2006: The year of memoirs

Indrajeet Rai

Novels, memoirs, travelogues, anthropology, history all kinds of book littered the literary landscape in the year 2006. Indian readers were exhilarated when Kiran Desai’s book ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ won Man Booker Prize 2006, making her the second Indian woman to win the prestigious award. Booker prize win apart, 2006 was the year of memoirs. Memoirs that not only created their share of controversies, which anyway they are expected to, in order to increase their sales, but also challenge the work of fiction by their imaginative theme and claims. Memoirs like ‘A Call to Honour’ and ‘In the Line of Fire’ created a fair amount of political controversies and topped the best sellers list for several weeks.

The year 2006 started on a high note with NRI Kavvya Vishwanathan hitting the headlines for getting USD 500,000 advance for her debut novel ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life’. The euphoria did not last long and soon turned into a big disappointment with the ‘Harvard Crimson’ publishing an article giving graphical details of instances of plagiarism in Kavvya’s novel. The controversy ended when Kaavya’s publisher Little, Brown and Company decided to withdraw the book from the stands and decided not to publish her second work. The Inheritance of Loss Author: Kiran Desai The sense of loss is not a thing to get in inheritance. But Kiran Desai had to inherit the loss of her mother Anita Desai not winning the Man Booker prize despite being shortlisted three times for the award.

Starting as a rank outsider with 7-1 odds, Kiran Desai surprised most of the literary world when she became the youngest woman, at 35, to win the Man Booker Prize of 2006 for her novel ‘The Inheritance of Loss’. What a way to overcome this inheritance of loss and that too so early in life.

The six shortlisted books for Man Booker Prize 2006 were:

Desai, Kiran: The Inheritance of Loss

Grenville, Kate: The Secret River

Hyland, M.J. : Carry Me Down

Matar, Hisham :In the Country of Men

St Aubyn, Edward Mother’s Milk

Waters, Sarah The Night Watch Set in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong and the basement of Manhattan hotels, ‘The Inheritance of Loss’ narrates the stories of Sai, an orphan who comes to stay with his grandfather, a retired judge, and a cook. The cook has a son who works in New York hotels, whose story provides an inkling of the hardships of the immigrants in America.

What mesmerises the reader is the range of issues like globalisation, immigrants` problems, ethnic identities leading to terrorism that Kiran Desai manages to deftly delve into her book. Kiran’s eye for details and the ease with which the sub plots continue shifting from India to USA and vice-versa keep readers’ interest going throughout the book. But an almost abrupt ending of the novel may have left some readers a bit discontented. A Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India Author: Jaswant Singh It is indeed difficult to decipher the motive behind the human actions. Yet, going by a very simplifying interpretation, ‘A Call to Honour’ was expected to serve three basic purposes: First, to offer a personal and insider account of significant events like India’s nuke test of 1998, IC-814 hijacking etc; second, to raise the profile of Jaswant Singh as much within the BJP as in the entire nation since he had responded to answer the call of honour on behalf of the entire nation; third, to embarrass or put in an awkward position, the Congress Party.

Instead, the book, it seemed, failed to meet any of its purported motives. Rather than embarrass the Congress, it was the BJP, which had to defend its actions in the IC-814 hijacking crisis. The mystery of red briefcases being carried along with the convoy of Jaswant Singh to Kandhar insinuated that money was paid to the hijackers.

Above anything else, it was Jaswant Singh’s flip-flop on the mole in the Narasimha Rao’s PMO revelation that became the albatross around his neck. He had to resort to a lot of linguistic jugglery to come out of this mole morass. In the Line of Fire Author: Pervez Musharraf This memoir of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf set a new precedent of a serving ruler of a country writing his/her version of the events while still being in power. In the year that saw allegations and counter allegations fly thick and fast between Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf over the role of Pakistan Army in the Kargil war, the memoir was an attempt by the General to prefabricate the judgement of history in his favour.

In an ingenious masterstroke, Pervez Musharraf decided to interpret Kargil as a splendid victory for the Pakistan Army. Next, he spilled the beans about Pakistan getting American bounty by handing over captured Taliban and al-Qaeda to US. This was to be read as another benefit that had accrued to Pakistan by its decision to side with America in its war on terror. Finally, to prove himself a visionary, he proposed a four-phase solution to the Kashmir issue.

Whether Musharraf was successful in leading his countrymen to believe his version of the Kargil story or not, he did succeed in confusing the readers and writers about the genre of ‘In the line of Fire’: Whether to put it into fiction or non-fiction category. Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal termed the memoir as stranger than fiction.