Bloggasm

Chandrahas Choudhury is a writer based in Mumbai, India. His literary weblog The Middle Stage features essays on both new and classic works on writers from around the world. His reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, the Sunday Telegraph, the Scotsman and Himal. He is at work on a novel.

Simon Owens: How different is literary blogging from mainstream reviewing?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I see it this way: reviewing is the work available to me in the real world, and my weblog is closer to an ideal world. With my blog I tend not to follow the news - I write about whatever I’m reading or thinking about.

Reviewing brings with it constraints of space, deadlines to be met, and the pressure of staying up to date - if you don’t review a book the month it’s out, you’ve lost the chance to write about it.

A weblog allows you to rove freely across time and space and national boundaries, as long as you can keep things interesting for readers. On my blog I don’t have to worry about space constraints, though obviously I don’t go beyond a certain word length. Also, there’s the freedom to digress, to make all sorts of interesting connections. And there’s the opportunity to quote liberally - sometimes two or three long passages in a piece - so that you can show what you think the writer is trying to do. There’s something about a beautiful sentence or paragraph that you instantly want to share out with as many people as possible. So often, when I have to write a review of a book for a newspaper, I tend to write a longer piece with a more informal tone for my blog.

Blogging is also in some ways a different form from reviewing. With my blog essays I try to say something interesting about a writer or book but also to signpost other good essays on the subject, so there’s several hours of reading locked up in one piece. Reviewing doesn’t allow you to exploit the resources of the Internet in this manner.

Simon Owens: Have you ever had the pleasure of meeting an author after you’ve reviewed his work?

Chandrahas Choudhury: Only a couple of times. I liked Altaf Tyrewala’s novel No God In Sight (out last month in the US) very much, so I contacted him for an interview on my blog, and as we live in the same city we’ve become friends since, and chat a good deal about what kind of work we’re doing and what books we’re reading. Last month I met the writer Vikram Chandra very briefly at the launch of his book.

Simon Owens: How do you go about browsing for new authors? Do you take word-of-mouth recommendations or is there some other method?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I read the review pages of the English press around the world regularly, so I always know what’s just out, and sometimes I look at publisher’s catalogues to see what’s going to be coming soon. Like most readers I know instinctively what’s going to be to my taste and what’s not. But I always find that a good, alert, sensitive review will make me curious about a book. My friends will kill me for this, but I rarely ever read the books they recommend.

Simon Owens: How successful do you think book blogs are in striving to promote books? Do you think that they’re convincing readers to buy the books they recommend?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I think getting readers to buy books is only one of the aims of a literary weblog, and a relatively unimportant one at that. I don’t think we have the power to give an Oprah Winfrey book-of-the-month boost to a book.

To be sure, over time people come to trust your opinion about things, and will often track down your recommendations. But I think what literary blogs are really concerned with is good conversation about books. What kinds of books are out there that we don’t know about, or don’t generally get talked about? What does it mean to read well? What relation does reading have to experience, to our day-to-day lives? Each one of us has some kind of answers to these questions, and we advance them through talk about specific books. Literary weblogs can become part of a book culture in the same way as a good periodical can.

Simon Owens: I’ve noticed that you focus a lot on international writers. Is there a particular reason for this?

Chandrahas Choudhury: That’s just because I read quite widely, and think everyone should as well - unsystematic reading is one of life’s great delights. Also, in India, there’s not a great deal of attention given by the newspapers to books from around the world - most newspapers only have one page for books in a week. I find I have a great deal to say but nowhere to say it, so that I put all that onto my weblog.

I now have a great deal more traffic from the US and the UK than I used to, so I feel that in some small way I help to bring writers from around the world to the attention of Indian readers, and Indian writers to the attention of readers from around the world. (This may only be in my imagination, but even illusions are vital motivating forces for work. In fact, blogging itself is based upon the illusion that one will one day become rich and famous out of doing work for free, mostly for people who have nothing better to do than sit around surfing the Web). Fakir Mohan Senapati, for example, or Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay - these are Indian writers whose work is easily the equal of anything in world literature. And Etgar Keret, or Osip Mandelstam - why shouldn’t more Indian readers be reminded of their work?

Simon Owens: What upcoming book publications are you looking forward to the most?

Chandrahas Choudhury: I actually dream of finding the quality time to give to classics I haven’t read yet. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for instance - I’ve never read it. I’d like also to read Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) - the book on which Satyajit Ray made the first film of the Apu trilogy. And a few months ago I found in a pavement bookshop in Bombay the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’s mammoth verse work The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel - it’s full of roaring lines and superb effects. I’d like to disappear onto an island for a month and read that, preferably with someone to read out bits to and to cook my meals for me.

But among upcoming books, I’d like to read Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, Roger Ebert’s Awake in the Dark: Forty Years of Reviews, Essays, and Interviews, the art critic Robert Hughes’s memoir Things I Didn’t Know, and David Thomson’s book on Nicole Kidman. I’d also like to lay my hands on the new issue of News From The Republic of Letters, the journal started by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford. This one’s going to be a special issue in memory of Bellow. I’d even be interested in In The Line of Fire, the forthcoming memoir by Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Chandrahas Choudhury: Two literary blogs I have a great deal of time for are Mark Thwaite’s ReadySteadyBook and Steve Mitchelmore’s This Space. The Indian writer Amitava Kumar has a great many interesting opinions, and Colour of Water, the weblog of my fellow Bombay writer Sonia Faleiro, features brilliant reportage on a slew of Indian subjects sharing space with funny titbits and gossip. Amit Varma used to run the Middle Stage before I took it over, and his widely read blog India Uncut is a distinctive mix of zany humour, libertarian opinions, and links to a great many bizarre things happening all around India.