Out of Print Author Series: Tanuj
Solanki
Interviewed by editor, Ram Sadasiv
OofP: Hi, we’re here with Tanuj Solanki,
author of Neon Noon, published by
HarperCollins India. I read the novel in galleys and I must admit that I got a
little chill seeing that watermark on every page. Congratulations. How does it
feel to be able to ‘assert the moral right to be identified as the author of
this work’?
TS: Well, it’s complicated. I take your question as
‘what does it mean to have a first book out’, and to that I have a not-so-sunny
answer. There is of course the initial excitement, and that stupid moment when
you hold it in your hands and are on the verge of crying; but then, a month or
so later, your joy begins to diminish and after a point you even start getting
bored by the mere sight of it. Compared to the day the book comes out, I now
believe that the day its joys expire (for the writer) is the truer landmark moment. You confront the fact
that your desire to create is enormous, that you won’t be satisfied with this
one alone, that a single book won’t solve you, that if you are writing for tiny
redemptions then those redemptions have to be had again and again and again,
that you are condemned to grapple with what it is to be a human being forever,
that you will continue to deal with the world in sentences, that you will have
to understand dawns and dusks and mountains and oceans and great plastic
hoardings and money and Muzaffarnagar and geopolitics and climate change as
sentences, that your back will hurt and your neck will hurt and your eyes will
hurt but you will keep at it, that something good will get made only after it
has swallowed a previously unaccounted part of what makes you you, et cetera.
Each time I look at Neon Noon on my
bookshelf now, it as a sign telling me that ‘there are no options.’ It’s bloody
terrifying, and so, yes, it’s a thing of horror to have a first book out and
then get past it.
OofP: It’s always good to see your friends
succeed, and you have certainly been a good friend to the magazine over the
years. To me, one of the most edifying things has being able to watch your
voice grow, and to see how some of the more fragmentary material that
previously appeared in Out of Print has been pulled
together into a coherent whole. The first piece of yours that we published,
Sentatoms, in March of 2013 [http://www.outofprintmagazine.co.in/archive/march-2013-issue/tanuj-solanki_sentatoms.html],
appears largely intact in Neon Noon
as ‘Flashback to Nepal Holiday’. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis
of that chapter and where it fit into the composition of the book?
TS: The project that became Neon Noon started with Sentatoms. I was in Nepal, with the woman I
was romantically involved with. It was a strange time because we both knew that
our relationship was going to end soon after the trip was over. But the inertia
of our love was making it difficult for us to say anything conclusive to each
other. (The French have written good novels about this excruciating phase, I’m
told.) Anyway, I wanted to make a memorial out of this pathetic period of my
life, and so I started writing about each day in a notebook, assuming fictional
replicas of the two of us; although I was also often hoping that she (the real
one) will open that notebook and see the beauty of the sentences and be seduced
and fall in love with me all over again (which didn’t happen). I was reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy on my Kindle in those days, and
it’s a bloody efficient book to read if you are trekking in the Himalayas and
desirous of writing about the mountains. I wouldn’t have used the words panniered and packsaddled and ecru and buttes in Sentatoms had I not been encountering
them at the same time in the McCarthy book. Even the generous spitting in
Sentatoms was a derivation from the McCarthy novel – people spit a lot in that
one. I don’t know why I felt that I could use the grimness of that
super-violent novel to inspire the bourgeouis grimness in my notes. But this
template persisted even as I wrote on after Nepal, after Sentatoms.
Initially, there was more in the
notes that later became Sentatoms. But I culled a lot before submitting it to
you. Sadly, I’ve lost those sentences. Losing a sentence is like losing a
reality, right? Then some sentences were edited out of the final draft that was
Flashback to Nepal Holiday, but I still have them stored. I think a writer
should maintain a repository of unused sentences. They didn’t fit
aesthetcically, so what? They were something when they were.
OofP: In several places in Neon Noon you name drop Roberto Bolaño,
and in the opening chapter, ‘I never think of those two nights’, you identify
him as one of ‘the graveyard writers’, continuing:
‘I love their writing, T said with a flourish of his hands. The
spontaneity. Sometimes I feel they create the illusion, the illusion that they
are not concerned with the demands of the narrative, that they are just
rambling – recording events and conversations. But you can’t miss the sense of
doom in each sentence. The story always reaches a precipice from where
everything is hurled. And down it all comes – all crash and burn.’
