Monday, November 06, 2006

Booker Sightings

The South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival was held on Saturday at the Museum of Natural History. At the Booker Winner's book signing, i was sorely reminded of the Vikram Seth signing last year where i self-consciously stumbled my way through, blinded by his 500-watt smile. Kiran Desai was sweet, too so i gushed something like, "it was really good, just finished and still recovering." She smiled sweetly and said thanks. When i mentioned my father was also one of those people in "Inheritance of Loss" who suffered from a colonial hangover, she laughed and said, "oh i have plenty of those in my family, too." [Maa, who has digested all of Anita Desai's novels, gave me the entire spiel on Desai family and which relatives were in the IAS and who had a house in Mussouri]. But when she was reading passages from her book at the literary panel, she wasn't the best reader. Later, i discovered she had signed my book with the wrong date. Ah well, could've been a lot worse.

5 comments:

Twisted DNA said...

Are you sure it's the wrong date or she put the date in Indian/British way?

Anonymous said...

she wrote "3 November, 2006" and it was definitely the 4th!

mommyof2 said...

I just finished the same book 2 days back.. didn't like it that much..

Anonymous said...

but did you actually like the book or not? or was it just gushing for the sake of it?

Anonymous said...

nono.. wanted to read it before it was even nominated. why did i like it? it's clever and funny, plus a fast read. not too many narratives to complicate things and i could relate to some of the colonial/immigrant issues she talked about.