departments, from editing, to setting maps and tables, and deciding the kind of binding. Most publishing people possess other well-thumbed and dog-eared books in the same genre: this one deserves some dog-earing too.
The book is written by a publisher who is hands-on, and it shows. (Being hands-on is rarer than you'd think: there are publishing houses where many functionaries don't know an index from an indent.) It is peppered with accounts of bookish disasters — between a manuscript and a book there can be many — and ingenious means of rescue. Endearingly conversational and leisurely in its style, it makes publishing seem the gentlemanly occupation it used to be.
Hurst is an unashamed, self-confessed conservative in matters of book production, sometimes to baffling effect — as when he rattles off suitable colours for binding material (dark blue for books on Britain and France and medium blue for the Nordic countries; why?). But even he is having to absorb some new rules — as about using non-sexist language: "If one does not wish to refer to God," specifies Hurst, "(where not referred to as `God the Father') as `He' (or `he'), I recommend avoiding the pronoun and repeating `God' as often as necessary." Amen.
The Invisible Art: The Pursuit of Book Making, Hurst Books, price not stated.
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Go on cooking
A SCRUMPTIOUS cookbook has been published by Penguin, with international standards of design, production, and food photography. Great Goan Cooking, 100 Easy Recipes (Rs. 395) by Maria Tereza Menezes has a chatty style and straightforward recipes that make "Bebinca" sound like something one might actually attempt with material in one's own kitchen.
To me, living in North India in the overpowering embrace of Dall Muckni and Tundoori Chikkun, it is reassuring to know that some corners of this country are still foreign fields where food has names as poetic as "Torradas de Camarao" (Prawn Toasts) "Chourico de Reino" (Portuguese Sausages); and where toddy and feni are regular ingredients just like haldi and dhania. There are vegetarian, non-alcoholic recipes too.
Romance of the Mango: The Complete Book of the King of Fruits, Kusum Budhwar, Penguin India, Rs. 495.
Rooms Are Never Finished, Shahid Ali, Permanent Black, Rs. 195.
Journey with a Hundred Strings: My Life in Music, Shiv Kumar Sharma with Ina Pud, Viking, Rs. 395.
ANURADHA ROY
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