My Friend Sancho by Amit Varma: Book Review

There are lessons to learn on writing from every novel that I read.

Lesson #1: Being funny and  writing funny are too entirely different things. When writing humor, it is important to remember that you don’t have the luxury of voice inflection and timing to get across the punch. Lesson #2: It is important to re-think and re-evaluate a story’s flow and structure. In other words, it is important to edit. I don’t care how delicious that burst of writing at midnight was. All you have there is the raw materials, it must be molded into a story first before becoming a story.

I went to Amit Varma’s book launching here in Bangalore. I really liked the guy. He was funny and smart with just the right measure of self-deprecation for it to be endearing. But there were warning signs early on that this would be the novel that it turned out to be (spectucularly mediocre). It was when Varma shared that he didn’t believe that plot was particularly important (“it’s just a tool to develop characters”, he had said). Turned out, plot wasn’t very important in this story. Nothing that happens to Abir Ganguly (the main character) much matters accept in relation to the woman (Muneeza) that he meets and how it changes him (and to a lesser extent her). There is murder, police corruption, ethics of journalism, love. But they are back drops to Ganguly checking his email, drinking black coffee, eating out and making wise-cracks that can be predicted pages ahead. Varma never bothers to flesh out the ethics of Ganguly’s actions (except in a masala-movie-style dialogue towards the end and Ganguly’s quick internal narratives. These narratives are short bursts which are supposed to display “growing up”. More time and space is dedicated to movie-theater-couple-making-out joke).

During the book launching, there was a lot of marketing on the point that this was a “quality popular” novel (which apparently doesn’t exist anymore) that “literary-types” might read with “guilty pleasure”. So I guess this is supposed to fit that “niche”. The one thing that sells popular, fluff novels is that the characters are constantly doing interesting and fun things that the reader wants to know about. They are having weird sex, (or atleast a lot of sex), they are shopping and rich, they are fighting crime, they are living life. But Abir Ganguly doesn’t do much of anything (even with his interesting life). He naps a lot, browses the internet, and eats out. A lot. Which might be interesting if Ganguly’s internal narrative was interesting. It’s not. (see Lesson #1 above for why). In Varma’s case, this is especially odd because India Uncut (Amit Varma’s blog) is often deliciously funny and witty.  Which brings me to…

I would have forgiven all of these short-comings if Varma had not done the one hallmark of bad writing — India Uncut was plugged Four times in the novel (not including the author’s profile).  In a novel this slim (it only took me about an hour to finish), in four separate instances Ganguly is thinking how cool India Uncut (the only blog Ganguly reads) is. Meh.

~ by Sonia on May 19, 2009.