The Short Story’s Novel Life

Short story, a condensed literary genre, has got a lease of new life with the proliferation of the digital media, beginning with e-book revolution which hit us in 2007. There is an ongoing debate of reading having taken a backseat in today’s world of never-ending deadlines and smart phones. But the fact of the matter is that people are reading on the screen rather than on paper. With short attention spans and a fast life, the short story which as Edgar Allan Poe defined it, ‘that which can be read in one sitting’ has gained momentum.  The length of an average short story takes just a couple of screens and  suits the rampant users of the internet and latest smart handheld gadgetry. ‘Amazon, for instance, created its Kindle Singles program in 2011 for publishing short fiction and nonfiction, brief-enough to be read in less than two hours. Although the list price is usually modest, a dollar or two, authors keep up to 70 percent of the royalties: a welcome revenue for fledgling authors and a potentially big payoff for well-known writers.’ Within the space of a few pages, a great author weaves a compelling story which, with a rich narrative and vibrant characters and a dramatic denouement, acquires the depth of a Dickensian and the pace of a thriller, creating memorable literature that impacts the reader long after they have finished reading.  Virginia Wolfe, talking of photography and the art of short story writing, said, “Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? This gives us, I think, a clue to the enduring power and appeal of the short story—they are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more than in real life.”

The genesis of the short story began with the caveman recounting the tale of his hunting encounter for the day. Improvising, deleting, dramatizing, rephrasing, repeating, exposing and yet withholding details to carve out the frame of a great story, the narrative traversed the ages in the form of anecdotes, parables and fabricated lies( an art ) to the Canterbury tales, fairy tales, legends relayed through poetry. Short story appeared in the printed format just two centuries ago with the industrial revolution and the surging middle class which demanded literary fodder through magazines and periodicals. A plethora of writers experimented and achieved success through their writings of intense stories, which were visited and reread time and again by generations down the line.  There were no evolutionary planes, a slow build-up to a crescendo.  In 1837, a printed short story collection was born when Nathaniel Hawthorne published his short stories titled Twice Told Tales..  The fact that in the early to mid-19th century, Hawthorne and Poe and Turgenev wrote timeless short stories virtually without any falterings, is indicative that the short story is hardwired in the human imagination, and was just waiting for an outlet stream which built into an ocean through the works of Melville, Nabokov, Calvino, Rudyard Kipling, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence and the like. A long story of short stories that began with Hawthorne reached its zenith with the publications of Anton Chekov.

Chekov is heralded as the greatest short story writer of all times, and rightly so because he transformed the narrative from a beginning - middling- end plot to a formless structure. He recognized the meaninglessness of life, its random dictates and answered questions that people lived and died for. He ploughed into the story format creating fluid characters, resisting judgments, and neat endings. His stories are lifelike i.e. unpredictable, arbitrary, thought provoking and disillusioned. The advent of the 20^th century in the world of short story writing thereafter is all Chekovian. The short story entered its golden age. Short story writers earned particularly good sums especially in America. ‘Magazines proliferated, readers were eager, circulations rose, fees went up and up. In the 1920s, Scott Fitzgerald was paid $4,000 by the Saturday Evening Post for a single short story.’ The Chekovian legacy lasted a long time without any new style bisecting it concretely, till the advent of the modern story.
We have spoken of the event-plot story and Chekovian story. Most short stories, even today, fall into one of these two categories. From them, other types emerged over the coming decades. The cryptic tale baffles many an untrained reader with a depth of meaning hidden under the apparent text, and the poetic story is for the connoisseurs. The biographical story is the latest modern form of short story writing blurring the line between fiction and fact to render sensational stories, maybe a take from the media which sensationalizes hard reality to appeal to the viewers’ appetite for drama in life.
‘The Gorkha’s Daughter’ is a short story collection by Prajwal Parajuly, a student of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt course. He was born in Sikkim to an Indian father and Napalese mother. He signed a record-breaking two-book deal with UK publisher Quercus. The five-figure deal makes Prajwal Parajuly, 27, Quercus’ youngest author and the youngest Indian ever to sign an international book contract. The book is out in the market and was discussed critically at the Jaipur Lit Fest, a sure shot indication of the popularity and resurgence of the short fiction genre in the contemporary world. The fever has caught on and novel writers are now switching over to the new demand of the digital era and new formats of writing. Story collections which had been put on a backburner by acclaimed writers like Tom Perrotaa ( books ‘Election’ and ‘Little Children’ have been adapted into Oscar winning films)  are seeing the light of day.

