It’s a very isolated place: Rana Dasgupta

Let’s face it: Where there’s a Bollywood star, there’s bound to be hype that follows. So it’s not surprising to see even book launches ‘Bollywoodised’ of late, with the presence of one or more film stars almost customary in the morning after’s photo-ops.

However, novelist Rana Dasgupta feels it doesn’t eventually help the book sales. “In Mumbai you have Bollywood stars available, in Delhi we don’t. The equivalent for us here would probably be either politicians, fashion designers or TV personalities. And that does happen a little bit…” he says, pausing. Then adds, “Book launches are good for the writer and the publishing industry, but I don’t think book launches have any impact on sales, even if the next day you saw a picture of some Bollywood star holding up a copy. What creates sales is reviews and word of mouth.”

Rana’s second novel Solo has just won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book: Europe and South Asia.

Ask him how important are awards to a writer, and he says, “Yes, of course it helps in general, because the book market is extremely crowded and to the outside world the books that people generally hear about are the ones that are singled out in some way — like everyone knows who won the Booker prize!” he exclaims.

Having taken four years to write Solo — a novel about the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a one hundred year old man from Bulgaria, Rana says, “Solo was an extremely intense, internal journey which is hard to communicate about. The real work of writing is very solitary and a private experience. You are essentially living in a fictional world which exists only because you’ve made it up — there’s no one else living in that world and so you can’t really talk about it to anyone. So, until you finish the book, it’s a very isolated place.”

So, what’s next on the anvil? “Now, I’m writing a book about
Delhi, interviewing lots of people for it, some known, many unknown,” reveals Rana. “The closest model for it would be (VS) Naipaul’s books. It is just about a certain quest to understand something about the essence of the city and what is driving it and who its people are,” he ends.