Anjali Joseph 

Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne, and written for the Times of India in Bombay. She was commissioning editor of ELLE India. Saraswati Park, her first novel, was published in 2010. It won the Betty Trask Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was joint winner of India’s Vodafone Crossword Book Award for Fiction, as well as being shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Hindu Literary Prize. Another Country, her second novel, was published in 2012 and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Thank you for coming here this afternoon

I’ve been thinking about literary events, and the business of meeting writers, and why I feel slightly strange about it. It can be great, but it might also be strangely disappointing. For example, there’s an Indian writer, Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose work I love – I’ve read all his books several times and I think he’s wonderful. But I’ve never gone to hear him read or speak. In a way, I want to. In another way, I feel he and I already have the perfect literary relationship: he writes his books, and I read them.

A while ago, a writer friend told me to read a story by Henry James called ‘The Private Life’. It’s sort of a supernatural story, though it’s not frightening as much as illuminating. In the story, a group of people from London are on holiday in a Swiss mountain resort. They include an actress, her husband, an actor, his wife, and a famous writer. The writer is a very famous writer, and the narrator of the story admires his work, but for some reason although he’s very pleasant, he’s just not particularly interesting or brilliant to talk to. One evening the narrator of the story goes to the writer’s room to look for a new scene of a play that he’s promised to read aloud to everyone. The writer is downstairs talking to the rest of the group. But when the narrator goes into his room, he sees this hunched figure sitting at the writer’s desk, writing in the dark. He realises that the writer is actually two people, and he tells the actress, speaking of the writer: “One goes out, the other stays at home. One is the genius, the other’s the bourgeois, and it’s only the bourgeois whom we personally know.” So maybe my instinct about not trying to meet some of my favourite writers is a good instinct. Maybe you only rarely, if ever, meet the writer – maybe you just meet the second-best self that the writer sends out to talk to people.

In August this year I was in India and a friend of mine, who’s a bit younger than me, wanted to go to this literary event one evening. I said I’d go with her. The event was supposed to be a discussion about Tukaram, a 17th century poet from western India, whose work I’ve read in translation – he’s a very popular folk poet. There were two university professors who were going to talk for a little while and then there were supposed to be questions. But the university professors talked for much longer than they said they would, and it wasn’t very interesting, because they just kept saying that the poet was a very good poet, but they couldn’t explain why. I began to feel extremely bored, and then quite angry. Meanwhile, my friend was very calm because she was sitting next to me and texting everyone she knew, which is what most of the rest of the audience was also doing.

The theme for this year’s writer’s program is ‘breath’, and it occurred to me that boredom is to inspiration what exhalation is to inhalation. By this I mean that you can’t have one without the other. Inspiration sounds more glamorous than boredom, but both are probably necessary in order to make something creative. But people tend to assume boredom or irritation are a mistake. I don’t think that’s so. A lot of artistic movements begin with exasperation. For example, the French New Wave film makers of the 1960s started by writing long articles about why the films that were being made at the time were useless and boring, and then they started making their own films. If the young film makers had just sat through the boring films, and maybe been able to text their friends during them, and if they just assumed that culture is supposed to be boring, and that their real lives are something else that goes on outside, then we wouldn’t have New Wave cinema.