Chimamanda, Ford a big draw on Day 4

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was an instant delight for the audience, giving a rollicking start to the fourth day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It required a Chimamanda to get the audience grounded after the transcending performance of the British-Tamil musician Susheela Raman, last night.

Speaking about her acclaimed novels Purple Hibiscus and Half Of A Yellow Sun, Adichie said, “Writing them was emotionally exhausting”. Especially the latter, which was ‘personal’ because her grandfather died in one of the refugee camps during Nigeria’s civil war of the 1960s.

Speaking about the process of writing the book, she said, “I went back to history for facts and to my father for truths”. It is indeed, intriguing to imagine a mother, in her novel Half Of A Yellow Sun, questioning herself if the bulge in her daughter’s abdomen was the result of pregnancy or malnourishment.

Richard Ford was not so personal but then he subsumed the entire American culture into himself. The Lay of the Land, third book of his famous Frank Bascombe Trilogy, is an unstintingly brutal look at the typical American white male, who at 50 is dealing with spousal abandonment, a life-threatening illness and George Bush’s rise to presidency. Ford said his major limitation was in describing people’s faces.

After lunch, William Dalrymple’s engrossing conversation with Anthony Sattin was just the perfect way to spend a laidback afternoon. Sattin’s A Winter on the Nile is about the cruise leaving Alexandria (in Egypt) that Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale shared in 1849, quite unwittingly. This was before the former wrote his pathbreaking Madame Bovary and the latter attained her famous status after the Crimean war.

Nostalgia was in the air when four writers got together to discuss what kind of bibliophiles they were. James Kelman spoke about his literary influences like Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, while Pauline Melville paid her tribute to Toni Morrison by reading passages from Beloved. Githa Hariharan talked about the impact of Yasunari Kawabata during her student days and Ahdaf Soueif explained how her mother initiated her into reading to keep her occupied, while the latter would go about with her PhD work.

The evening ended with a discomfiting statement by J M Coetzee that the future is of ‘Big Language’ and people could read other languages through English translations. While speaking at the session ‘Imperial English’, he expounded whatever language one is fluent in automatically becomes his ‘mother tongue’.