Booker nomination came as a surprise: Thayil

The Booker long-list nomination came as a surprise to Kerala-born poet-novelist Jeet Thayil who says his selected novel "Narcopolis", which talks of opium

dens and heroin addiction in Mumbai, is a secret history of the city.

"Yes, the Booker long-list nomination surprised me...An award is important in the sense that it is recognition for the work the writer has done, but, back at the desk, no award will reduce the usual anxiety," the 53-year old writer told us.

"Narcopolis" found a place among the 12 books long-listed for this year's 2012 Booker Prize. The list was announced last week by the Man Booker Prize committee in London. The shortlist of six authors will be announced on September 11, and the winner on October 16.

"Narcopolis", published by Faber and Faber, is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

For Thayil, a self-confessed former drug addict, "Narcopolis" is not an autobiographical first novel.

"There are enough of those in the world and I didn't want to add to the list. But it is personal in the sense that there is something at stake, something genuine and human," he says.

Thayil describes his book as a "secret history of Bombay" and the city's drug underworld as a narcopolis.

"Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story, and since I'm the one who's telling it and you don't know who I am, let me say that we'll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there¿s time enough not to hurry...," Thayil says in his book.

... contd.

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