Inscrutable Success

The most obvious question is then, to what does it owe its popularity? 8216;8216;I have no idea, none at all. If I had the formula for its success, don8217;t you think I would have replicated it with all my other novels?8217;8217; asks Mathur. True, but surely he had tried to balance every obscure equation in sight to find it, albeit without fruit. 8216;8216;Maybe it had something to do with the fact that going abroad and being part of an alien culture is something so many people can identify with,8217;8217; says Mathur, adding, 8216;8216;also I find its continued audience comes through successive batches of young people, who discover the book through recommendations of those who have read it.8217;8217; That and the fact that the book is relatively inexpensive at Rs 95 and is quite devoid of sententious, starchy prose, thereby making it an easy read, probably helps. Mathur tells of a time when he met Sunil Gavaskar at a function: 8216;8216;He told me that his son Rohan enjoyed the book so much he insisted his father read it.8217;8217;

The book is about Gopal, scion to a hair-oil empire in Jajau a fictitious town in Madhya Pradesh heading toward America to acquire a degree in Chemical Engineering, presumably to make more effective hair-oil. His encounters with Americans, both hybrid and hyphenated, and the subsequent changes in his perspective, provide the grist for most of the novel. Written in the voice of a person not totally clued into either the language or its references, the humour is entirely situational. For instance, at Immigration, the greeting, 8216;8216;How8217;s it going?8217;8217; inspires Gopal to expound for 10 minutes on the problems and hopes of the family business in Jajau town.

8216;8216;I found it very funny and enjoyed reading the strange English,8217;8217; says Shalini Rose, manager of the popular store Bookworm in New Delhi. She claims that the book is one of their longest-running bestsellers: 8216;8216;We sell, on an average, one a day.8217;8217; This startling figure is mirrored almost exactly by Fact and Fiction, another New Delhi bookstore, which sells around 25 copies a month. In fact, all the bookstores this correspondent contacted had much the same tale to tell, the south being no exception. Higgenbothams in Bangalore reported sales of around 250 copies a year. Looking at the demographic break-up of The Inscrutable Americans-reading public does not make the book8217;s success any less arcane. Young, old, middle-aged, in short, everyone or anyone.

Not everyone, however, is impressed. Ravi Vyas, a widely-known literary critic, says: 8216;8216;Literature in not an equal opportunity employer. Everyone has their standards and his work does not fit into mine.8217;8217; Others still decline to be named but express utter disbelief at the remarkably quiet success of the book. 8216;8216;The book is really quite ordinary, The God Of Small Things has sold about 100,000 copies in hardback but then it has won the Booker, these statistics come as a surprise to me,8217;8217; says one.

Apply the most rigorous commercial parameters and the book remains steadfastly a success. What remain obscure, though, are the reasons for it being so. Having had very little by way of a publicity stratagem or favourable reviews to ingratiate itself into the genre of the good book, it instead continues to choose playing possum even while freshly printed copies make their insidious way into your unsuspecting collection.