'The Big Bookshelf' has the same people saying the same things

The Big Bookshelf
Edited by Sunil Sethi
Penguin Books/NDTV
240 pages
Rs350

Sunil Sethi has been anchoring the programme Just Books on NDTV for over six years now. The show focuses on interviews with writers and literary folks, along with book reviews and news. The Big Bookshelf collects together interviews with 30 people, from this programme, ranging from Javed Akhtar to Gunter Grass.

Before we go into the contents, a little calculation. The book is about 230 pages long, with a page for each writer’s photo and a page each for their introduction. That gives us about 5 pages for each interview on average, or 2,000 words. So, properly speaking, these are not complete interviews, but excerpts from interviews. In such a limited space, it isn’t possible to have a rambling interview, and the focus of the interviewer and the editor become paramount: Should they focus on the writer’s linguistic style, or his public life and scandals? Or ask questions about the plot and settings of their latest books?

Newspaper and magazine interviews in India all follow a template: talk about the writers’ public personas as defined by the Indian English press, and the subsection of their writing that is most popular among the hip “reading” crowd. In The Big Bookshelf, Sethi seems to have followed the same pattern. So, for example, Umberto Eco — author of many scholarly works, and of five novels, is asked only about The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. Salman Rushdie’s interview focuses on (a) the fatwa, and (b) The Enchantress Of Florence, his newest book at the time. And so on. Rarely if ever is the writing craft discussed. Sethi never comes across as a serious literary critic. The book ends up feeling like a collection of newspaper articles — not a huge problem, but a reader buying a complete book would expect to sink deeper into the interviews than one chancing upon an article in a paper.

Similar criteria extend to the choice of writers that are included here. Chetan Bhagat represents the brash young campus-lit set, while Ken Follett and Jeffrey Archer are the Western thriller writers. Everyone included here has had dozens of interviews published in the Indian media, saying much the same things they say here.

Sethi could have used the platform to introduce us to international writers who deserve more attention, or else Indian writers who are not darlings of the English press already. But not a single person here is a discovery for either the international media, or for the Indian public.

To be fair, there haven’t been too many books of this nature published in India so far. There is a tradition of long, in depth interviews of writers in magazines like The Paris Review, The Believer, and The New Yorker, some of which have been collected into books as well. But interviews in Indian magazines often lack depth. The malaise extends to interviewing in general — there are no specialist interviewers for the arts and culture.

Sethi’s work, and The Big Bookshelf is an effort to fill that space. More space for undiscovered gems, and more space per writer, would have turned this book into a must-have.