Amitav Ghosh on language in fiction

One does not need to know meanings of all the words to enjoy a novel, says novelist Amitav Ghosh, who reveals that his ignorance of exotic sounding recipes like pot beef did not stop him from reading books.
"That never stopped me from reading," he said recollecting his childhood days which was filled with reading books by Enid Blyton and others.
Ghosh articulated the finesse of language in telling a story while giving a preview of his new novel the third and final book of his Ibis trilogy, "Flood of Fire", at 'Spring Fever' by Penguin, a celebration of books and literature that began here on March 14,

Ghosh, whose historical fictions that tend to make you "desperate for the end only to read it again," are witness to the author's extensive experimentation with the language.
Charting out how the language in fiction writing is distinctively different from that of a work of non-fiction, for instance his "Countdown", Ghosh said, "Novel is not reflecting reality but creating reality, where language is used constitutively like clay."
It is in the usage of the language, in its repetitions, resonances and substitutions, he said, that a new word becomes "clear from the context that it means something."

About English author Blyton's pot beef he said, "How can I know what pot beef is unless I tasted it but I figured out it was some sort of food, and that's all you need to know."

While the genre of Ghosh's fiction writing is fairly constant and revolves around historical events, the diversity of language in his works is beyond capture.
In "Hungry Tide", which is "a reflection on language and on translation," he claimed to have tried his hand, much successfully, at experiencing metre.