A change of air from Paris

I read recently in an article in Le Monde (which I haven’t been able to recover since) that the French find the classification of Anglo-Saxon literature almost ridiculous and it might be said rightly so. The author of the piece asked if one could imagine the French having special prizes or literary categories that classified Tahar Ben Jelloun as a Moroccan writer the way the UK so easily classifies Hari Kunzru as an Indian one. Applied to literature in French the idea is absurd. Eliette Abécassis might write about Israel, Yann Apperry might write about America but their books are treated quite rightly as part of the French canon and awarded their merits as such.

The United States and the UK have almost made an industry of the classification of books. If we must all submit to the Starbucks era nomenclature (decaf mocha, skim soy, no sugar, grande please) then I want to forward the idea that we should classify the book and the not the author. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a novel in verse sent in California. The author splits time between the UK and India. Must we apply our coarse perspective of Indian to what is a beautiful book that salutes Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin? Our perspective of Indian is too coarse to classify Indian cuisine even in a city like Paris which doesn’t begin to boast a range of Indian cuisine. In a city like London or New York the cuisine is shamefully better classified than the literature.

But why kvetch? (You will notice that since I have been subjected to this classification myself my kvetching too is circumscribed by this identity) Who has escaped this after all? Not the Nigerians, not the Eastern Europeans, not the South Americans. One is lucky if one can get in a mention of the name of the country instead of an entire region. But does anyone think of Paul Auster as a Jewish writer? For that matter, despite several novels dealing with very Jewish themes we don’t think of Philip Roth as ever being only a Jewish writer. We think of him as being first and foremost an American writer, the American writer. I am naïve enough to hope that it is just a matter of time and good writing. If there are enough books from India that are different enough we will cease to be treated like cuisine and instead be treated like holiday destinations (already much more specific: Kerala, Rajasthan, South, North, mountain, beach). And finally one day the classification would have become minute enough, cellular enough to cease to make any sense. Amitav Ghosh will then remain in the memory as a writer. Period.

What we risk losing, and it is not little, is a precious book once too often. A writer of a nationality that is not quite à la mode. Never mind that the book is universal, the writing crisp, the story our own in the way true art always belongs first and foremost to the viewer. On this visit to Paris I’ve recently read one such book in French by Ornela Vorpsi. Vorpsi grew up in Albania, moved to Italy at 22 and learnt Italian. She wrote her novel in Italian but was living in France and was published here in translation before the release of the novel in Italy (upcoming September 2005, Einaudi). It turns out that while various European publishers are busy having the novel translated into their respective languages America thinks that no one is interested in Albania! If we continue our classification of literature along these lines we can be sure that ever fewer people will be interested in ever fewer countries. These prophecies risk self-fulfillment partly because of the marketing within the industry which relies heavily on classification.

Till I moved to the United States in 1991 I don’t think I was much aware of the nationality of any writer I read. Often the stories themselves were set in certain places and the back cover gave away information. But I never thought while reading a love story by Carlos Fuentes that he was Mexican. I couldn’t escape thinking that Kundera was Czech but it was because his novels grappled actively with the state of the regime. It was always the interior of the novel that determined how I thought of it and how I classified it. In that sense it was organic, holistic, and most likely a nomenclature that would have sat well with the author himself or herself.

Thematic classifications of novels of course do exist. One hears of coming-of-age novels, family sagas, etc. This kind of classification is relatively defunct outside of the academic world; most people walking into a bookstore to browse seem to read not by theme but by ethnicity (excluding genre fiction). Last year I picked up three books that dealt with writing by Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, and Marguerite Duras. I wanted expressly at the time to read about writing since I am a writer. It was a sort of self-assigned homework I’d given myself qua writer and this informed my intention. Never mind the nationalities of the authors, in the end, even the theme itself faded in face of chapters that were powerful and I found myself simply a reader. A reader qua reader reading these books. And I was liberated.

In the end books are here to set us free. By binding them to our limited visions of the day, to fad, trends, columns and categories it is not so much the books but ourselves that we are imprisoning.