A Conversation on the Art of the Novel with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari

In his brilliant novel Chronicle of an Hour and Half, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, deploys multiple voices to chart the progress of a frenzy in a sleepy monsoon-struck village community in North Kerala that leads to a mob lynching. Each first person voice propels the narrative forward by revealing a life situation and a mindset. From this, a kaleidoscopic picture of the faces behind the mob emerges. Kannanari brilliantly captures how ordinary the mob is — made of everyday cowardly folks smarting under individual angsts and humiliations. There are the stupid and the macho, the uncomprehending and the unconcerned, the reckless and the damned. No matter how different the men comprising the mob are, they are all consistent in their misogyny and moral righteousness.

In an interview with The Wire, Kannanari dwelt on his practice of the art of the novel and the style secrets behind his prose.

Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

I have read your first published novel, Chronicle of An Hour and Half thrice now. First I read quickly for pleasure, then slowly, for savouring the sentences by reading aloud. The third time I read with a wordsmith’s zeal for instruction on how you breathe life into fiction word by word. Now I have even started hearing the soundtrack of the wind and the rain when I turn the pages. I have a hunch that this novel was written to the rhythm of incessant Kerala rains. Was it? 

Haha. That is not true. If anything, I was a bit worried actually, because choosing to set the novel in a weather of relentless rain carried the risk of repetition in terms of descriptions and imageries. This is because intense rain, unlike the other weathers, is a real physical event, especially so in Kerala, and you cannot just ignore and not describe it. I chose rain for a host of reasons. For a multiple-narrator, chaotic novel that is action-packed and unfolds in an hour and a half, I wanted a weather that was both dramatic and erratic for the plot and the timeline to work and carry the reader along. Another reason is that Kerala’s monsoon, aside from being the most familiar weather for someone who lives here, is also a season of hardships on the poor. So the rain also served the purpose of portraying the hardscrabble life of Nabeesumma, one of the two central characters in the novel.

Cover image of Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s Chronicle of an Hour and a Half

Your sentences thrum with life. You bend grammar to serve the magic of your prose. Share something about your personal style, about how you use punctuation and repetition to make sentences taut.

Rousseau said that accent is the soul of language. I think style is that accent to prose. You have to develop a style of your own. It’s not even that you consciously develop a style of your own. A style evolves on its own. Which is why it’s important to write two-three bad novels before you get to publish one, so that when you finally appear in print, your prose glistens with the sweat of your own voice. I myself employ a range of commonly used techniques. Like, I don’t open my sentences with a verb except for very special reasons. I don’t use semi colon and exclamation mark and steer clear of parentheses as much as I can. I like an occasional use of em-dash and colon and I am not a fan of italics. I enjoy writing long sentences and I make good use of polysyndeton — the use of conjunctions in chain. I try to resist adverbs but not adjectives and I like my adjectives without commas in between. Stuff like that. 

To demystify the sonorous polysyndeton for the readers, let me quote from the book:

‘In the quiet middle of the night I would be suckling two at a time while the other three went on crying and I felt like a helpless bitch with a limited number of udders and for a long time I didn’t sleep. During the day I opened pods of kapok and stuffed mattresses with their fluffy fibre at the communist mattress company across the river and at night I pedalled the sewing machine dreen dreen dreen while the children clung like bats to my breasts and for a long time I didn’t sleep.’

So connecting clauses of a long sentence with ‘and’ instead of the comma creates emphasis, a sense of things piling up which is what is happening in Nabessumma’s life. What kind of work  is involved in crafting such beautiful truthful sentences? Given how easy it is not to do the hard work of making a compelling novel in a world full of distractions (and WhatsApp) what makes you stick to a novel? What does a good day of writing look like for you? Are there any bad days? How do you deal with them?

What makes me stick to writing novel is my need to write itself and my faith in novel as an art. I have always known that it takes only a handful of personal qualities to be a novelist: sobriety, austerity, a body lazy enough to keep the mind thinking aimlessly, ready to take possession of whatever impulse it is that makes a cat to topple the glass onto the floor, a boundless willingness to fail over and over, and a capacity to grow poorer if you are poor, financially speaking. I house all these qualities in abundance. So far as the second part of your question is concerned, well, I don’t look at writing in those terms. To me, some eight hours a day spent just staring at the blank page without writing a single sentence is as good as a day spent writing five hundred words. In fact I do it so much that staring at a blank screen for hours has become the chief pleasure of my life. I consider novel-writing work, not epiphany. I am neither frustrated by a drought of three months nor particularly cheered by a short period of high productivity. To be frank, I am far more worried about inflation. Yesterday sardine was priced at Rs 400/kg and tomato cost Rs 60/kg. That’s what I am worried about.   

Thanks for that refreshing clarity. The extraordinary unity of the novel’s structure and content makes me ask the next question. Can you talk on how the subject matter of the novel determines the form of the novel?

Well, there were reasons other than the immediate influence of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that informed the choice of the structure. One was my belief that more than a dozen narrators would help me infuse a sense of chaos befitting the theme to the reading experience. It also allowed me to tell the story in first person and I knew that I wanted my two central characters, Nabeesumma and Reyhana, to speak in first person. Another reason was that I wanted to bring the village alive through as many characters as possible and short, first person monologues struck me as the perfect form to achieve that.  

Also read: What the Body Desires: A Conversation with Novelist Saikat Majumdar

What fuels your writing? Books, people, places? Anything else?

Aside from the pleasure of merely describing, what fuels my writing is this extraordinarily complex animal called human being, a very helplessly non-innocent animal. The novelist must speak the truth. Which means that since the life we live in reality is a kind of mutually agreed fiction, the novelist must write the fiction of our unspoken disagreements. Because it is by talking about what exactly we are not talking about truth is made accessible. Nothing threatens normalcy like truth. Nothing releases truth like language. To me fiction, which I believe is the slowest possible form of conversation between two individuals, marries both these filial and dependent needs. Philip Roth in his American Pastoral speaks of the “the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things”. The novelist must tease the fragile foundations of this theatre of agreements we live on the surface. In this sense, I would say the novel is a secular blasphemy on everything we claim we are. Bad citizenship, as Don DeLillo would concur with a critic of his novel Libra.  

Thank you for these Orwell-like words on the relationship of truth and language and the importance of the novelist not being the model obedient citizen. Let me repeat what you said: “Nothing threatens normalcy like truth. Nothing releases truth like language.” And one way of releasing truth requires owning the language that everyone from AI and the authorities want to steal. Can radical relationship with language be taught? What are your thoughts on writing schools? Do you think writing is teachable?

I don’t know if writing is teachable but it’s certainly learnable without going there.

The experience of reading your book is like watching a grand movie. Will we see a movie based on the book?

I don’t watch movies but I know my editor Ambar Sahil will be very happy to see that happen.

What are some of the books you are reading/ re-reading now?

I just reread Hamlet. I am going to reread Hamlet.