Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.
"Someone's got to go out there, and give up the easy chair and the
two cars in the garage, and actually bring back reports from the world. Otherwise,
there'd be no artists, no
newspapers, no explorers. Some people are made to stay at home;
some are made to wander."
"And you're one of the ones who are made to wander?"
"Yeah, I think so. And now
I'm on the course, it's
harder to get out than to just keep going."
Cuba and the Night
HB: How do you
feel about the fact that your books are sometimes listed as fiction, sometimes
as nonfiction?
PI: After taking
great pains to write a book that does justice to the truth of an occasion, it's
distressing to go into a bookstore and find it classified as fiction. But more
and more travel writing is dancing on the borders. I noticed, for example, that
VS. Naipul's last book came out as nonfiction in England and as fiction in this
country. And one never knows how to categorize Bruce Chatwin's books.
HB: Could be the
whole classification system is cracking up.
PI: Just at a
time when other boundaries are dissolving, too, in a new post-national world
where there are no barriers. The same is happening in writing. All
post-national writing is so ventriloqual, whether it's Ishiguru or Caryl
Phillips or even Rushdie. People with many homes can write in many voices and
see through many different kinds of eyes. It's a new literary form affecting a
new kind of person, I think. Look at Mukerjee: Every one of her stories is from
a different nationality.
