The Empire's orphan children

As a touchingly emotional Rana Dasgupta rose to receive the Commonwealth Award for the Best Book, he joined a long list of distinguished winners, from Mordecai Richler and Rohinton Mistry to Peter Carey, Vikram Seth and Andrea Levy.

Dasgupta’s Solo, his second book and first novel, is a virtuoso performance, like so many Commonwealth Prize winners. Set in Bulgaria, it explores the painful consequences of the choices made by both nations and individuals. Ulrich is blind, living out his years in a city where all the stories have changed, after “the former villains were cast in bronze and put up in parks”. As his mind wanders through a real and sometimes imaginary past, his life seems like a settling, however unfair, of history’s accounts.

With Peter Carey, J M Coetzee, Thomas Keneally and Chimamanda Adichie on the regional shortlists at one point, it seemed that Solo would be the dark horse of the competition, despite its obvious merits — but the final list of regional winners didn’t include any of the big four, making Dasgupta and Michael Crummey the front-runners for the competition.

Full report here Business Standard

Prize-winning writers on CWG menu

Literary enthusiasts may get a chance to interact with award-winning authors at a special event during the Commonwealth Games that will host all the previous winners of the annual Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. “We hope to hold a literary event in the cultural programmes associated with the Games and will invite authors who have won Commonwealth Prize,” Commonwealth Foundation director Mike Collins said.

The previous winners of the award include Vikram Chandra, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mohammed Hanif, V S Naipaul, J M Coetzee, Indra Sinha, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. “India is at the heart of the Commonwealth and it is great to have the Games and the literary award come here,” Collins said.

Full report here Indian Express

In the twilight zone with Coetzee

What it's like to delve into the heart of darkness with a great author…

I have just read two books by J.M.Coetzee in quick succession and I wonder how long it will be before I can pick up a book by another author and not fling it away as meaningless. I know that I will recover and the spell that Coetzee has created will pass; in time the whirlwind will die down, the mind will stop trying to hold on to phantom images floating in the half-light or to find rational answers to questions that are not meant to have any answers.

But for the moment, I drift with Coetzee in the twilight zone — somewhere between life and death, between the known and the unknown, between certainty and doubt.

Led by Dostoevsky

In the first of the two books, The Master of Petersburg, one is led there by none other than Dostoevsky himself, who has, in this imagined episode, been called back to Petersburg from Dresden by the death of his stepson. Petersburg was never just another city to Russian writers. Gogol portrayed it as the capital of alienation, illusion and deception in his soul crushing Tales of Petersburg, a city where human greed and vanity ruled supreme. And Dostoevsky, credited with saying that the whole of Russian literature came out of Gogol's Overcoat, added a dimension of fantasy to the city. In the fevered imagination of his characters, it became a fog-bound city of hallucinations, visions and dreams; its long summer daylight could not only enchant but also play havoc on sleepless minds and tortured nerves.

In Coetzee's novel, the ghostly visions of this city are always at hand as Dostoevsky struggles to come to terms with the death of his stepson, in the process entering headlong into unexpected political intrigue and conflict. He takes over the room where his son lodged and forges ambiguous relationships with the landlady and her young daughter, to whom his son was not just a lodger but a hero, a revolutionary in the making, a man recovering from a lost childhood, even from a selfish step-father.

Full report here Hindu