So Do You Want
to be a novelist? Si? Ja? Oui?
Ha of course you want be! Then go right away get a facial or plastic surgery or something that will make you look hot, for as Kate Kellaway writes in the Guardian Review:
"Certainly, the idea of a novel quietly selling itself now, with no sense of the writer behind it, is far-fetched. Kate Saunders, one of the judges of this year's Orange Prize for fiction (the longlist, just announced, has half-a-dozen first novels on it), says: 'It is harder for first novelists to get noticed now. They will find, increasingly, that they are judged alongside their work - and are less likely to be taken on if they are not photogenic or newsworthy.'Amid the pile of first novels in front of me, a handful of author photos proves her point: Ivo Stourton looks as if he has stepped out of Brideshead Revisited, snapped outside a sunny villa. His publisher makes much of his youth and Cambridge education. And an A4-sized photograph of a smiling Priya Basil slips invitingly out of the review copy of her novel as if to win favour.
Mungeri Lal ka Haseen Sapna No. 1: He dreams that he now looks buffed, with gelled spiky hair, tall obviously, designer everything - glasses, shirt, pant, undies, and he is up there, at a lectern, looking over a sea of nubile women yelling, swooning, immodestly throwing their upper garments at him, requesting his autograph in strategic locations etc. Obviously his book will feature spices, tropical fruit, doe eyed dusk courtesans, adventitious elephants etc. He will be the publishing sensation of the year.
Since he was looking into the world that Cervantes dreamed up earlier this afternoon to cure himself of loneliness, he has a question for Ms. Kellaway: if Don Quixote was published now, would Papa Cervantes have to rustle up that magnificent steed Rocinante, and that heroic squire Sancho Panza to go the requisite book tour?
From the same Guardian article:
"Priya Basil won a two-book deal with a six-figure advance for Ishq and Mushq ('Love and Smell'), a tragicomic saga about voluptuous Sarna and her husband Karam. Their marriage, in spite of Sarna's virtuoso cooking, is never uncomplicatedly palatable.
Sadly for Ms. Basil - with that last name I suppose she had to, absolutely, have cooking in her novel - I am one less potential reader of her book.
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It's a tragiCOMIC cooking saga though :) It'll be funny instead of all teary eyed silk and soap opera storyline. And the title! I'm halfway excited :) Be halfway excited too!
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Khush, you read it first
and make a Bollywood movie out it - I may then take in Ms. Basil's work!!
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