I recently read a short story collection ‘Difficult Pleasures’ by Anjum Hasan . She revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

My last article was about book apps, the latest format of books on the smart phone, and now the above topic of the new life of the short story has been an endeavor to explore the latest genres of books and reading in the contemporary world. This talk about short stories has surfaced many an unforgettable story from the recesses of my consciousness – which I shall continue in my next article. In the meantime readers can too go explore and recollect their favorite short stories and if you mail them to me I shall expound on them in my next interaction with you.

Happy short story readings on the KINDLE!

Book Apps

                                                        
I am an educationist and my experience as a curriculum developer and administrator for educational institutions led me on a path to develop book-reading worshop-modules incorporating fiction/nonfiction books as the bases of teaching-learning process instead of dry, prosaic academic readings. My book presentations entail power point presentations, maps, documentaries and music downloads along with excerpts from relevant books. Sometimes I share my insights and critical appraisals of books with book lovers on different platforms – colleges, art galleries, libraries and book reading clubs. The journey through these book reading workshops keeps me abreast of the latest in the book publishing world in India and abroad.
New book formats have become part of our reading lives, and they simultaneously create opportunities and challenges to my reading workshops. The e-book has segued into book apps since the launch of  ipad in 2009. It sent the publishers and developers into a tizzy and created app space to redesign, create and develop books in an avant-garde  fashion.  It’s a much more collaborative process and it’s hard to look at any of the apps and say ‘this person made that’… it requires an input from many a different disciplines. The cozy relationship of a writer and his book is replaced by artists, animators, designers and storytellers and their book app.

The London Olympics created a stir with their spectacular preparations and execution. The news doing the rounds in the book world was the Heuristic’s award-winning London: A City through Time which challenged our interpretation of a ‘book’. Taking as its basis Pan Macmillan's London Encyclopedia, the app packed in a simple design and a scrolling menu which navigates 6,000 articles about places, people and events from the city's history. There are panoramas of the city, rare photographs, video documentaries, a timeline and audio tours. The app is not linear like a book and one can tour places and events from links on the map. Indeed a fascinating guide to an amazing city and is well-worth investigating.

