The World Is Not Enough

Peter Carey, the steel-nibbed kookaburra, affirms that there8217;s a whole world out there beyond England and America. 8220;It8217;s to do with finding your own voice. Australia didn8217;t really have much of a voice at first. But now there are so many strong, interesting ones.8221;

Carey, a Booker winner twice over, tells the rough, tough stories of convict seed, the blood price it pays, its conflict with oppressive English colonial authority. 8220;Australia8217;s big stories are about loss and death. In America they went west to get wealthy. In Australia, they went west and died. But we don8217;t call our heroes 8216;losers8217;. We call them 8216;battlers8217;, because the majority of Australians identify with the poor and the rural underclass8221;.

An Australian author Carey admires for her unique voice is Helen Gardner, who says, 8220;I write to save myself.8221; She created a sensation in 1977 with her novel Monkey Grip not seen on Indian bookshelves. It8217;s a novel about a contemporary Australian woman, drug taking and rock and roll. Garner told the press on her home turf, 8220;I never had a sense of Australian literature back then.8221; Garner continues to shock Australians with her hard-hitting truthful voices that dare to say the unsaid. Her recent book The Feel of Steel 2001 wrote of steel cities can you imagine a shocker of a contemporary Indian novel set in Bhilai, Asansol or Durg?. Children, troubled women, Antarctica 8212; there8217;s nothing Garner doesn8217;t feel entitled as a modern author to investigate. And we8217;ve yet to read her!

India had a chance, though, to get acquainted at Kim Scott, at a recent litfest. Scott, a descendant of the Noongar people who lived along the south coast of Western Australia, was born in Perth in 1957. His two novels, True Country and Benang, the latter, much awarded, deal with issues of desi identity and history read, impact of colonialisation. Worth watching out for!

Equally strong as a modern literary voice, but from a civilisation now on the backfoot, is Turkish author Orham Pamuk. His controversial novel, The Black Book, elevated him to literary Grand Turk in 1990, while his recent book, My Name Is Red, is an esoteric period best-seller last matched in global popularity by Umberto Eco8217;s medieval monastic The Name of the Rose. Red is set in the world of miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire. It8217;s a sophisticated murder mystery combined with a period recreation that is as full of enchantment and subtlety as a Safavid muraqqa. Pamuk is hailed as the Voice of Turkey, much as Naguib Mahfouz is celebrated as the modern literary articulator of Egypt.

What is most interesting though, is that that both Australian Peter Carey and Turk Orham Pamuk adore William Faulkner, the great American Voice, celebrated for giving rich voices to the poor read, unheard. Dialogue, detail, characterisation and a very grown-up wit that sees everything, understands everything and knows how to say it well are the hallmarks of these brave new voices. And then there8217;s Israel to discover, and Japan Banana Yoshimoto for choice8230; we Indians have lots to connect up with, a Gumpian box of chocolates!