VTony D’Souza got the idea for his new book, The Konkans, a long time ago, but it was only recently that he felt ready to actually sit down and write it.
“The book is very close to my family history. I had all the details to tell the story, but I had to make it feel real,” he said. “The only way I could make readers want to turn the pages was to add detail that were not part of my history, but that spoke to the larger issues I was writing about.”
The Konkans tells the story of the D’Sai brothers, Lawrence and Sam, who relocate from India to Chicago to seek a better life, but who go about their quest in very different ways, one by denying his culture and one by embracing it. The story also deals with the woman from Detroit who is wife to Lawrence and mistress to Sam.
http://www.bostonnow.com/entertainment/books/2008/02/25/an-insider-view-of-indian-culture
“A lot of things I write about are things people do not want to talk about and I get frustrated with that,” said the author, who is the son of an Indian father and American mother. “To me, far too many authors romanticize India. All you hear about is yoga and Ghandi, when the truth is that for many people India is a degrading hellhole. I wanted to write a book that was more true about India.”
I’m focused on the end game of The Konkans, my new novel. Basically, this is a novel narrated in present time by the son of a white women and a Konkani man, thirty years removed, telling stories of immigration to the U.S., the history of the Konkans. The vehicle driving the book is the years-long affair of the narrator’s mother and uncle. The Konkans are the Catholic Indians of Goa that Portuguese colonization left behind. They collaborated with the British during the Raj, and the narrator explores the wrongs of his grandfather, who was a police commissioner for the British, and who tortured and killed Hindus to enrich himself. It’s about inherited guilt, race, immigration to America, and as always with me, sex. Half is set in Chicago, and half in India. As with Whiteman, readers will assume that I am the narrator. Fine with me. If it reads true, people think it must be. That’s a compliment. But just as with Whiteman, the vast majority of the book is imagined. I do draw heavily on my knowledge of what’s it’s like to be the son of a Konkan man and a white American woman, as that is in fact who I am. The book has all the energy of Whiteman, but is a very different book. It’s a little darker. I wrote most of it before I went on tour, and am finishing it now. I wrote articles for The New Yorker, Salon, Esquire, and a slew of other places in airport and hotel bars while on tour, by the way. I’ve discovered a lot about myself this year. One is that I can write on the road.
