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Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the … - Jeet Thayil
" "Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels.
English
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About Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil (born October 13, 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is most famous as a poet and is the author of four collections. His first novel, Narcopolis, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize.
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Additional quotes by Jeet Thayil
The thing about opium is that it makes you vomit. You cook the original raw sticky pellet against the bowl of the pipe. And for the first three or four months, you puke. But it’s a clean very easy puke, not like alcohol. You could be walking down the street talking to a friend, turn, puke and keep going. But you do that a lot for the first few months. It takes devotion to become an addict to opium and heroin. You have to keep doing it to get through it. I lost a lot of weight. But the payback is huge. It is pure pleasure. There is a reason why opiates are used as a painkiller: they make you feel better. They’re designed to make you feel better.
I should have done my novel before this, but I was a journalist and a junkie for 20 years and unlike the junkie cliché, I had good jobs all over the world. I was a books editor, I did financial journalism for Asia Week for five years, I was Bombay correspondent for the South China Morning Post for 18 months, I worked for every newspaper in India doing arts journalism. I was a hardworking junkie.
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...has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature-2013 for his debut novel Narcopolis based on the theme of drug addiction destroying the poor, deranged and marginalised people in Mumbai during 1970s and 80s. He was one of the six shortlisted authors for the DSC prize, was born in Kerala and is also known as a performance poet and musician. He earlier worked as a journalist in New York, Mumbai and Bangalore and his poetry collection.
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