Three literary walks: Nilanjana Roy, Shehan Karunatilaka, Daisy Rockwell
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Loading... - Basem Touati
- 13 Jan 2023
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'Should a Books page be apolitical?'
"Can I be really blunt? Features sections by and large are handed out to women. That's the only reason it is seen as 'soft'."
Nilanjana S Roy has authored three novels, The Wildings, The Hundred Names of Darkness and this year's Black River, but it is The Girl Who Ate Books, her collection of essays on reading, which told me we would have much to talk about if we ever met. The hunch was right—as a columnist of books at the Financial Times' Life and Arts section, she tells me that "a book review gives a book a home, a place."
We have this conversation as she begins to leave the Bangla Academy on the penultimate day of the Dhaka Lit Fest. She had said something in her session on 'Culture Wars' a day earlier which struck me—how Books pages are (incorrectly) expected to be the "unpolitical" part of a newspaper. Could we talk about it? She suggests we take a walk.
"In India and in the UK, the moment people started to realise that Books pages are the 'ideas' pages, they started to be passed back to male editors. And then again you have to fight for your space", she says as soon as I bring the issue up.
We delve deeper: "What you're doing with a Books page is creating a running history of the ideas and the parallel history or the imagination of a country. You're not looking to question and knock the book out of attention as much as you're trying to say, What kind of creature is this? Of what family? What tradition?
How do you make those choices?
"Your own opinion doesn't matter. If you're reading a book with a certain sense of disgust or discomfort—the latter is fascinating, because why is a writer making you so uncomfortable, what is he or she pushing past? Such as Hanya Yanagihara; I read her before the hype started. It was extremely disquieting. At the same time, you see that she's writing in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and taking that and putting some nails in the coffin. Your review is not going to be about how it made you uncomfortable. It's about what this is conveying to you. What are you participating in? So, with reviews it's about paying attention to your instincts and then not being carried away by them. Knowing your strengths and limitations. Read More…
