First Impressions Of Hari Kunzru

One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust that was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air. It falls on a rider who is making slow progress through the ravines that score the plains south of the mountains, drying his throat, filming his clothes, clogging the pores of his pink perspiring English face. His name is Ronald Forrester, and dust is his specialty. Or rather, his specialty is fighting dust. In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke: Forrester the forester. Once or twice he tried to explain it to his Indian subordinates in the Department, but they failed to see the humor. They assumed the name came with the job. Forester Sahib. Like Engineer Sahib, or Mr. Judge.’’

So begins the debut novel of the year. Hari Kunzru, thirtysomething, created a huge splash last year when an unfinished draft of The Impressionist fetched a million dollars. Now the book is ready for release. And while Penguin has posted a 3000-word extract about Forrester’s strange, and surely significant, meeting with a young Indian woman on its website, it gives little away of the story. Nor does it give enough away to answer that awkward question novelists of Indian origin wooed by leading publishers are called to answer: did they, did they actually dare to exoticise India? Or that other query: will The Impressionist match up to Zadie Smith’s multicultural romp White Teeth, with which his publishers are inclined to draw parallels?

From Salinger, With Sadness

Bad, bad news for J.D. Salinger fans. Though why it should come as a disappointment is in itself surprising. It’s been ages since the author of The Catcher in the Rye, which has given generations their favourite growing-up buddy, Holden Caulfield, intimated that fresh writings shall not be placed in the market. So when booksellers started taking orders for Hapworth 16, 1924 — based on a story about the Glass family that first appeared in The New Yorker in the 1960s — it was a trifle difficult not to blink in disbelief and wonder whether this most reclusive of writers was actually going to publish anything after four decades. So now comes news that in fact the novella will not hit the bookshops later this year. And Amazon.com has dutifully stopped selling it.

But disappointment has also given way to speculation. Many are now asking if Salinger chickened out because he thought the novella would not be well-received by critics, never mind the thousands of fans who would have settled for any scraps he may have offered.

Vishnu Gets Another Chance

His book, The Death of Vishnu, may have got a frosty reception in his native land last year, but Manil Suri is making it to one award shortlist after another. His brush with the Booker Prize was of course limited to a mention on the longlist a few months ago, which incidentally was made public for the first time ever. Now he finds mention alongside Jonathan Franzen in the shortlist for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as well as for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for a first fiction.

Franzen, for his part, seems to have become a permanent fixture for all book prizes. But why not. The Corrections remains the only dazzling work of fiction to have been published in recent months.