It is not represented in Neon Noon,
but I certainly felt the shadow of Bolaño in some of your earlier Out of
Print stories, particularly The
Sad Unknowability of Dilip Singh, published in the DNA Fiction issue in
July of 2014 [http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-dna-out-of-print-short-fiction-contest-the-sad-unknowability-of-dilip-singh-2005504].
Can you expand on the concept of ‘graveyard writers’, or more generally, what
Roberto Bolaño means to you?
TS: There are many levels on which reading Bolaño has
helped move towards becoming that thing called writer. At the level of the sentence: my education is that it is
possible to craft an incredibly affecting one even without possessing
astonishing powers of description or great wit in turning phrases. Simply
speaking, at the level of the sentence Bolaño taught me that it was okay if I
couldn’t become Nabokov. Heck, Bolaño taught me that it was okay if I couldn’t
become McCarthy (Bolaño was also a Blood
Meridian fan). This seems inconsequential, but Bolaño’s simplicity at the
level of the sentence hides massive wisdom, in my opinion. As a writer, you
develop an aesthetic around your limits, rather the highest common factor
sentence you have. If it takes too much for you to come up with a single
sentence as good as a Nabokov or a Salter, then you are not going to be able to
write novels in the same league as those guys. But there are other sentences,
other leagues.
Beyond the sentence, reading Bolaño
is an experience in getting comfortable with fragmentation. Also the confidence
of keeping plot points outside the novel. You see, it was through Bolaño that I
learnt that while the plot may be a series of causal linkages that provide the
figurative spine of a novel, it is not necessary for all of these linkages to
actually appear inside the novel.
Novels can have fragmented spines. Even short stories can have fragmented
spines. Have you read the short story Last
Evenings on Earth by Bolaño – the whole story is a big fat middle and he
keeps the ending invisible.
This simple wisdom—or authorly
brutality, depends on the way you look at it—is the very heart of all the
mystery that Bolaño’s novels are understood to possess, their dark pulsating
secret, so to speak. In Neon Noon,
you never know the reason why the protagonist split with Anne-Marie, even
though it is a part of the plot. I’m ok with it just as Bolaño might have been
okay with it. Although of course I may look silly using a Bolaño trick in a
novel that is far less political than any of his.
The term ‘graveyard writers’ refers
to doom and gloom writers, I guess. You read their work and you know that their
lives are difficult, that something very
heavy is very wrong in their
lives. And it all kind of implodes in the end of the story / novel. I’m sorry
to sound mystical, but to give you examples: Jeet Thayil is a graveyard writer,
Amitava Ghosh is not; David Foster Wallace is a graveyeard writer, Jonathan
Safran Foer is not; and there is no graveyard writer in Britain. Europe has
many, too many to count.
OofP: I got a big kick out of the last line
of the first chapter:
‘P.P.S. The girls in Sriram’s apartment were not call girls. They were
from his neighbouring flat.’
It made me laugh because that is
exactly the kind of detail that I will share with friends if we are discussing
one of my more ‘lightly’ fictionalised works. Your stories are generally told
in the first person, and the narrators of your stories are frequently writers
who share some of the details of your public biography and, in some cases, even
your initials. If it’s not too personal, could you share some of the
similarities and differences between you as a person and your narrators as
characters, and how you manage that distance and overlap for inspiration and
for creative effect?
TS: My narrator-protagonists are definitely more given
to melancholy than I am, especially in situations they share with me. They also
have less control over their lives than I have, which I guess is a derivative
of their being pathetic. They are sadder than I was in the same situations.
Their inner lives are more conflicted than mine. What they share with me is
their writerly self, that struggle to write the best sentence, that
self-consciousness about the quality of their own writing, of its powerlessness,
and so on. And yet they find, as I’ve found, that writing does change things
for them, that when reality is threatening all their subsistence fantasies it
is the writing that glazes over reality to make it manageable, that to write
something like ‘the flickers of neon defied the sky above and the sky was my
heart and my heart was drowning in the lights of the world’ is a massive relief
after you’ve actually had that same very exact experience looking at neon
lights blinking at twilight.
A friend used the word auto-fiction
for what I have done with Neon Noon, and
I’m very happy with that, because it retains the auto- of autobiography and
appends it with fiction. I think the word captures precisely what I did with
the book. The protagonist shares some life experiences with me, especially the
propelling ones, the ones that begin the action. I was similarly romantically
involved and I similarly broke up. So that’s common. After that it’s mostly
imagination, the fictive part taking over. Auto-fiction was not a limitation,
it was a choice. Debut writers are often talked of as limited to writing
autobiographically, in a euphemistically pejorative way. And here I was,
wanting to create a protagonist who was close to me. So I decided to invite that euphemistic-pejorative quip.
