Happiness is not exactly the emotion you would attach to either of Manu Joseph’s two novels. This, notwithstanding the fact that both ‘Serious Men’, shortlisted for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, and his new novel ‘The Illicit Happiness of Other People’ have elicited such qualifiers as ‘darkly comic’ and ‘wickedly funny.’ The serious-faced author, however, sprang a surprise when he stated that he was a happy person and found it hard to write unhappy stories.
“I like to write happy stories with happy endings. But I discovered that stories lie in the weaknesses of people. As a writer, you cannot wish away unhappiness in life and at some point you have to face up to it.”
Joseph, the editor of Open Magazine, was speaking at an author interaction event of the ongoing DC Books Harper Collins Literary Festival at the DCB showroom in the city on Saturday.
‘Illicit Happiness,’ which has at its centre the death of Unni Chacko - an adorable seventeen-year-old who is also a brilliant cartoonist, was a difficult ordeal while in the making, said the author. In answer to a question, he confessed that he had considered tweaking the storyline to let Unni live. “I feel a little exposed to be asked this question. But yes, I wanted to give Mariamma (Unni’s mother), the benefit of hope. And I wondered several times over the three years it took me to write the story, ‘how nice it would be if I could write the same story without the death’.
The mixing of genres in the book was a spin off from his own interests in various forms of communication. “Cartoon, which is a major subject of interest in the novel, is perhaps the aspect that I worked on most consciously. I had wanted to be a cartoonist but gave up because I thought I had no talent to draw. Later, I came to realise that this talent is the least important thing needed to be a cartoonist. Instead, what you really needed was ideas. Also, I take a very critical view of Indian cartoons, they are lacking in many respects.”
He added that the structure of the novel owes much to his admiration for the movies of Quentin Tarantino. “Such techniques as the appearance of one great or important character in just one scene, who takes the story forward, have fascinated me,” he said. He pointed out improvisations by novelists like Jeniffer Egan who incorporated PowerPoint Presentations in her fiction to underscore that there are significant attempts everywhere at furthering the possibilities of storytelling.
Joseph also clarified that he did not believe it was necessary for writers to be influenced by other writers. “I’ve been very suspicious of the reputation of books because so much of it depend on the opinions of other people. Films, on the other hand, by virtue of the nature of the medium and the higher stakes involved, cannot help aspiring for superior quality and it is there for all to see.”
Brushing aside the comment that as a successful debut author he must have been under pressure while working on his second novel to meet benchmarks, Joseph said that ‘Serious Men’ was “only moderately successful”. “And being a journalist, one knows that much of it is a circus. One keeps meeting famous people and those who are not famous anymore.”