Bibliofile

It’s a Top Ten of an unusual kind. The Book magazine in the US recently conducted a ballot among prize-winning authors, artists and book experts asking them to rank their favourite fictional characters from the last century. Jay Gatsby, the social climber from The Great Gatsby, emerged at the top of 100 best characters in fiction since 1900. Others in the top 10 in ranking order: Holden Caulfield, prep school dropout from the Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger; Humbert Humbert, the licentious professor in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s ad canvasser from Ulysses; Rabbit Angstrom, the disappointed ex-high school basketball star from John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; the legendary Sherlock Holmes; Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird; Molly Bloom, again from Ulysses; Stephen Dedalus, yet another character created by James Joyce; and failing socialite Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Who is yours?

But there’s at least one author who has trouble remembering his own characters. And what can you expect when his sprawling 1,350-page novel covers an even more monumental cast of four extended families and scores of minor ones? So it happened that when an eager Rajkamal Jha confronted Vikram Seth at the literary festival with the intellectual dilemmas about a guy called Amit Chatterjee, the jet-lagged Vikram wondered for a bewildered minute or two if he could possibly have meant Amit Chaudhuri. It was close enough: like Amit Chaudhuri, Vikram’s Amit in A Suitable Boy also writes poetry in English and is pilloried by an indignant reader who demands to know why he can’t write in his own mother-tongue, Bengali.