 Touch Press is one of the developers that is exploring how books can be reinvented for the iPad. Previous titles, Solar System and Gems and Jewels, have taken coffee table books and re-engineered them for tablet devices. Touch Press has moved away from non-fiction and has renewed its partnership with publishers Faber to try out some poetry. A new app compiled Shakespeare's 154 sonnets and it costs about the same as a decent printed book. But it goes far beyond what could ever be achieved in print and after a few hours of playing with it you'll feel that £9.99 is a bargain. Central to the app are the 154 video readings of the sonnets read by great actors, which is a wonderful thing and the readings here are a delight.
Touch Press experimentation with T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’ was very impressive. There is the poem itself and detailed, informative line-by-line notes which will help students and anyone who wants to understand the work in more depth. Beyond that, there are six readings of the poem, including two by Eliot himself and an excellent one by Sir Alec Guinness, a picture gallery and a facsimile of Eliot’s original manuscript.
One of the most interesting areas in book-apps right now is the one aimed at the children, as publishers blur the boundaries between books, games, animation and creative software. The handling of a book is difficult for a very young child. They have to know how to turn pages, and have to manipulate this thing, whereas with a tablet, you don’t need to work a mouse, or know the concept of folders.  There is a direct relationship between the child and the app or the digital book, and it is manipulateable with tremendous ease. That causes delight not just for the child but the parent, too. There’s a challenge for publishers here though. Books have been designed to be read with or by parents, so while it’s important to create book-apps that are engaging and fun, it would be a shame if that came at the expense of the emotional value of the book: of the parent and child sitting together. The answer could lie with writers and artists who also understand the fundamentals of interactive design. “Those are going to be the new children’s book rock stars!”
Me Books is the digital equivalent of an independent picture-book shop, which is trying to help parents who are struggling to filter the sheer number of book-apps available on iOS."It should be exactly like going into a little picture-book shop where you trust the guy who runs it, and know the stuff he's selling is good.The key feature of Me Books is its "draw and record" feature, where children can draw an area on-screen – a "hotspot" – and then record their own sounds or words for it.
That may sound minor, but in the Peppa Pig and Ladybird Me Books apps, it was enormously popular where they invent their own zebra calls or insist that visitors to the house record their own take on Daddy Pig. In the future, we'd really love the notion of people being able to save, swap and share versions of the stories, both with other people that have the app and the ability and to send your version of The Three Little Pigs to grandparents.
As children grow into their teens and tweens, they’re becoming much more immersed in interactive content, particularly video games, where there is a nonlinear world that they’re getting to explore. The challenge for the publishing industry, then, is to tell stories in the way that these teenagers are used to and want to receive them.
I have shared my exploration through my smart phone and the internet with my readers. In fact rereading the write-up, it is more of what a reader would find on the net. I have bunched in all the relevant detailing on the net to take you through the new world of book reading. What delighted me no end was the fact that my book reading workshops are very much on the lines of the book apps designed by Touch Press, where-in I take the audience through virtual tours of settings in the book, the historical, social, and political backdrop of the book, pictures and maps of architecture, paintings and designs in the book – besides deciphering the plot and literary study of the technique and themes in the book. My most delightful experience so far has been ‘An Equal Music’, written by Vikram Seth in which I made the audience listen to all the five pieces of European Classical Music woven in the story of the book, with an added tour of the geography and artistic musical theatres in London, Vienna and Venice.
Do come to one of my LIVE BOOK APP READINGS in the forthcoming months! 

Love it was that made us!

 

Love and music have been in the air the past fortnight and I have been ruminating on the power of love to enrapture, beautify, heal and comfort. Romance stories have been a part of our reading journeys since we were fired by hormones in our teens. Books like Gone with the Wind, The Thorn Birds, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Rebecca have enthralled us and led us on trails of passion and delight of our own. Each one of us craves for the right love to enter our lives to render us from the everyday monotony and harshness of life. The power of LOVE elevates us and fills us with an ultimate feeling of well-being and happiness. From reading and seeing love around us, it is only when we embark on our personal journey of love that we realize that it is not about receiving but giving love, which ultimately fulfills and enriches us.

The books we read are not just love stories, but life stories. Some of them have stayed with me for the larger than life portrayal of a character or an interlude which became life lessons for me. Anna Karenina has been hailed a great classical love story against a backdrop of nineteenth century Russia. Is it only the story of the aristocratic Anna Karennina and her all-consuming passion for Lord Vronsky, a forbidden love that then leads only to pain and destruction? There is a parallel strand of the story of Levin and Kitty, a juxtaposition of the two lives or maybe two novels in one. While Anna Karenina burns brightly for a time, Levin and Kitty light a fire that will keep them warm throughout life. The love life of Levin is crafted on the marriage of Leo Tolstoy himself and Lev which means Leo in Russian is a character sketch of Tolstoy in the four years that he took to write the book.

