Rana Dasgupta / Features / Untitled Books

'There are still elements in this book that I don’t understand.'

Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta's first novel Tokyo Cancelled drew immediate acclaim and was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys prize. He knew he wanted to write something particularly ambitious when he started work on his second book, Solo, a novel of brilliant complexity. He talks to Viola Fort.

'The idea that one needs to constantly express Indian-ness, or express local realities in order to say who we are, I think it just doesn’t fit anymore.'

Rana Dasgupta first started writing in the service of romance. As a teenager growing up in Cambridge, he realised that girls find arty boys irresistible. "I wrote for friends, and I tried to seduce girls by writing stories," he laughs, and takes a draught of espresso, amused that what started as a schoolboy ruse has come to inform his life. Now 37, he looks five, even 10 years younger. He is considered in speech and manner but never fussy or fastidious, and speaks with calm confidence, forthright without bluff or apology. He calls to confirm before we meet and arrives in Soho an hour later, surprisingly spritely given he had been up till 4am celebrating the launch his new novel Solo at a pub on Clerkenwell Green. His only concession to fatigue is an immediate request for strong coffee. He clings to the tiny cup with both hands and sits back in his chair.

Dasgupta's first book, Tokyo Cancelled, published in 2005, is described as a novel by his publishers, a collection of short stories by him, and lies somewhere between the two. A disparate group of passengers stranded at an airport pass a night together trading stories. They take turns to beguile each other with tales of strange and remarkable things; a Japanese entrepreneur risks everything in his obsession for a doll; Robert de Niro's love child masters the art of transubstantiation and takes revenge on his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led back to his lost love by a wingless bird and a Chinese youth with astounding luck cuts men's hair and cleans out their ears. Finding patrimonial influence in Chaucer and Boccaccio, Dasgupta puts a modern complexion on the all but defunct tradition of oral storytelling and its associated myth and fable.

He started Tokyo Cancelled while living in New York, immersed in the world of corporate advertising. After having completed one story from the eventual cycle of thirteen, something in him shifted. "Something that was pent up in me was unleashed and I thought this was really something I wanted to devote a lot of time to," he explains. He gave up his corporate job and moved to Delhi. Why there? "I followed this woman, Monica. I fell in love, and I wasn't required to be anywhere so I went to be with her. I just wanted to change my life and see if that relationship would work out, and see if I could write books." The pair are now married with a daughter.

Dasgupta takes care to demarcate his interest in writing from his interest in storytelling, which he sees as, "a kind of yearning for something I don't have rather than expression of something I do." It's a territory he revisits more comprehensively in his new novel. Solo is a complex and ambitious exploration of myth and music, of shifting social and political ideologies, and of memory and the unruly terrain of fantasy and imagination. It's a book of two halves that reach back and forth into each other.

The first movement traces the life of a one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria and the tumultuous history of Eastern Europe. Commencing in Sofia in 1901 in the declining days of the Ottoman Empire and the dawning of the railway age, Ulrich, named by his father in homage to all things German, modern and efficient, watches the retreating tide of the East as 'Sofia found itself beached suddenly in Europe'. The excitement at this new order turns gradually to frustration, and finally to apathy, as the century advances and regimes impose and fail. At the end of his life, blind and dependent on the charity of his neighbours, he retreats into himself; 'Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and, ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it.' He lurches into an otherworldly phantasmagoria, losing himself in the mutable fabric of memory and exploring the imagined consequences of a life lived more full-heartedly than his own. Here begins the second movement, a leap through the looking glass which starts off as a cycle of modern folk tales and, like a magician's ring trick, start to connect and interlock imperceptibly. As Ulrich's fantasy progresses, the characters he conjures draw flesh to their bones and award his frustrated life a retrospective vibrancy and texture that, despite a promising start, he failed ever to accomplish.

Dasgupta deftly blurs the boundaries between real life and imagination, dealing in the numinous distortion of dreams and exploring the ways in which a repressed mind will find relief. "I wanted to create a certain kind of novelistic pleasure - and I didn't know and I still don't know if it works - which would be akin to the pleasure of waking up from a dream and realising that the dog that you saw in this dream was actually something you saw in the street." It does work, and reading the second movement invokes repeated instances of déjà vu, and the uncanny feeling that you've been here before. Motifs found in the first book are mutated into the second in much the same way the burr of your alarm clock is, for a moment before waking, the scream of seagulls on a deserted beachfront. "I was interested in the way that dreams mutate ordinary elements that you've just seen, and there's a kind of self analysis and pleasure of recognition in that process which I hoped book two would deliver with respect to book one," he says.

Solo takes place largely in Bulgaria, with forays into Georgia and New York in the second half. Of all the places to choose to write about, Bulgaria seems like an unlikely choice. He agrees it's unexpected, "I really should by now have a good answer for this. I was looking for a place to write about and this place on the map was attracting me, especially since the Lonely Planet was telling me there's nothing of any interest there. Everyone told me: "don't go there, don't go there, there's nothing there!", and that always makes me very curious about places. What is it that arouses such strong denial?" In fact, the truth turns out to be much more considered. "One of the things I was trying to do in this book, and one of the things that attracted me to that space, is to tell a story of Europe that comes from the small countries, from the margins rather than the centre. In many respects, Bulgaria is an exemplary European nation in the sense that its whole 20th-century project was to become European. It experimented with the various European ideologies in a far more intense way than we did, and was tossed around by those ideologies."

