A potluck year in print

By Shinie Antony Dec 27, 2006, 8:03 GMT

New Delhi, Dec 27 (IANS) From Kaavya Viswanathan's humiliation to Kiran Desai's jubilation, Indian writers penned a long-winded route to global glory in 2006.

Viswanathan was all set for accolades via a second book deal, Hollywood offers and general celebrity-hood when it was discovered that 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild And Got A Life' was not all her own.

There were thinly disguised plagiarized paragraphs from various other books, including by Salman Rushdie. How Kaavya Viswanathan got kissed-off, got booed and got the boot, sadly, formed the rest of her print history.

Desai's win of the year's Man-Booker was not so much a surprise as reassurance. Daughter of three-time Booker nominee Anita Desai, she dominated the betting stakes. And though she took home the prize in a little black dress instead of a desi nine-yard sari, no Indian grudged her sartorial choice as long as 'The Inheritance Of Loss' did not lose.

While 'Sacred Games' by Vikram Chandra stands out for its sheer bulk and astronomical advance paid, Sagarika Ghose's 'Blind Faith' merged Indian spirituality with existential dilemmas in her 'khumbh mela' excavation.

Polished debuts - from C.P. Surendran's 'An Iron Harvest' to Rajorshi Chakraborti's 'Or The Day Seizes You' - kept up the prose proceedings.

Chakraborti, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Edinburgh, says he never expected to attract much attention being a first-time author. 'I wasn't even here for my book launch,' Chakraborti, who shuttles between Britain and Kolkata, told IANS.

Down chick-lit street, Rajashree made her debut with 'Trust Me' - a mad Bollywood caper about amour lost and found - while Rupa Gulab switched publishers - from Penguin to Rupa - for 'A Chip Off The Old Block', her follow-up to 'Girl Alone'.

'The Marriage Market' (Pocket Books) by Nisha Minhas kept up the bachelor girl's lighthearted lament.

Lad-lit, a new Indian genre picking up slowly but steadily, saw Neelesh Misra's 'Once Upon A Time Zone', a hilarious romantic romp between an Indian - Neel Pandey or Neil Patterson - and Angela, a US scribe he was yet to meet.

While pathos reigned in 'A Life Less Ordinary' (Zubaan) with Baby Haldar's matter-of-fact rendering of her life as a servant-maid in a heartless capital, Srividya Natarajan climbed aboard the wit van with her 'No Onions Nor Garlic' (Penguin).

Roswitha Joshi, meanwhile, sought to strike a balance between absurdity and sobriety with 'Once More!' (UBSPD), a work in which a German woman dreams about her Indian lover.

'Beantown Boomtown' (Rupa) brings Bangalore alive in the world of words with anthologies from R.K. Narayan to Anita Nair.

In translations, Indira Goswami's 'The Man From Chinnamasta' (Katha) and Vilas Sarang's 'Women In Cages' (Penguin) bridged the linguistic divide.

The year's last chapter folds on a somber note with Raj Kamal Jha's 'Fireproof' (Picador). Jha gives us his main protagonist - Ithim - a combination of it and him - a newborn who survives the Gujarat riots only to face a lack of identity. Born a day after Godhra, Ithim has no facial features except a pair of eyes, stressing his observer status and ability to cry.

Experimental styles, untried genres, marketing gimmicks and unique cover designs - Jha's book jacket has 'Help me' in runny typography - were the bestsellers of 2006, which was also a year book marked by unprecedented highs and lows. All in all, it was a potluck year in print.

© 2006 Indo-Asian News Service