The Word

AMITAVA KUMAR, Writer

A book that means a lot to you?
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. A pure assessment of power. How many books do you own? Five thousand, limited by the size of the bookshelves which, at great risk to my health, I put together myself.

Your favourite character from a book and, briefly, why?
Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. His desire to write, and his failure. Mr Biswas is me.

An author or genre you hate?
I’m torn between my dislike for the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and the dull realism of Rohinton Mistry.

Last book bought?
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.

Last book read?
VS Naipaul’s A Writer’s People.

A very overrated book?
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s — do you even remember the name of the book?

A book you wish you’d written?
When I think of the books that my friends have written, I often wish I had written them because I like those books, of course, but also because a part of me believes that if my friends can do it, I can too. Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana; Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread; Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World; Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return and Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut.

Your favorite genre?
A realist novel that reinvents the world.

A book you’ve always wanted to read but haven’t?
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

LAKSHMI INDRASIMHAN