The Russian society of the times was undergoing an identity crisis. They did not know whether they were western or eastern and under the tutelage of the Czar, they aped French custom and etiquette to the letter and in a sense they were performing as if on a stage. In contrast Levin a socially awkward but generous-hearted landowner prefers to live in the countryside, away from the gliterrati of balls and horse races. He grapples with questions of the meaning of life and strives to find truth in his work, land and relationships. Kitty is sacred to Levin, right from the first day he sights her skating and he is overwhelmed with joy and bewilderment. In spite of their daily differences and squabbles as spouses their relationship blossoms and strengths based on the sacredness. He works hard not only to provide for his family, but makes Kitty his closest companion and friend, his soul mate.  He endears himself to Kitty by opening his vulnerable emotional self to her and is sensitive to her every need and fancy. Whereas his friends are concerned with power, position and money to impress their wives, he is a man of courage, sensitivity and heart. Kitty matures slowly and realizes the hurt she has inflicted on Levin by initially rejecting his offer and wows to be authentic and herself in her pursuit of life. She is her most rational self when Levin is lost and confused about the uncertainties of life – his greatest suffering. His sincerity and search for truth culminates in hope and redemption when he realizes that his life does have a higher purpose: "...my whole life...is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it." Tolstoy came upon the virtue of man to transform himself and his potential for goodness and betterment during the writing of this book, where after his life towed a more spiritual path. Levin and Anna are both in turmoil about the question of one’s role in the greater scheme of things, but Levin does not shoot himself, or hang himself, he lives. He is anchored by the love of his family, land and workers.  The book does not end with the tragedy of Anna but with the fruitful life of Levin and Kitty in the countryside, imbued with hope and faith, sharing and giving, and the triumph of the human spirit to higher levels of consciousness.

The relationship of Celie and Shug in The Color Purple is a hard to forget lesson in love. Celie is a scared downtrodden, heavily abused and exploited girl in a black household who is raped for years by her own stepfather. To save her sister the same predicament, she marries Albert who has designs on her sister, and looks after his children, gets beaten, abused and is uncared for. She hates herself and has no identity except being used and worked over and over all her life. Her meeting with Shug Avery, a blues singer and a long standing lover of her husband, brings her across a character who is apparently strong, independent and spoilt as a woman. Celie is astonished to witness the tantrums of Shug and sees a different face of her husband who walks like a dog behind his mistress. She falls in love with Shug and there begins a sexual, deep-rooted companionship of two utterly different women. Through Shug she experiences the pleasures of sex, joy and delight of loving human touch and care. A relationship which lasts decades is mutually beneficial to both and Celie flowers into a new woman with a light step and confident gait. Shug also opens Celie’s eyes to new ideas about religion, empowering Celie to believe in a nontraditional, non-patriarchal version of God.  She realizes her worth, comes to love herself and turns her talent of sewing into a self supporting profitable business and walks out on her husband. After being voiceless for so many years, she is finally content, fulfilled, and self-sufficient. When Nettie, Olivia and Adam return to Georgia from Africa, Celie’s circle of friends and family is finally reunited. Though Celie has endured many years of hardship, she says, “Don’t think us feel old at all. . . . Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”
Heidi likewise in her eponymous book brings tears of joy to my heart every time I revisit her in my rereading. She is a lesson in love and life, saving and reforming the lives of every character around her, namely her cynical cold grandfather, the sad, blind and lonely, Peter’s grandmother, her handicapped rich friend Clara and the lost, scatterbrained Peter. Her weapon of transformation to joy, happiness and wholeness is her infinite capacity to love, care and fill her surroundings with the sheer joy of her being. 
Although Vanity no Apologies is the mantra of the age we live in, yet  peace, bliss and joy is in giving and receiving love.
Love it was that made us and it was love that saved us
Love was God's plan when He made man God's divine nature is love
Born of God's love we must love Him
That's why He made us to love Him
But only when we love all men can we partake of God's love (2)
Love is a wonderful thing, joy in hearts it will bring
where there is love there is God and where there is God there is love
Love transforms, heals, and renews. Let’s go find the magic in our lives!

    

The Point of it All

The reading habit in India has come of age considering the lakh and a half footfalls at the recently concluded Jaipur Literary Festival.  Litfests in the country are a new genre of festivals gathering momentum over the last ten years.  Every other city boasts of an art/lit fest,  the Apeejay  Kolkatta Literary Festival, the Mussourie Writers’  Festival, the Hay Festival  and Bookaro, to name a few.  Is it a passing fad or a lasting phenomenon and has the common man become an avid reader?  These are questions which spring forth, but going by the mere 10,000-sold mark of a book which becomes a bestseller in India , the story needs to be  investigated. 

