Latest news with #TheElsewhereans
The Hindu
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Jeet Thayil in conversation with Jerry Pinto on his new book The Elsewhereans
Jeet Thayil's new work, The Elsewhereans (published by Fourth Estate), defies genre, forcing readers to reconsider everything they think they know about literary strategies. The subtitle calls it a documentary novel but it is biography, autobiography, family history, ghost story, travelogue, ityaadi. We meet Ammu and George in a village in Kerala and travel with and without them to Mumbai, Hanoi, Saigon, Hong Kong and Paris. On this periplus, ghosts surface and evanesce, skeletons tumble out of closets, one of which smiles at us from the cover. At the heart of this magnificent and compelling mélange, the narrator, Jeet lui-meme, forces us to decide: is this an unreliable narrator? In my opinion, there is no such thing as an unreliable narrator because there are no reliable narrators; there are only compelling narrators and boring ones. Jeet is a compelling storyteller, descended from an ancient line of mariners — water plays an important role in this story. His first commitment will be to the story and so should ours be. I believe that a family story that leaves the family happy will be boring; the real stories are the ones we hold close to our chests, the family's asps. (The more the writer bleeds, the better it reads.) To bring these stories out into the world, to talk about the failures and the addictions, the desires and the disappointments is to remind all of us that every family is a work in progress. Perhaps the first and most natural question to ask the author who turns his hand with elegance and strength to the forms of poetry, the novel and the anthology is about the risk a genre-agnostic book takes in a world obsessed with categories. Excerpts from an email interview: Q: This genre-shifting is an enormous risk in a world of categories. Did it happen organically or was it planned? A: It was very much an organic process. I started with a book that was twice the size, about 400 pages or more. Which might have been some form of Proustian anxiety, the obsessive compulsive need to record every passing digression. Then, in a moment of clarity, I jettisoned everything that didn't fit the single and singular story being told — and ended up with a leaner, tighter, better manuscript. The form revealed itself three or four years into the writing. It might have been the most crucial stage of the whole process, and the most difficult. Q: But at the heart of this magnificent mélange is Jeet Thayil telling us a story so close to him that we sense the vulnerability of the storyteller. Could you talk a little about the psychic cost of such writing? A: Since my parents are a part of the story, I had to ask their permission. It was only right. My mother gave her permission reluctantly, but there was never any question that she would refuse. She'd probably agree wholeheartedly with the epigraph that begins the book: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.' I guess the psychic cost is one every writer must confront: by telling your story, which is also the story of the people you have known, are you usurping or co-opting their voices? If there's a sense of guilt, a residual guilt, it is offset by a sense of duty. That it is your job to tell the story however the chips may fall. Q: As readers, we encounter a series of enigmatic and intriguing women: Ammu, Nguyen Phuc Chau, Da Nang, Lijia, Chachiamma, a dead wife, M. We half recognise these women from our own histories and yet they are completely new. Perhaps this question is about the choice of characters populating the book. A: It started with Ammu, and the novel ends with her. She died in January, at which point I knew it was time to bring this novel to a close. It was always going to be her story. Though I didn't realise until I saw your question that she is only one among half-a-dozen compelling women characters, and that the women own the book. This wasn't planned, but it seems absolute and inevitable. I come from a long line of strong women. There's no way to tell this story without acknowledging and honouring them. Q: The poet and the novelist work together here. For me, this is about the lapidary care with which conversations are constructed or events outlined. Would you like to say something about the interaction between these selves? A: It isn't always possible to separate those selves. If you practise, or embody, both disciplines, it's difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. In my case, and in yours, the poet and the novelist bleed into each other. Which is the way it should be. Genres or labels are for book shops. If you are both those things, how do you separate? And more to the point, why should you separate? If the point of a novel is to tell a story only you can tell, why would you discriminate between your separate yet adjacent selves? Q: You take for granted — and expect perhaps your reader to also take for granted — the osmosis between the world of the dead and the living. Our generation, I believe, was trained to be rational. Was this something you struggled with? A: We have been trained to be rational. We are told to believe half of what we see and none of what we hear. And at this point, in the age of AI, we can't believe much of what we see, either. I can't say I've ever struggled with the question of what is rational and what isn't. The rational world would have us endorse the viewpoint that when the dead die, they cease to exist. And yet, and yet. I've never had much doubt about where the dead go. I know they are among us, unable to fully be here or to fully leave. In that sense, the difference between the world of the dead and the world of the living is nothing more than a veil. All we have to do is look past the veil. It's a way of seeing, of believing in the world that lies beyond the waking world. Or to quote from The Elsewhereans: 'This is where the dead go. To torment us in our dreams. They have nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.' Q: Is 'Elsewhereanism' an inheritance? Or is it a choice? A: I'd say it's a state of being, and in that sense, it's an inheritance. But in every other way, it's an ongoing choice. Is it possible to live in the modern world and be of one place? Who can answer with one word the question, 'Where are you from?' Even if you've never left your place of birth, you may feel like a stranger at home. You may choose to believe that your hometown is wherever you happen to be. You are not of single origin, like a coffee varietal. You are from multiple places. You contain multitudes. Home is where you lay your hat. The interviewer is a poet and novelist.
