On one of those nights when you usually look for something on TV to watch along with your dinner, I came across a news channel’s panel discussion – a rare well-moderated session on pornography. Certain members of a state government had been caught watching porn mid-assembly, and there were heated discussions across channels. There were only 2-3 people on this particular panel whose opinions were intelligent and nuanced, and one of them was Delhi-based vascular surgeon Dr. Ambarish Satwik. But I was more than intrigued when I heard he was also an author of pornographic fiction. Naturally, I had to check him out, and Google scrolled up the tantalisingly titled Perineum: Nether Parts of an Empire. I knew I had to get it.
Also, the guy is hot. Yeah, I’m shallow like that.
Apart from this Tehelka review, and an interview in The Hindu, nothing much of either Ambarish or the book is on the internet. Several online booksellers offer customer reviews at most, but nothing really detailed enough to give you an idea of where this book could sit on your bookshelf. Is it literary? Is it historical fiction? Is it light reading / popular fiction? None of those questions were answered for me when I decided to purchase it.
Also, book blurbs – overburdened and vague at best – label Satwik’s writing as “feverish fictions lit by Kafka, stage-managed by Manto” (by Mukul Kesavan). Another description inside says he concocts a “Borgesian fictional labyrinth” that just made me scoff in disbelief.
So over the last few months, I have been obsessing over a Soviet/Ukranian/Polish writer from the 1920s. He’s only been brought out of KGB cold storage into publication in the 80s, and translated into English only in the last 4-5 years. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, along with zhis unpronounceable last name, was a Pole, born in Ukraine who wrote entirely in Russian and never saw his work published in his lifetime.
In a Brown Study 