Keshava guha

This debut novel of writer and journalist Keshava Guha follows the lives of four readers from different parts of the world and from different cultural backgrounds, whose paths converge in their shared appreciation of the wildly popular Harry Potter books. Kannan, an Indian immigrant to the U.S., is the stereotypical socially awkward IT professional not yet familiar with American cultural mores. Rebecca, an accomplished, self-assured Harvard graduate, is faced with what is probably the first chapter of instability in her otherwise predictable life. Malathi, an English student from Chennai, is jolted out of the quaint reverie that is her life in Chennai, by unfamiliar stirrings of passion. Curtis Grimmet, an enigmatic and eccentric older mentor figure, looms above them all. Passive players While superficially Harry Potter serves as the common thread binding them together, on a deeper level, it is a palpable sense of wanting to find oneself that drives the protagonists to immerse themselves deeper and deeper in a digital world of larger-than-life intrigue and romance — something Rebecca so aptly describes as an “accidental magic”, which transcends the literary. Accidental Magic ’s sparse cast of principal players are searching for something to give their lives purpose and meaning — a quintessentially human endeavour, one could argue. However, their energies seem directed inwards: their primary interactions are with themselves, in the form of internal monologues and recollecti...

Murakami Haruki—to use the Japanese form of his name—confounds, more than any other modern writer, the dubious dichotomy between “literary” and “genre” (or “commercial”) fiction. He has always been difficult to pin down. A new Murakami novel is an immediate bestseller across languages and continents; but unlike other global publishing cash cows, such as Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho, he is also an annual favourite, at least in the eyes of bookmakers, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known as a surrealist, but made his reputation with a realist bildungsroman, Norwegian Wood . His novels and stories tend to be set in and around Tokyo, but are full of references to Western, rather than Japanese, popular culture. He signals his debts to the great Western modernists, and his books can be exuberantly inventive, full of ideas, and formally complex. His prose, however, is simple in the sense of being flat and uninspired, rather than spare. In any Murakami book one encounters stretches of writing so astonishingly bad it almost seems deliberately so. In this, as in many other respects, the English-language writer he most resembles is Paul Auster. For every reader or critic who thinks Murakami is a genius, there is another who regards him as a fraud, or at least overrated. Standard Murakami fare Men Without Women , his latest collection of stories, which appeared in Japanese in 2014, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Murakami. These seven stories are wildly uneven in...

Those familiar with Cole Porter’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting would know that his timeless hit Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love), is a humorous love song a la Porter style, replete with sexual innuendos. Therefore, when you flip open the book with a half-yellow jacket that spells out the title Accidental Magic in pop colours atop the ever-familiar lightning bolt reminiscent of a certain boy wizard, and then find this very song referenced to in the epigram, it might mislead you for a minute. For, this book is anything but a meet-cute orchestrated by said love for Harry Potter leading to a happy-ending. “The thing about the book is that they fall in love with Harry Potter but they can’t fall in love with actual people,” explained debut author Keshava Guha, when I caught up with him over the phone, a few days after attending his session at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, held in association with The Telegraph and Victoria Memorial Hall in January. “This is actually a very dark book — the title and the epigram, in a way, are using irony to underline the darkness,” he added. Kannan, a young Indian techie from Bangalore living the ubiquitous American dream; Grimmett, a significantly older Anglophile in the process of resigning to his American life; Rebecca, a bright young girl, fresh out of college and working a mediocre job; and Malathi, a Chennai native who goes to the US after marrying Kannan, eventually find their paths crossing in Boston due to their common love for Ha...

Neel Mukherjee’s third novel is made up of five narratives and the book’s architecture is revealed gradually: the odd-numbered sections are linked to each other, as are the even-numbered ones. Any connection to the novel sequences of V S Naipaul – A Way in the World and In a Free State – is, as the title indicates, no coincidence, and the connection goes beyond form. But Mukherjee is a very different writer and A State of Freedom modifies and repurposes Naipaul’s form to very different ends. This is not a sequence of narratives; it is a coherent novel, unified by its characters’ pursuit of what Mukherjee calls freedom. Freedom, as they understand it, connotes economic security, an escape from the tyranny of the family and, above all, dignity – the ability to transmute imagination into lived reality, to achieve and hold a dignified place in the world. For each of his characters, this pursuit necessarily involves migration: true freedom can only be achieved far away from home. Mukherjee lays bare the material and psychological traumas that this kind of dislocation can cause, but his characters hold firm to its emancipatory power. The opening section is narrated by an expatriate Bengali academic who has taken his son to see the Mughal monuments of Agra. This holiday is in turn anguished – the narrator becomes aware of the unbridgeable distance between himself and his US-raised son – and terrifying. Around Agra he encounters two men with fox-like faces; these ‘fox twins’, Laks...

"Accidental Magic" was launched at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday evening. Based in Bengaluru and Boston, the novel weaves in cross-cultural and relatable contexts such as the world of fan fiction, university life, with complex themes like solitude, self-discovery, identity, aspirations, and the tussle between love and duty. Published by HarperCollins India, 'Accidental Magic' is the story of four very different people whose lives are brought together by Harry Potter. For Kannan, Curtis, Rebecca and Malathi, social outsiders and people adrift, the intense and diverse world of Harry Potter fandom offers community, even a sense of meaning. The novel is about how flawed relationships can be; how people battle loneliness, live on hope and search for that perfect connection - often settling for imperfection - it is also about the tension between duty and the individual pursuit of happiness. According to Keshava Guha, Accidental Magic is a novel about how outsiders and misfits can find a sense of place and meaning in a community that is open to anyone (e.g., Harry Potter fandom). 'It is also a story of the challenges and rewards of relationships across cultures and generations," he says. At the launch, the author talked about his curious nature which propels his interest in writing, his love for reading growing up in a house filled with books, popular fan fiction writers, and his own book which is not Harry Potter fanfiction but just draws on that as a bridge betwee...