My debut novel is unabashedly auto-fiction – now for others to deal with that.
Auto-fiction, as it happens, is not
lacking a tradition of its own. The French writer Edouard Leve wrote some
beautiful books before his suicide. Karl Ove Knausgaard. W.G. Sebald perhaps had
more fictive elements in his auto-fiction. Teju Cole, a descendant of Sebald,
also wrote what could be called auto-fiction. Ben Lerner is more playful, more
humorous than I can ever be; and being a poet, he is exceptional at the level
of the sentence. But the two novels Lerner has written can be thought of as
auto-fiction.
OofP: The third part of the novel, starting
with the section conveniently titled Neon
Noon, is to me a significantly different voice than the first half of the
novel, and most of what we have previously published in Out of Print. I’m very
happy that you chose to share an excerpt from that section with us, published
in the September 2016 issue as Noon’s
Entry [link]. Can you tell us a little bit about the excerpt and how that
relates to the part of Neon Noon in
which it appears? My co-editors are particularly interested in what might be
construed as the heroism in the character’s positioning with respect to the
women prostitutes in the excerpt.
TS: (I hope by ‘conveniently titled’ you don’t mean
‘badly titled’). Thank you for calling it ‘heroism’, though it was more like
writerly duty. My protagonist is on sex trip. So, in his inner life, is he
going to be politically correct? Shouldn’t he be using what are called vile
expressions in his mind? He should, and that shouldn’t be surprising. A very
juvenline review in a major newspaper wondered how the Pattaya sections will be seen
by feminists. I was like—come on! I’m a feminist, but I can’t give away
verisimilitude for political correctedness. In fact, what is really surprising
is the tenderness that this protagonist shows in certain moments, the humanity
he lets show, even if accidentally. The more evolved reviewers have found the
book to have a great sensitivity towards the women who drive this book, and I
find that observation to be so gratifying. I did a decent job with the
positioning with respect to the prostitutes, I think: my protagonist was
lustful, regretful, loving, tender, angry, confused. What he was not was an
evil person.
Noon is one of the many prostitutes
he encounters in Pattaya. And since her name appears in the title, you can
guess that she is the most important. The excerpt you are publishing is a pivotal
one in the novel—it is, as the name suggests, of Noon’s entry. The
protagonist-narrator sees something different in her—perhaps it is the very
plainness of her appearance that contrasts with the pomp and glitter all around
him. (In fact, immediately after this passage, he moans about not being able to
describe Noon’s entry better). I also introduce the cast at Marie Bar Beer,
where Noon works. Some of these characters will return at a later stage in the
novel.
The excerpt gives an idea of the
kind of writing the novel contains—not everything relates directly to the
story, there is atmosphere, then there is the awkwardness of human interaction,
and so on.
OofP: Neon
Noon is filled with the idea of love, but the reality of love in the novel
is less clear:
‘We kissed not like two people in love, but like two people in love with
the possibility of love’
Having read Neon Noon, how are
we supposed to feel about the (im)possibility of love?
TS: Romantic love is a subsistence fantasy, we need
it. But it comes with the same caveat that all fantasies come with: the actualization
in reality can be a thing of horror. If you have been ‘lucky’ enough to
actually spend some domestic time with someone you really love, you also know
how stupid the whole thing becomes if you keep using the vocabulary of—let’s
call it—‘high love’. Love has a half life as soon as you domesticate it and fix
your gaze on it. Because to have love manifested as daily life is to make it
lose its own sense of possiblity.
The protagonist’s and Noon’s
love—if it is love—is a thing of beauty, because it ends precisely at the
height of its possibility. Any real manifestation after the point I left it off
with will be a disappointment to either or both of them. I wanted them both to
be remain truly happy forever, forever floating in beauteous possiblities.
Anyway, to come back to love’s
difficulties: I claim that the tension between domestic life and love might be
a derivation of what sort of work qualifies as economically viable in any age
or time. For today’s bourgeousie across the word, corporate work cultures makes
love’s quotidian actualization very difficult. It needs other notions and
systems to survive. In other words, love needs unglamorous clutches, and there
is no turning away from that fact. Thankfully, there are some.
Friendship is a much more flexible
notion, more suited to reality than fantasies. Marriage is a solid system too,
I think, a truly timeless social system. It can be unforgiving, yes, but it at least attempts to make certain
things (like infidelity) criminal, things that are necessary for love’s
functioning. It at least attempts to provide a workable template for a love
relationship.
