Vivek Shanbhag Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

An Interview with renowned Indian author Vivek Shanbhag about his first book to be translated into English, Ghachar Ghochar.

What was your initial inspiration for this novel?

This novel was inside me and growing for several years. It is difficult to put my finger on a single incident or experience and say it was the inspiration, but I have a hunch that the seed of the story was sown twenty-five years ago, when I first began working as an engineer. At that time, I worked with a few salespeople, and I vividly remember visiting a salesman's house where every member of the family was involved in his job. They even knew the codes assigned to hundreds of products he was selling. This may have been the seed, but it takes a lot for a seed to grow into a tree and bear fruit. There is a saying in Kannada, which roughly translates to "one must not try to discover the source of a river;" such efforts inevitably end in disappointment.

Neel Mukherjee calls Ghachar Ghochar "a book of distilled simplicity;" indeed, it is a paragon of concision. Was this your intention when you began writing? Is brevity a hallmark of your work?

I started out writing short stories, a form that demands much discipline, and all of my novels are relatively short. I like Hemingway's Iceberg Theory: that most of the story is beneath the surface, like an iceberg. That does not...