This debut novel of writer and journalist Keshava Guha follows the lives of four readers from different parts of the world and from different cultural backgrounds, whose paths converge in their shared appreciation of the wildly popular Harry Potter books. Kannan, an Indian immigrant to the U.S., is the stereotypical socially awkward IT professional not yet familiar with American cultural mores. Rebecca, an accomplished, self-assured Harvard graduate, is faced with what is probably the first chapter of instability in her otherwise predictable life. Malathi, an English student from Chennai, is jolted out of the quaint reverie that is her life in Chennai, by unfamiliar stirrings of passion. Curtis Grimmet, an enigmatic and eccentric older mentor figure, looms above them all. Passive players While superficially Harry Potter serves as the common thread binding them together, on a deeper level, it is a palpable sense of wanting to find oneself that drives the protagonists to immerse themselves deeper and deeper in a digital world of larger-than-life intrigue and romance — something Rebecca so aptly describes as an “accidental magic”, which transcends the literary. Accidental Magic ’s sparse cast of principal players are searching for something to give their lives purpose and meaning — a quintessentially human endeavour, one could argue. However, their energies seem directed inwards: their primary interactions are with themselves, in the form of internal monologues and recollecti...

Neel Mukherjee’s third novel is made up of five narratives and the book’s architecture is revealed gradually: the odd-numbered sections are linked to each other, as are the even-numbered ones. Any connection to the novel sequences of V S Naipaul – A Way in the World and In a Free State – is, as the title indicates, no coincidence, and the connection goes beyond form. But Mukherjee is a very different writer and A State of Freedom modifies and repurposes Naipaul’s form to very different ends. This is not a sequence of narratives; it is a coherent novel, unified by its characters’ pursuit of what Mukherjee calls freedom. Freedom, as they understand it, connotes economic security, an escape from the tyranny of the family and, above all, dignity – the ability to transmute imagination into lived reality, to achieve and hold a dignified place in the world. For each of his characters, this pursuit necessarily involves migration: true freedom can only be achieved far away from home. Mukherjee lays bare the material and psychological traumas that this kind of dislocation can cause, but his characters hold firm to its emancipatory power. The opening section is narrated by an expatriate Bengali academic who has taken his son to see the Mughal monuments of Agra. This holiday is in turn anguished – the narrator becomes aware of the unbridgeable distance between himself and his US-raised son – and terrifying. Around Agra he encounters two men with fox-like faces; these ‘fox twins’, Laks...

Murakami Haruki—to use the Japanese form of his name—confounds, more than any other modern writer, the dubious dichotomy between “literary” and “genre” (or “commercial”) fiction. He has always been difficult to pin down. A new Murakami novel is an immediate bestseller across languages and continents; but unlike other global publishing cash cows, such as Dan Brown or Paulo Coelho, he is also an annual favourite, at least in the eyes of bookmakers, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known as a surrealist, but made his reputation with a realist bildungsroman, Norwegian Wood . His novels and stories tend to be set in and around Tokyo, but are full of references to Western, rather than Japanese, popular culture. He signals his debts to the great Western modernists, and his books can be exuberantly inventive, full of ideas, and formally complex. His prose, however, is simple in the sense of being flat and uninspired, rather than spare. In any Murakami book one encounters stretches of writing so astonishingly bad it almost seems deliberately so. In this, as in many other respects, the English-language writer he most resembles is Paul Auster. For every reader or critic who thinks Murakami is a genius, there is another who regards him as a fraud, or at least overrated. Standard Murakami fare Men Without Women , his latest collection of stories, which appeared in Japanese in 2014, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Murakami. These seven stories are wildly uneven in...

Those familiar with Cole Porter’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting would know that his timeless hit Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love), is a humorous love song a la Porter style, replete with sexual innuendos. Therefore, when you flip open the book with a half-yellow jacket that spells out the title Accidental Magic in pop colours atop the ever-familiar lightning bolt reminiscent of a certain boy wizard, and then find this very song referenced to in the epigram, it might mislead you for a minute. For, this book is anything but a meet-cute orchestrated by said love for Harry Potter leading to a happy-ending. “The thing about the book is that they fall in love with Harry Potter but they can’t fall in love with actual people,” explained debut author Keshava Guha, when I caught up with him over the phone, a few days after attending his session at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, held in association with The Telegraph and Victoria Memorial Hall in January. “This is actually a very dark book — the title and the epigram, in a way, are using irony to underline the darkness,” he added. Kannan, a young Indian techie from Bangalore living the ubiquitous American dream; Grimmett, a significantly older Anglophile in the process of resigning to his American life; Rebecca, a bright young girl, fresh out of college and working a mediocre job; and Malathi, a Chennai native who goes to the US after marrying Kannan, eventually find their paths crossing in Boston due to their common love for Ha...