Literary spring in Lahore as Litfest kicks off

Lahore Literary Festival came to life the third year in a row yesterday. The three-day event kicked off with much excitement and anticipation. This year’s event seems to heading towards being bigger and better than before. The sessions are going to be made up of an international panel of over 100 speakers.

‘The Trials of Writing a First Novel’ featured debut writers Saba Imtiaz, Bilal Tanweer, Soniah Kamaland and Mahesh Rao. The session was moderated by Mohsin Hamid, who started by welcoming the audience and introducing the writers. Each of the four writers read an excerpt from their respective books and discussed their books generally, before the floor was opened for a question and answer session. The session gave a unique perspective to the audience as to what goes into the work of a first time author.

First off was Soniah Kamal who read from her book, An Isolated Incidence, which was nominated for the KLF French Embassy prize. The book is about a love story and families torn apart by the Kashmir conflict. It tells of hope and of the language of silence, which can speak more than words. The subject matter is very close to her heart as she hails from Srinagar.

“My father made me promise that I would write about Kashmir”, she said, “and I wanted to talk about man-made borders and conflicts which confine people and the problems it causes for families separated by these boundaries.”

Next to read was Bilal Tanweer from The Scatter Here Is Too Great. It was a book with different narrative voices, each with a story to tell about the city of Karachi. Even though his debut is an English novel, he writes in Urdu as well. In fact, Bilal fondly remembered Urdu literature as his starting point with Tilsm-e-Hoshruba and Umroo Ayyar as childhood readings. “Writing creatively for me is like being at play. You have to find your voice in the playground of writing.”

Saba Imtiaz entertained the audience immensely with her sharp and witty Karachi You’re Killing Me. The parallel she drew between Karachi’s CNG crisis and Lahore’s petrol crisis had the audience in stitches.

“People ask me with this tone of concern if the book I’ve written is about me,” she laughed. “When you write as a journalist people only care about the story, but when you write a book, you get asked all kinds of questions. But that never bothers me,” she said.

Mahesh Rao travelled from India and before writing his debut novel had worked not only as a lawyer but also as a bookseller. His novel, The Smoke Is Rising, is an “as ghastly as I could make it” take on the rapid urbanisation and the “land is everything” culture that seems to have pervaded in major cities in developing countries. The novel uses “Heritage Land, Asia’s largest amusement park being built in Mysore, to satirise the devil of development. “It’s very easy to mock something like Heritage Land,” he added thoughtfully, “but we can apply to this everything about the incessant need for development. Who wins and who loses? And even though we are obsessed with our history, maybe this obsession is because we don’t understand any of it.”

Asked about struggles faced by debut writers, Mahesh said, “Writing is the easy part, no one ever talks about the road to getting it published, especially the unremitting flood of rejections you have to face.” Saba disagreed with this, stating, “I wrote the first 10,000 words easily. The rest of the manuscript was harder to complete.”

Bilal proclaimed himself as a nerdy novelist with a medium of narrative storytelling. And that it was a “constant struggle when writing to open yourself up and allow things to affect you.” Soniah shared how she wanted to be an actress, but gave up on that dream and used writing as a form of expressing herself. She noted that “female authors get asked a lot about how they manage to balance their writing and personal life. I think writing takes a lot of discipline. Just sit down and finish what you have started. Ultimately you’ve succeeded if you read yourself and your emotions on the page.”

The first session started with a bang and ended with a whole lot of excitement. There was more coming and those attending the event knew it. Of course, the second session only got better.

The Eccentric World of PG Wodehouse was hosted by Peter Oborne and the key speaker was Richard Heller. Oborne welcomed the audience and stated how excited he was to be in one of the most ancient empires and the glorious city of Lahore. He invited Heller, a master in his own right, to talk about the master of 20^th century English prose: P. G. Wodehouse.

Heller talked about Wodehouse and how he created a fantastical realism in which neither his characters nor the actions they did seemed out of place. He even did a small bit of acting out a small scene from an episode of famous British 60’s Comedy show “40 Towers” in which a proprietor of a hotel tries to gather a large clientele but everything that can go wrong for him does. And so badly does everything go awry, that in frustration he starts thrashing his car going, “I told you what would happen if you behaved like this!”

Amid laughter, Heller explained that Wodehouse built a similar world of fantasy in which objects take on personas and the world is real enough to not seem out of place even in the humdrum reality of our daily life. He expounded on Wodehouse’s ability to mock the conventional style of writing and how he went from being a very realistic writer to one of the fantastical greats of prose. Wodehouse used comedy and satire in such a way that even though his books are filled with imposters and crimes such as muggings and theft and double crosses and tomfoolery galore, they never turned towards the darker aspects. In Wodehouse’s books, no one gets seriously hurt or murdered; maybe one or two knocks is all the damage his characters take.  Nor do his characters ever get affected by the war or its aftermath. Their world is indeed separate from ours.

Heller also talked about other writers who tried to emulate Wodehouse’s style and satirical take on reality. He quoted one of these writers, “Money talks and we are always listening.” And even though Wodehouse’s characters were featured in books written by other writers, it just isn’t the same as the master, setting up the stage for one of his comedies of human life and its fantastic foibles.

After the session had ended, Heller was asked for a quote that would sum up P.G Wodehouse’s madly eccentric and brilliant fantasy world, and he obliged with “P.G created a perfect imaginary world to which we need no visa”.