At the inaugural session of The Hindu Lit for Life 2015, Eleanor Catton and artist Parvathi Nayar got off to a slow start, although they discussed Eleanor’s books and divergent themes in rapid succession, accounting for a full house at the venue.
Dressed casually in a pair of printed green pants and a black shirt, Eleanor (or rather Ellie as she was addressed) who was in conversation with Parvathi, spoke of her experiences at winning the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction and how it affected her life thereafter. “I don’t know how much it changed my life, mostly because I haven’t written anything after The Luminaries . It’s a curious thing to be in the public eye; I was unprepared,” she said.
When the talk veered to her first book, The Rehearsal , Eleanor’s quip on revisiting her earliest work was capriciously put, “Reading from past work is like reading love letters from someone you no longer love. The Rehearsal , which came out in 2008, details theatric technique in great measure and according to Catton, employs the themes of performance. What started out as a monologue for a saxophone player-friend of hers, was put aside as “life got in the way,” and later, rediscovered as an unfinished document that Eleanor thought would be more interesting as a piece of fiction than drama.
Often during the session, Eleanor echoed some of our deepest thoughts. The 29-year-old spoke about puberty (“you become the audience in your lives”), as being a terrible experience of wanting to be outside of her own skin, something every teenager can identify with. And in many ways, Eleanor resembled a sensible life coach and drew comparison to love and life with writing. At one point she remarked that, “books are like relationships; they teach the writer a great deal about themselves and my first book taught me how to write.”
The Luminaries , the 832-page tome that won Eleanor fame, glory and critical acclaim, tells the story of New Zealand’s goldfields in 1866. The brilliance of the novel lies not only in its plot but in the meticulous and rigorous structure. “I discovered a computer programme online where if you enter any date/time/year you can see how the skies will look. I put in the date when gold was first discovered, watched the sky revolve and took notes. I sat with all the data and realised that I wanted to write a novel about all this. The way the sky moves represent characters; I used star charts as maps to form a plot. She also spoke about how 19th Century novels influenced the book, both positively and negatively. “The desire or impulse to write is from reading a great book and in also thinking that it could’ve been done better. I loved the novels for their rigorousness and the structure, but from a reader’s point it wasn’t all that fun to read. The Luminaries was born out of that — structurally experimental and wanting to read a good, old-fashioned Victorian novel.”
Towards the end, the talk shifted theme to the power of reading and rightfully so. Eleanor who believes that, “reading is 90 per cent of a writer’s job,” ended with a memorable quote. “We have a beautiful native plant in New Zealand that changes its physical dimensions halfway through its life. This is a metaphor for reading — we begin defensively and change towards the end of our lives.”
