You loved reading John Berger and also wrote a book on him, Ways of Telling. What was it like to meet him?
At that stage, I’d met very few writers. I loved literature, and I wanted to be a writer myself, and they were sort of mythic figures, so naturally, I wanted to meet them. I just feel so lucky that Berger was the first. He was my favourite writer, too, and he happened to be the first great writer I met. His behaviour was so exemplary that I feel that it set a standard for my own behaviour. In a way, something about his writing made me particularly interested in him because of the values that he espoused in his books. It’d have been particularly disappointing if he had been less than wonderful. At any festival you go to, you always hear stories about people who’ve been left in floods of tears by VS Naipaul. There are always horror stories about Naipaul, and I’m glad that it was not VS Naipaul that represented to me as my first contact with what a writer is like.
I still like to meet people, but I could draw up a list for you, which I won’t, of dreadful writers whom I hope never to see again. Fortunately, there’s an equally long list of writers with whom I’ve now become friends.
Satire creates an equal space where all sides can laugh at the joke made at their expense. Is this why you have provocative titles for your works, like Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.
Well, you say, provocative, but I’d say seductive or alluring perhaps. There’s another title, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which was to really signal that it’s a version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Titles must have some kind of gravitational pull to them, of course, so I’d say they are seductive in their invitation.
Tell us about your memoir, Homework.
{{/usCountry}}Tell us about your memoir, Homework.
{{/usCountry}}I didn’t have a contract with the publisher, but I had a contract with the form, if you like, a covenant, to be as accurate as I could, and not to invent things that didn’t happen. Then, you know, we come to the thing of little details. And I found that I actually didn’t need to invent them because after a certain time of concentrating and working on a scene, extra details would come back to me. Ever since the book has come out, I’ve realised that several such details, as it turns out, I’ve gotten wrong. But I won’t be changing them in the text because they’re an accurate reflection of what I thought was the case. I’m just going to add a little postscript to the paperback, explaining certain things that I’ve remembered incorrectly, though I was trying to be as reliable a witness as I could.
As a writer, you’ve forayed into a variety of genres. As a writer too you have been a literary critic, written novels and this memoir. Do you feel that a writer must assume a different personality to cater to the different sensibilities and responsibilities to play a particular role? For example, while critiquing, you’d have noted what doesn’t work in a book, but self-editing your work is altogether different.
For me, genres don’t really exist; it’s all just writing.
Certain things, like the reliability of a text, can alter emphasis, but it’s all writing for me, concentrating on the quality of the detail, which is, of course, important, and more so when you’re writing fiction; so it is when you’re writing a memoir; but also, when you’re writing literary criticism, because the details then would be noticed in the quality of the response to a book. You’ll have to supply quotations to show that what you’re doing is not malicious or insane or unreliable, that you’ve got it right, so there’s a closeness between testament and evidence, a substantiated experience in your analysis of reading a book. It’s remarkable how striking and similar these two things are.
Self-analysis has a similar role to play when you’re working on a novel or any other form. Do you tend to analyse what you’re writing from that lens?
Well, it bothers me how people read my books. Of course, once anything I write is in a book form, it’s out of my control, and I’m frequently disappointed by the readings of my books offered by critics. Whenever I publish a book, my initial reaction is invariably, thank God, what a good critic I am, because typically I think I read books with more care than my book is being read with.
Of course, whenever a book of mine comes to people like my agent or editors, they have some useful sort of input, but I feel that my own capacity for self-editing and self-criticism is quite highly developed, so I don’t feel I need as big a team of helpers as some writers might.
Do you think writers should feel burdened with the responsibility of being an activist?
Some writers’ work is more politically or activist-driven than mine. It’s not like Berger at all. But I’m always surprised that I’ve ended up being the kind of writer I am, given that the many writers I admire were Camus, Berger, Orwell, [Raymond] Williams, and so on. I was going to say disappointed at the kind of writer I’ve become, but that’s not true, because I don’t think you have much control over the kind of writer you are.
One of the things that assails us now with the genocide in Palestine is that this appalling thing is going on, and what can we do? So, of course, you can go on marches, but you know, there’s this awful feeling of accepting defeat. There was a panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival where people were talking about genocide, ecocide, and medicide. I’d like to add, I don’t know what to call it, but let’s call it ‘triviacide’. So, even the smallest thing, the powerful would try to crush, and the terrible thing is that they seem to be succeeding. It’s easier to fall into a kind of passive despair of feeling powerless to do anything about the unbelievable injustice of it all.
Saurabh Sharma (they) is a nonbinary, queer writer, essayist, and culture critic. On X: @writerly_life; Instagram: @writerlylife.