Writing Lessons From Arundhati Roy

 Arundhati Roy may have been the first Indian writer I read. Along with Salman Rushdie and Jhumpa Lahiri, I found a variety of styles and a different view of the world. Lahiri was born in Britain and lived in America. We all know Rushdie left India for Britain and lives here now. Roy has stayed in India and has been involved in politics.

This weekend, The Paris Review released its Arundhati Roy, The Art of Fiction No. 249. The parts that interested me most follow, of course.

INTERVIEWER

Can you tell me a bit about your reading habits?

ARUNDHATI ROY

When I was growing up in Kerala, to nourish the English part of my brain—there was a Malayalam part, too—there was a lot of Shakespeare and a lot of Kipling, a combination of the most beautiful, lyrical language and some very unlyrical politics, although I didn’t see it that way then . . . I was definitely influenced by them, as I have been later by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. What an impossible task it is to list the writers one loves and admires. I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries—everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer. My reading can switch rather oddly from Mrs. Dalloway to a report about the National Register of Citizens and the two million people in Assam who have been struck off it and have suddenly ceased to be Indian citizens. Ceased to have any rights whatsoever.

A novel that overwhelmed me recently is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Just incredible—the audacity, the range of characters and situations. It begins with a surreal description of the Volga burning—the gasoline floating on the surface of the water catching fire, giving the illusion of a burning river—as the battle for Stalingrad rages. The manuscript was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as though it were a person. Another recent read was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Giorgio Bassani. It’s about the time just before World War II, when many Jews in Italy were members of the Fascist Party. The Finzi-Continis are an elite Jewish family who live in a mansion with huge grounds and tennis courts. The book is centered around a love affair between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis and a person who is an outsider to that world as the Holocaust closes in. There is something about the unchanging stillness of that compound, the refusal to acknowledge what is happening, even while the darkness deepens around it. It is chilling and so eerily contemporary. All of the entitled Finzi-Continis end up dead. Considering what happened in Stalinist Russia, what happened in Europe during World War II—one is reading, searching for ways to understand the present. What fascinates me is how some of the people who were shot by Stalin’s firing squads died shouting “Long live Stalin!” People who labored in the gulag camps wept when he died. Ordinary Germans never rose up against Hitler, even as he persisted with a war that turned their cities into rubble. I look for clues to human psychology in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, in the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whom Stalin basically killed, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov.

Joel C told me in prison to read and read well. I was already inclined to this, so call me an easy convert. However, over and over the same advice is to be found. Artists and musicians pay attention to the works of predecessors, and writers must do the same.

I am too old to be trying to do what I am doing. My felony status and my Midwestern location will further limit my ability to be fashionable. So, why not experiment? Where can the story take me? I cannot say that there are no American writers thinking like Roy, only that I have not read them. I suppose Gore Vidal's raging decades ago against academic novelists does not count.

INTERVIEWER

What is that product? What is a novel supposed to be?

ROY

I think there is an increasing danger of novels becoming too streamlined, domesticated. When you read Vasily Grossman or the big Russian novels, they are wild and unwieldy, but now there’s a way in which literature is being commodified and packaged—is it romance, is it a thriller? Commercial? Literary? What shelf should we put it on? And now we have the phenomenon of the M.F.A. novel, which can often be a beautifully confected product. There are no rough edges. The number of characters, the length of chapters, it’s all skillfully orchestrated—and I’ll say that male novelists are allowed leeway there. They’re more easily allowed the big canvas. But with a woman, it’s like, How many characters are there in that book? Isn’t it a bit too political? I’d ask them, How many characters are there in One Hundred Years of Solitude or War and Peace or whatever? I sometimes feel that the settled classes, the contemporary cultural czars who are the arbiters of taste in the arts and in literature, are often wary of the real, deep, unsettling politics that are not part of accepted pedagogy—we are expected to write within a sort of default worldview, in which the ideas of what constitutes progress, enlightenment, and civilization are agreed upon. But I think that is changing now. It’s being challenged by young writers and poets, challenged from many directions, from across the world.

INTERVIEWER

The idea of a confected product is interesting, in that it also limits the subjects a writer is “allowed” to talk about, or what they can bring together into one book—as though a family story shouldn’t have a political dimension or vice versa. In Ministry, you say of Tilo that she “had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete,” which seems to speak to the way you work, too—in the novels themselves and in the way you move between genres.

ROY

A novelist can’t keep discrete worlds. Your business is to smash them together, against each other. The academic world, the journalistic world, the NGO world, they like to keep things discrete—this is a climate change dossier, in this room we deal with Hindu nationalism, that is the war and peace industry admin bloc, this is international finance, this is the environmental issues funding department, in this room we administer and ponder upon issues regarding caste, race, gender, and other identities. Sometimes, when I’m in a cruel mood, I think it’s a bit like a taxonomy of funding applications. But in order to really understand these things, to radically understand them, you have to look at the interplay. To truly understand the conflict in Kashmir you have to be aware of not just the dynamics of a military occupation, but also the geography of the place, the control of natural resources, the importance of the rivers in that region. When violence breaks out between two communities in Odisha, apart from the history of conflict between those communities, you must also look out for the bauxite mountain and the mining companies working in the neighborhood. To understand how the Indian economy works, knowing finance is not enough. You need to look at it through the prism of caste. You need to have a circle of eyes, many pairs of eyes arranged all around your head and a skin that is osmotic. At least that’s the kind of novelist I want to be. That has been my life’s tragedy as well as my holy grail. It has blown my life apart and then glued the pieces together. Sometimes I wish I could be otherwise—some other kind of person.

Think about this; read; and get to writing (which I should be doing now!)

 Arundhati Roy's books.

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