Writers: Arundhati Roy and Peter Carey; The Anglosphere - Navel Gazing?

 If I recall correctly, it was Arundhati Roy who was my gateway into Indian literature. In Vogue, she writes about her early life: In an Exclusive Excerpt from Her Memoir, Arundhati Roy Writes of Her Early Upbringing. I believe she is not writing much fiction today, but is spending much of her time in political activism.

Peter Carey is, to me, Australian literature. This week's books newsletter from The Brisbane Times had some disappointing news for me: Peter Carey retiring from writing fiction: Acclaimed Australian author on why A Long Way from Home will be final novel.

The Guardian's Book Review newsletter landed this morning, and I read ‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal. With more than a little interest. It also seemed relevant to this post. Carey certainly belongs to the Anglosphere. I seem to recall Roy wrote in English, albeit being Indian, I suspect she is multilingual. For Americans, they are foreigners, regardless of the language in which they write. We may be big, but that only increases the height of our parochialism - the world is even larger. 

There could be several reasons for this. The further consolidation of the US publishing industry has made it harder for innovative, ambitious novels to emerge. It could be an effect of the trendiness of “literature in translation” in the English-language market – even though the notion that it would have its own niche is largely unfathomable to non-native English speakers, used since childhood to reading literature in translation and calling it “literature”.

It could also be that different books are being written. Since the turn of the century, writers from all over the world have felt the dual literary citizenship that Minae wrote about: seeing themselves as part of both a local and a universal tradition, reading Anna Maria Ortese at the Scuola Holden. It would have been natural to try to combine the two, working into their writing a thin veneer of exoticism to lead readers to engage with its deeper ideas.

If we are not to be decadent and stale, trending to the useless, then we need to look over that wall, not to just fit into a conversation over a shared tradition, but also challenge our notions about the limits of style and content.

On the other hand, this increased international interest in non-anglophone literature could have another source: no matter where these books originated, their worldwide success often came as a result of their success in English. This was the case with, for instance, both Ferrante and Bolaño, who only caught on abroad after resonating with the English‑language market.

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 This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism; and yet it also allows more room for agency. Our peripheries are closer to each other than the long way through the centre makes it seem: readers in Buenos Aires or Naples could very well find a story set in Seoul more relatable than one set in Franzen’s Minnesota.

And if Franzen's Minnesota, is all that is relatable for Americans, then we are stuck gazing at our navels.