Bibliofile

For those who hated Rushdie for daring to declare English as the strongest language in India, how’s this for evidence: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy will soon be out in Hindi. Diplomat writer Gopal Gandhi has been working away at the translation for over 18 months, and no wonder—Ek Achcha Ladka is 200 pages longer than the original 1,349-page tome.

Wonder if we should cheer or not? The Literary Review’s annual award for worst sex in literature is out and not an Indian name figures on the list. Either our Indo-Anglian writers are cravenly eschewing the subject or getting better at it. It’s hard to be original on a subject as old as Adam and Eve, but writers are getting more inventive by the year. From "pitching her tent on his north(!) pole" (prize-winner Christopher Hart in Rescue Me) to "jerking and threshing" inside her like "a rising salmon plunging home to spawn" (short-listed Wendy Perriam in From Dreams, Demons and Desires) to "pursuing sexual congress with his red chaise-lounge" (Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections), to comparing her "wet and warm down there" to a pizza, to the anti-climactic—"He’s climbing, he’s filling, he’s plugging...It’s over in minutes"—(Adele Parks in Game Over) it’s as James Herbert (also on the dreaded shortlist) writes in Once: "To hell with impossible."