Hindustan Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Home run: Wknd sits down with Jeet Thayil to talk about his deeply personal new book
It's a 'conundrum of a novel', says Jeet Thayil, of his new book, The Elsewhereans. It begins with his father, the journalist TJS George, flying from Bombay to Cochin in the 1950s, to visit Ammu George, a teacher he is set to marry. Against convention, he wants to privately meet her once before the wedding. The book takes off from there, merging fact and fiction, memoir, travelogue and supernatural saga in mind-bending ways. The reader isn't meant to know which is which. 'I want you to wonder… to keep guessing,' Thayil says. Fragments of postcards, letters and photographs add to the sense of confusion. A few years on, he enters the tale, born in the backwaters of Kerala, followed by his sister Sheba Thayil (who would also go on to be a journalist and writer). The family would move from Bombay to Bihar, then Hong Kong and New York; the novel unfolds also in Vietnam, France, Germany and the UK. As it traces his teen years, when he 'lived to defy and dismay my father', and builds itself around his deep love for his mother, what emerges is Thayil's most personal novel since The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017; a pacy, autobiographical work that also married memory and fiction). Incidentally, in 2013, Thayil became the first Indian author to win the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, for his debut novel, Narcopolis, about opium, Mumbai and one man's struggles with drugs. (The novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.) 'This is a story about a family of Indians out in the world,' says Thayil, 65. Excerpts from an interview. * Where did the idea for The Elsewhereans come from? This is material I've been saving, or hoarding, all my life; material that never found its correct form. The novel — discrete stories, some written in the third person, some in the first, set in different eras, on different continents — assumed its true shape only towards the end of the writing. Some of those stories were gratifying to relate. For example, the story about my father starting AsiaWeek in Hong Kong. They sold a majority stake to Reader's Digest, which sold the shares on to Time, and then Time eventually shut AsiaWeek down. This is a story only journalists in Asia, Europe, America and India knew about, that AsiaWeek was a magazine run by Asians for Asians, in the '70s, and that it was killed by Time… Like that story, there are others that illuminate forgotten corners of history. * This is also a book about your difficult relationship with your father…. For most of my teens, I tried to be the opposite of what he wanted me to be. My father (now 97) is gifted in many ways, but not so much when it comes to the minutiae of fatherhood. He comes from a long line of conservative Malayali Syrian Christian men for whom parenting is about distance, punishment and anger. But if you don't have a relationship where you're also a friend to your children, you miss out on a lot. The child may end up self-destructive or recalcitrant. For a long time, I wanted to upend his image of himself by becoming the black sheep, by doing things that would have made any parent upset. I think of it now as a waste of time, but… that's how it was. I don't think I got over that very childish way of dealing with myself, my parents, and the world until my 40s. I was living in New York, working for a newspaper, trying to get by, and I realised it takes so much space in one's head to define oneself in opposition to a single person or idea. I realised it just wasn't worth it. It seems like a basic lesson, but it took me ages to get there. * Your love for your mother forms the sort of nucleus of this book. She was always my biggest champion. And yes, she is the moral centre of this book. Her story begins the narrative and her end ends it. In terms of our financial lives, if it weren't for my mother, I wouldn't be writing novels. I'd be working, earning a living, trying to pay the rent. She was the one who, right from the beginning, invested small amounts of my father's earnings. My father had very little sense of money as a living quantity. She always did. Which is why I can afford to spend the day writing a poem or a song. In that sense, I suppose I owe her everything. I wanted to chronicle her life in The Elsewhereans. A life can be remarkable, but unless you put it down, unless you record it in some way — not necessarily in the form of a novel, but in some way — what's the point? All those extraordinary moments are gone. * Her death (six months ago; aged 90) was an emotional trigger to the ending of the book… Yes… I knew it was finished the moment she passed away. Obviously, I couldn't do anything for a while, but once I got back to work, I finished it very quickly. I rewrote portions, added the last few pages, and it just put a lock on the book for me. * Did the idea of a documentary novel, a blurring of truth and reality, make The Elsewhereans easier to write? At first, I thought it would be a work of non-fiction, but that would have made for a narrow narrative. One can't inhabit other people's heads and other people's lives in an immersive way unless one is writing fiction. At the same time, a number of elements here are factual, taken from life, with actual photographs, letters and documents. Which is why I think of it as a documentary novel. The point is, life isn't easily categorised. Life is open-ended. It doesn't have labels, and it doesn't have happy endings. I like the form of the documentary novel. I might do another in the same vein. * You suggest that we are all on a lifelong journey, never belonging to a place. And yet you capture how the world is turning to hate because of ideas such as nationality and race… As someone who began travelling at the age of eight, I've known for a while that all travellers are not equal. A traveller of colour understands this before they begin to understand cultures other than their own. It's more than the colonial-era hierarchy of the visa process. It's also a question of belonging. As the world becomes increasingly intolerant, it becomes increasingly intolerable. When divisions between nations and races deepen, you realise there are places you are not welcome. For me, the sense of being an outsider has always had an upside. It has sharpened my perception. * Are we all Elsewhereans then? All of us. There's a moment in the book that describes what it's like to feel like a foreigner in one's own house. Even if you've never left your hometown, you might feel as if the world around you has changed so much it doesn't feel like home anymore. * Given that it is set across 70 years and a dozen countries, what did the research for this book involve? I looked up accounts of the various time periods and places in which each chapter is set. I interviewed my parents over the course of about three years. That was a useful thing about moving to the family home in Bengaluru in 2018. I started work on this book in 2020. As soon as I knew I was going to write it, I began talking to my parents about the past. They remembered a lot of it, in striking detail. Then I looked at my dad's notebooks. He kept extensive notes of his years as a journalist. I went through a lot of material and asked both their permissions before I started to write. My mother may not have been very pleased with the idea, but there's no way she was going to say no, which is why the first epigraph in the book is Czeslaw Milosz: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.'
