Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers Book

A four-point guide to enjoying Bookless in Baghdad:

1. Skip the essays In Defence of the Bollywood Novel, A Novel of Collisions and Art for Heart's Sake. These are essentially endorsements for his own books. Worse, they are pompous, self-indulgent, and annoyingly serious in tone. Tharoor's trademark wit dries up when he starts talking himself and his books up.

Exhibit A:I have always believed that, as the very word 'novel' suggests, there must be something new or innovative about every novel one sets out to write; otherwise what would be the point? (This from a self-professed devotee of Wodehouse, that delightful writer who published roughly the same novel every year*)

Exhibit B:As a writer, I had always believed that the way I tell a story is as important to me as the story itself. The manner in which the narrative unfolds is as…OH GOD! PLEASE STOP, SHASHI! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET'S MOVE ON!!!


2. Any paragraph in which one comes upon the name of any of his books (The Great Indian Novel, Riot, Show Business, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond) should be immediately skipped for the next. It is likely to contain more self-indulgent tripe.


3. Tharoor's reflections on other writers are a delight. His ode to Wodehouse is replete with many of the Master's celebrated turns of phrase ("She had more curves than a scenic railway"; "her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver's trousers"; "I turned him down like a bedspread"; and the much-quoted "if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."), but it also contains the slightly self-conscious grief of the adolescent worshipper:

…his death still came as a shock. Three decades earlier, Wodehouse had reacted to the passing of his stepdaughter, Leonora, with the numbed words: "I thought she was immortal." I had thought Wodehouse was immortal too, and I felt the bereavement keenly.

He offers a measured, if trenchant, critique of R. K. Narayan:

Like Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects… At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock- cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.

Other writers featured include Pushkin, Neruda, Naipaul, Le Carré, Churchill, and Rushdie, among others. This section of the book, titled Reconsiderations, makes the book.



4. The rest of the book blows hot and cold. Tharoor tackles the Islamophobic, right-wing faction among Rushdie's supporters in the wake of the fatwa, pays a fitting homage to Orwell by visiting a Spanish Civil War outpost for a cup of coffee, and wonders whether Westerners sometimes willingly indulge in "the pornography of povery". His felicity of language ensures that even the unremarkable among his essays make for breezy reading.

I realize now that my review has unintentionally transformed halfway from a guide to a commentary. For some reason, it makes me more sympathetic towards Tharoor. He's a good 'un.

*As Wodehouse immortally remarked in the introduction to Summer Lightning:
A certain critic -- for such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.