The Word : Karan Mahajan : 20.Dec.08

KARAN MAHAJAN
Author

A book that means a lot to you?
I loved The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick so much that it became my fate: like Ruth Puttermesser, I too work for the New York City bureaucracy and have lived among other people’s things in borough after borough. All I lack now is a wish-granting golem that’ll make me Mayor of New York, and a prosestyle so brilliant it glistens on the page like hell-frozen fire.

Your favourite genre?
ALL-CAPS EMAILS.

Your favourite character?
Gould, the eponymous character from Stephen Dixon’s Gould, for stupidly explaining himself at great length and speaking in run-on page-size sentences.

How many books do you own?
I’m going to ballpark it at 400+.

An underrated book? And why?
The Suffrage of Elvira by VS Naipaul. Brilliantly titled, written rapidly, and sandwiched chronologically between The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street, this book has been nearly forgotten. But as a racial and political satire it is far riskier and biting than the other comedies; it carries within it a real sourness about the communal infighting that consumed Trinidadian politics.

An overrated book? And why?
Money by Martin Amis. We’re told to read him for the prose, but he seems like a ‘burra sahib’ trying to rap.

The book you bought last?
Remainder by Tom McCarthy.

Last book read?
Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel.

A book you wish you had written?
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, because that would mean I’d have read it and led a largely olfactory life.