Reading “Off the Page” (Edited by Carole Burns), where “Writers talk about beginnings, endings, and everything in between”, as the book claims, I found an interesting passage by Jhumpa Lahiri in the section “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? How Characters Come to Life”.

In a pertinent addressal of the reading audience’s perception of her novels, and what is (crassly) called “Indian Writing in English”, exoticised to an extent that it seems a genre in itself, Lahiri says:

It’s a fact about my writing that I write about characters of a certain background. But I don’t see them as Indian-American characters. I don’t see them through that screen of difference. Sometimes people ask me, “Did you grow up eating Indian food?” And I don’t think of it as Indian food. I just think of it as food. So it’s the same with my characters, as people. I think it’s inevitable that readers will ask me these questions, given that I live in a country where Indians are not a majority.

I’m never speaking for all Indian Americans, or all Bengali Americans for that matter. These are just individual characters brought up in a particular way, as everyone is.

*****

The book “Off the Page” has been pieced together from Carole Burns’ interviews with writers for washingtonpost.com’s “Off the Page”, The Washington Post’s online literary chat show. Contemporary authors like Martin Amis, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, A. S. Byatt and others talk of the writerly life and nearly everything the process of writing involves.

I’m nearly halfway through the book  and have found some absolute gems:

(From the section “What’s it All About? The Ideas Behind the Stories”)

*

It can be said that many human endeavors depend upon a “quarrel” with reality, whether these are scientific or philosophical or political or aesthetic. I think that, like many writers I’m fascinated by the world that surrounds me, both the human world and the world of nature. I don’t know that I have a quarrel with it, but I do see myself as an observer, both admiring and skeptical.

Joyce Carol Oates

*

I suppose I’ve never set out to write a novel in which nothing happens… only write a novel about the lives of certain characters. That nothing “happens” in their lives is beside the point to me; I’m still interested in how they live, and think and speak, and make some sense of their own experience. Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident , the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is lifelong and fluid, and that’s what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers. We’re deluged with stories of things that have happened, events, circumstances, actions, etc. We need some stories that reveal how we think and feel and hope and dream.

Alice McDermott

*

I think my purpose in writing the novel You Remind Me of Me was to look at the questions of nature and nurture—not necessarily to find an answer to the question of what turns us into the people that we are but to try to get deeper into the mystery of that. I don’t think it’s one or the other. As an adoptee myself, I’ve seen both sides of the coin. Parts of me are definitely genetic; parts of me are definitely the result of my upbringing; and other parts appear to be my own invention.

Dan Chaon

*

Sound and silence were important from the beginning, and I tried to balance the various parts of the book so that in the back ground, the reader is always aware of these two concepts. Sound, of course, as I learned in my research, is not important at all to deaf people. Sound, as my characters says, is more important to the hearing. In my book, the sound of artillery is devastating to the young soldiers who take part in World War I. I learnt while reading hundreds of journals, diaries, and letters that every man who was at that war wrote home about sound. (On Deafening)

Frances Itani

*

Most writers are better at treating big moral issues obliquely unless they are completely possessed by something they must say. I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what’s going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.

Books I have read that were written at a moment of social-political crisis tend to be incomprehensible twenty years later. Books that are written about some problem twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago are written with understanding and somehow also illuminate the present and the future.

A. S. Byatt

*****

“Off the Page” would have been a more convenient read if,  in a particular section, each author’s view had begun on a fresh page instead of running continuously after the previous one with only a few lines’ space to serve as a break, allowing some leeway to disengage from one author’s train of thought and tune into another’s.

But the book is delightful; I’m trying hard not to gobble all of it in one go.