I was a delegate at the  Goa Art/Lit festival . The mood of discussions and debates propelled me to continue the experience and I found myself part of the burgeoning crowd of intellectual elite at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Itl was hosted at the Diggi Palace within the heart of the Pink City. Readings were held simultaneously at six venues ( lawns and halls) of the palace.  One had to be present at the reading tents well in advance to secure a seat , which I got used to after the first day . What heartened me was the turnout and active participation of youngsters at the readings.  The old and older people were in attendance as usual.  It was a congregation of the intellectual elite from various cities of India and abroad in their winter best. The writers, literary agents and publishers from India and abroad completed the circle of the most elusive and celebrated people from the world of books.

The talks celebrated great writings from poets and writers, lyricists and novelists, environmentalists and journalists, and the power of great ideas to transform our way of thinking. The festival became a playground of the exchange of views and meeting of minds that inspired revelations- personal, political and educational. A Chinese writer remarked during one of the discursive sessions that he was both astonished and warmed by the wide open debate between writers, journalists, members of the civil society and the audience without any embargoes so much in place in his own country. He felt intrigued by the diverse voices applauding and at the same time critiquing the government and other policy makers. If one tent hosted a political debate on breakout nations, another talked about the history of literature and yet another about the nature of a Punjabi. Religious and spiritual readings interspersed the chain of hot topics thronged by thousands from all age groups. Then in the end, we went and spoilt it by the 2013  controversy by a sociologist about the age-old caste factor in our country.

Dalai Lama was the star of the festival with every person in attendance beelining to hear him speak on truth, honesty and the need to educate our hearts and minds, the so-called process of self-engineering. Each peaceful mind adds to the peace of the world and there is no THEY and WE , for as it came up in the talk about Kipling, They are nothing but We. Buddhist monks created magic each morning with Buddhist chants in Pali and Nepali, and another, beginning with  poetry from the archives of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, too.
It was global in its reach and yet anchored by 17 Indian languages. Bollywood, too, was equally represented by lyricists, actors and directors. The panel discussions ranged from folk elements in cinema to the onscreen image of a woman. Young adult workshops at Samvad were led by eminent educationists on the latest pedagogical practices in education. The bookshop engaged the crowds effectively by proudly displaying works of all writers in attendance. The DSC prize for best South Asian literature and the showcasing of the Booker of the Booker prize shortlists were programs not to be missed.    The readings ran clockwork with close adherence to the printed schedule and protocol. Kudos to Namita Gokhale, Sanjoy Roy and William Darlymple.

That’s the bookish side of the picture so far. The other side introduced the idea to the spectators that though we are here for books and for the sake of books only, it would be too boring without music, food and controversies to sum the matter on a somber, pleasing note. The venue did not seem like a cosy village of booklovers and writers but a commercial hub, with food stalls, crowds, as if thronging fairs of colour and music, and Rajasthani cuisine and fashion in full splendor. Did this showmanship detract book lovers and writers from their activity of serious discussions or spurred them on with its alluring whiffs of colour  , is a matter of debate in itself. For me, it was the latter, provided they come up with a much bigger venue to house the noise and congestion of a huge audience or spread the events over 7-days at least.

The fest was an ultimate pleasant interlude of writers, publishers, literary agents, debutant authors, and readers. Coming back to our original question of whether the events (I have been part of the Bookaro, and Kala Ghoda Lit Fest too sometime back) are an evidence of our improving or revolutionizing reading habits in the present times of the visual media and gadgetry. The pointer is towards young India with never-ending deadlines and short attention spans. Or is it a cool quotient to be seen at such spots of the literary elites. You mention books as you drop names without having read them.  Maybe they are new centers of business and touristy agendas under the garb of literary and cultural promotions. The fast growth and explosive popularity has achieved the inclusion of corporate sponsors. In the solitary world of books, reading and  writing , these incursions are indicative of a defining change in the modern times of writing, selling and promoting books. Certain writers and avid readers like to remain far away from such happening fairs.  But the question remains ‘Is the general public reading?’

Brand Books Festivals are here to stay. What form it will evolve into, only time will tell. Let’s wait and watch as the Tamasha continues, said Amitav Ghosh.