South African
best-selling author Wilbur Smith isn’t kidding when he says he looks upon India
as “almost a neighbour, with just a little sea between us”. It’s because he has
been visiting the country for over 20 years now. In the city on Sunday on the
Landmark Wilbur Smith tour to promote his latest book Those in Peril, Smith
says he first got an idea of the huge energy and diversity of the country from
reading British Indian writers like John Masters and Paul Scott. It isn’t
surprising to hear him say he loves India, but what really baffles you is when
he says, “I love the traffic!” to which he adds, “It is just like a videogame;
except here, if you lose, you die.”
His favourite Indian author is RK Narayan, and the mother of his wife (who’s from Tajikistan) “feels deprived if she doesn’t get to watch a Bollywood movie everyday!”
Then he promptly breaks into a tale of how, when he visited Jaipur, his driver told him that to drive in India you need four things: Good brakes, good eyes, good nerves, and yes, the most essential — good luck.
That’s the 78-year-old writer of historical thrillers for you — every minute with him is full of anecdotes. For instance, there’s the story of how, when he was in Sydney once, a man had travelled over five hours to meet him. “When I was talking to him, I noticed that one of his legs was a prosthetic leg,” he recalls. “He told me he was in college when he lost his leg and wanted to die. But then he said, he read my book Leopard Hunts in the Darkness where the hero had also lost one leg, and that inspired him to get his life back. That’s when I realised I’m not just telling stories, I’m giving people visions of what life might be.”
His latest book, set in the Indian Ocean, is a story about a businesswoman whose daughter gets kidnapped by Somalian pirates. From ancient Egypt to colonised Africa and now a contemporary topic like piracy — how does he choose his subjects?
“I don’t choose my subjects,” he says, “my subjects choose me. Ideas gel over time; one book suggests another, one character I create wants to continue… It’s like painting an infinite mural— you never quite finish, you go on painting. You cover generation after generation, century after century…”
And this particular subject chose him when he bought an island in Seychelles. “There I had contact with pirates and met people who had been captured and kept for years. So you had something right there.”
You want to know what it was that he found from the pirates. “I found out what they look like and what their boats are like! I met the pirates in passing,” he explains. “The boatman on the island I owned was a Somalian and when we went out fishing, we saw the pirate boats passing close by. I remarked to the boatman: Those are your brothers. But he said they are not my brothers, those are evil people.”
There’s another kind of piracy that Smith feels strongly about — the e-book variety, which, he says is being practiced by Google and Kindle. “These companies are like shadowy nations of their own; their only concern is money. You can’t put any pressure on them to play fair. They’ll be quite happy to pirate books and they pay pitiful amounts of money. There’s a possibility that they would destroy all creative talent.” Ask him whether he thinks e-books would soon take over the reading scene, and pat comes the reply: “I would hate that to happen.”
But he also acknowledges, “If you’re not on Kindle, you don’t exist!”
His favourite Indian author is RK Narayan, and the mother of his wife (who’s from Tajikistan) “feels deprived if she doesn’t get to watch a Bollywood movie everyday!”
Then he promptly breaks into a tale of how, when he visited Jaipur, his driver told him that to drive in India you need four things: Good brakes, good eyes, good nerves, and yes, the most essential — good luck.
That’s the 78-year-old writer of historical thrillers for you — every minute with him is full of anecdotes. For instance, there’s the story of how, when he was in Sydney once, a man had travelled over five hours to meet him. “When I was talking to him, I noticed that one of his legs was a prosthetic leg,” he recalls. “He told me he was in college when he lost his leg and wanted to die. But then he said, he read my book Leopard Hunts in the Darkness where the hero had also lost one leg, and that inspired him to get his life back. That’s when I realised I’m not just telling stories, I’m giving people visions of what life might be.”
His latest book, set in the Indian Ocean, is a story about a businesswoman whose daughter gets kidnapped by Somalian pirates. From ancient Egypt to colonised Africa and now a contemporary topic like piracy — how does he choose his subjects?
“I don’t choose my subjects,” he says, “my subjects choose me. Ideas gel over time; one book suggests another, one character I create wants to continue… It’s like painting an infinite mural— you never quite finish, you go on painting. You cover generation after generation, century after century…”
And this particular subject chose him when he bought an island in Seychelles. “There I had contact with pirates and met people who had been captured and kept for years. So you had something right there.”
You want to know what it was that he found from the pirates. “I found out what they look like and what their boats are like! I met the pirates in passing,” he explains. “The boatman on the island I owned was a Somalian and when we went out fishing, we saw the pirate boats passing close by. I remarked to the boatman: Those are your brothers. But he said they are not my brothers, those are evil people.”
There’s another kind of piracy that Smith feels strongly about — the e-book variety, which, he says is being practiced by Google and Kindle. “These companies are like shadowy nations of their own; their only concern is money. You can’t put any pressure on them to play fair. They’ll be quite happy to pirate books and they pay pitiful amounts of money. There’s a possibility that they would destroy all creative talent.” Ask him whether he thinks e-books would soon take over the reading scene, and pat comes the reply: “I would hate that to happen.”
But he also acknowledges, “If you’re not on Kindle, you don’t exist!”
No comments:
Post a Comment