5 Questions with Brannavan Gnanalingam
Brannavan Gnanalingam is an award-winning novelist based in Pōneke/Wellington.
He is the author of Sprigs (winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel and shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards), Sodden Downstream (also shortlisted at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards), and A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse (longlisted at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards). He is also a former columnist for the Sunday-Star Times, and winner of a Qantas Media Award (as it was then known) as a film reviewer for The Lumière Reader.
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is his eighth novel.
No.1
Kartik Popat is such a specific character: a friendless slacker from the Indian diaspora living in Pōneke/Wellington, self-righteous and self-loathing. How did you come up with him?
I was inspired by a horrible interview between Vivek Ramaswamy and Ann Coulter, in which Ann Coulter makes a racist joke about black people that Ramaswamy laughs at, but then Coulter says, “I still would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian.” So he’s complicit in racism, but also becomes a victim of it.
I became interested in what drives a person to work against the interests of their own community. That was my basis for thinking about an Aotearoa New Zealand equivalent, someone who’s so full of self-loathing that he mocks immigrants and other minorities for a semblance of power, without realising that he’s easy to discard by the very people he’s trying to please.
There’s also an inherent laziness in far-right thinking—scapegoating and hatred doesn’t require as much effort as trying to build solidarity—that I wanted to tap into, [as a result] Kartik Popat doesn’t really spend much time thinking about what he’s doing.
I also wanted to capture the double-bind that immigrants experience: on the one hand, there’s a sense of passiveness (a kind of assimilation-technique where you keep your head down) while simultaneously being a hustler (where you want to be celebrated or rewarded for having ‘made it’). All of that came together with Kartik Popat, whose voice was concerningly happy to live in my head.
No.2
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popat is your eighth book. Your earlier novels deal with so many different subjects: for instance, your debut novel Getting Under Sail is about a group of friends who travel from Aotearoa to West Africa; your fourth novel A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse looks at modern-day intelligence in New Zealand, and your award-winning sixth novel Sprigs revolves around an elite private high school. Despite the different narratives they are all books that attempt to interrogate some moral failing in society, whether that’s rape culture, Islamophobia, citizenship privilege, identity politics, etc. What does your world-building process look like?
I write because I want to figure out something in the world. What’s it like to be a privileged brown person travelling in West Africa? How is structural Islamophobia baked into government in Aotearoa? What barriers do survivors [of sexual violence] face to control their own narratives? For Kartik Popat, my question was what failings in the right (following the Global Financial Crisis) has then led to the right being taken over by populism and (ethno)nationalism.
I’m unashamedly a political writer—some people (and writers) think writing shouldn’t be political or polemical, and I have no idea who came up with that rule. Who benefits from such a rule? Not minorities. It also conveniently ignores how so many of the great 19th century novelists—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola, Eliot, Flaubert, Trollope etc.—were all deeply political and exploring ideas about the world.
Trying to answer that political question is always my starting point. My technical approach is to view my narratives using (Juvenalian, not Horatian) satire. That allows me to create a world that’s close enough to reality, without necessarily having to worry about complete fidelity or worry about coming up with something completely bespoke—it allows me to distort, exaggerate and essentially lie (for want of a better word), as I try to figure out the answer to my question.
No.3
All your novels are published by publishing collective Lawrence & Gibson based in your home city, where authors are required to be a part of the labour when the book goes to print: printing, binding and guillotining. What results in your loyalty to this publisher and what do you think are some benefits of publishing with an independent publisher, instead of say, having an agent and/or publishing with a Big Five press?
I have a great working and personal relationship with Murdoch Stephens, who helped set up Lawrence & Gibson. There’s a real freedom in knowing that Murdoch has very similar taste to me (essentially New Narrative, perverse French stuff, and Slavic literature in all forms), which means that I can trust the way he interprets and critiques early drafts of my work.
I’ve definitely benefited from the freedom of working for a publisher for whom profit isn’t the main priority, and which operates as a writer-collective. We release books because we want to. We also only release books that we really want in the world, because any time spent making someone else’s books is time that we don’t spend on ours. It means we have high standards (particularly around ideas, anti-racism and experimentation) as a result, which also gives me comfort in following this path than one that a more traditional publishing model might provide. Like anything, you get better the more you do it, and working for a not-for-profit publisher has meant I’ve managed to get better [at writing] without worrying about a publisher dropping me because my first book sold less than it should have to make a profit.
I’m also someone who was heavily influenced by punk and DIY music and film scenes (including the Aro Digital Movement and Flying Nun)—there’s a real freedom in knowing that you can manage production and distro yourself, and you’re less at the mercy of third parties looking to clip the ticket. Plus it’s fun: we work together to get books out, usually while drinking, and there’s a real sense of community that undermines the usual idea of writers sitting alone in a garret.
No.4
You have a day job as a lawyer as well. How do you find time for writing, and what does your process look like?
My family has a terrible history of heart disease and I’ve had uncles die in their 40s and 50s of heart attacks (I’m now 41). I’ve also had family members die in the Sri Lankan Civil War, and my Amma, while pregnant with me, was almost killed in the Black July Riots. This sense that death could happen at any moment has led to a fairly unhealthy work ethic, given I don’t know when I could drop dead. It’s meant I’m driven to be the best writer I can be, while also working as a lawyer, so I don’t have to rely on my writing to make a living. I’m very lucky: I have great family support, a great employer, and a clear sense of purpose. I usually don’t write unless I’m itching to write and until I’ve got a clear plan—that helps me with writing under a constrained time environment, so I don’t waste the half hour or hour I get to write.
I’m also a writer who follows a routine, but that routine depends on the book. I plan each day when I’m writing. Each book is frequently written at the same time of day (Sprigs was written in my lunch break; Kartik Popat was written at night once I’ve got the kids down), and I often listen to the same song over and over again for each book, a kind of Pavlovian approach to using music to put me a writing trance and take me out of my environment. I’m also someone who believes in lots of edits—usually between 30 to 60 per book—so getting that first draft (the hardest part of writing for me) down no matter how poor it is, is more important than having a good first draft. I find I can manage and fit in edits much easier in my daily schedule.
I also keep reminding myself: no-one else, not even AI, is going to write my books for me.
No.5
On your Instagram account you note that Kartik Popat was influenced by books about “bad migrants” such as Huo Yan’s Dry Milk. What other similar books would you recommend to those who want to read about fictional bad migrants?
I love Dry Milk: it fully commits to its bad migrant protagonist, and its fearlessness gave me a lot of confidence to be ruthless in how I depict Kartik’s despicable nature.
Of course Nabokov does so (or John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor), but I did however struggle to think of many other bad migrant narratives from those with Asian backgrounds. My touchstones were also films that explored some of this territory—I thought of the films of Hong Sang-soo, Med Hondo’s Soleil O, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or Ulrich Seidl’s Love Trilogy. I would love some recommendations!
Find out more
Kartik Popat breezes through his teenage years despite having no friends. He has no time for his fellow Indians or immigrants. He wants to earn money, without doing any work. He dreams of being a filmmaker, but ends up working at Parliament, racing through the ranks of advisors and party hacks. As the Covid lockdown sets in, he learns that there are more grifts in the world, than doing a half-arsed job.
Mr Popat disputes all of the above characterisations.
The Life and Opinions of Kartik Popatcasts a sidelong glare at the rise of wannabe South Asian demagogues in Western democracies, and imagines a version fit for Aotearoa. The novel lampoons the concept of the model minority, as Kartik makes a mockery of representational politics and reacts to the echo chambers and political movements of the day.
Get it from Lawrence & Gibson here or from Brunswick Bound here.