Bulgaria experienced a turbulent 20th century. In the second world war, British and American forces arrived to support communist rebels against the fascist state. The state responded with horrifying cruelty. The battle between the two ideologies had raged throughout the 20s and 30s, as Dasgupta explains, "the fascists and the communists recruited young men to their parties with enormous violence, or threats of violence, so a combination of fear and idealism meant that every young man in Bulgaria, and young women too, were associated with one of the two extremes of politics. They were denouncing their parents, denouncing their friends, and planning extremist attacks on the state." Towards the end of the war, the Soviets invaded and Bulgaria became a communist state for the next 45 years.

He is well versed in the history of the region, and finds fascination in the effect of events on the ordinary people who lived through it and whose experience remains largely undocumented. "I think there's a kind of melancholy to that place and its history, and the triumphalism with which we often think about the European twentieth century is a gloss that for many people didn't have a lot of substance," he says. During the communist years, state influence informed every sphere of life; familial, social, industrial, political and cultural. Before such interference, Bulgaria had a vivid heritage of storytelling and music, and rich amalgamation of Ottoman and Arab influences, and gypsy and folk traditions. "It fascinated me how all this music was banned by the communist state. There's this musical void for 45 years where people who are Ulrich's age couldn't ever hear again, not only Turkish music and gypsy music, but also jazz, which had started to enter in the 30s and which was also banned." Music was limited to classical, and a kind of state sanctioned Bulgarian modernist music fashioned from the more benign strains of folk. Amazingly, many of the musicologists he spoke in Sofia while researching the book worked for the police in the 80s, straight out of college, informing on people playing the wrong chords, 'un-Bulgarian' melodies.

Bulgarian music and its consequent prohibition by the state is what really captures Dasgupta's imagination. Music runs through both halves of the book like a current and reflects much of what is happening in the personal and political domains of those he writes about. What is repressed inevitably finds form elsewhere, and though the music is silenced by the state, it continues to underscore his characters' lives. "I think one of the things that people in the West hanker after to some extent is a society in which music and poetry have intensity," he posits.

Last night seems suddenly to catch up with him and he breaks off to go in search of more coffee. He returns after a few minutes, disappointed - there are no waiters to be seen anywhere - and picks up as though he never stopped talking. "In Bulgaria music had enormous intensity; it had political overtones, it was repressed, it was illegal, and so there's a long silence in someone like Ulrich's life. It's a silence of fantasies, and the music you can't hear becomes the stand in for all the things you never have in this life, and that's why it becomes so important in the second half of the book."

Many people will look at the name on the book jacket, the painting of the parrot and the quote from Salman Rushdie, and assume it contains an Indian story. The cover is somewhat misleading - we have grown used to reading publishers' visual shorthand - but then so are our preconceptions. Does he find there's an expectation to write of the Indian experience in some form or other? He looks patiently amused, but considers the question carefully before answering, "I think we might just be reaching a moment when that expectation is being disrupted to some extent. The idea that one needs to constantly express Indian-ness, or express local realities in order to say who we are, I think it just doesn't fit anymore." He cites Kamila Shamsie, a British-Pakistani writer who's just written a novel primarily about Hiroshima, and Nadeem Aslam who's another British-Pakistani writer who wrote The Wasted Vigil about Afghanistan. Attitudes abroad are shifting too; "I've just done my launch in Delhi and I found journalists there much less fazed than I thought they would be. I think the eternal repetition of Indian-ness, of Indian family, home, society, has not only become boring to novel readers, but because of the circumstances of everyday life, it's becoming more and more superfluous to what experience is." He catches sight of our errant waiter, who is about to disappear around the corner again. We both bellow at him, and he saunters over to our table. "Don't worry! I wasn't going to leave you", he says, with the relaxed smile of someone who doesn't require caffeine.

Dasgupta is drawn to absences, and Solo is riddled with them; the silence left when music was suppressed; the space left by the death of Ulrich's childhood friend Boris; all the things that didn't happen in Ulrich's life as it shrunk away from his early hopes and expectations; and then Bulgaria itself, a blank spot on the map in a forgotten corner of Europe. It is in these spaces that Dasgupta works, forging new narratives and characters and following where they lead rather than rationalising the life out of them. He agrees this is an important element of his writing; "I think you must allow a certain amount of chaos in your own creation, and there should be things which please you for reasons that you don't quite understand," he says, draining his cup. "I have heard writers who are amazing in presenting their books because they have such an incredible understanding of it, and the book afterwards is sort of redundant because they have rationalised and explained it so clearly to themselves and to you, that the book itself doesn't really have much life independently of that explanation."

Solo was four years in the writing and even after it left his hands, after two publishing deadlines passed, it still felt unfinished; "I still open it and feel there is sculpting that could be done", he says. This is precisely what gives Solo such depth, and why its influence lingers long after the last page is turned. "There are always things about your book that you don't know," he finishes, pulling on his scarf, and disappears as punctually as he arrived.

Tuesday, 10 March, 2009