India comes good in Bad Sex in Fiction

London: It?s that time of the year again. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown and Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire are in the running for this year's 'Bad Sex in Fiction' award.

Perhaps the most dreaded of British literary prizes, the award was created by The Literary Review for the 'worst, most redundant or the most embarrassing description of physical intimacy in a novel'. The award, in its thirteenth year, is normally awarded in London's In and Out Club. The jury selects specific passages in the book that are chosen for their particular lack of taste.

Rushdie and Tejpal are the only Indian authors in the running for the award this year. Aniruddha Bahal had won the award in 2003 for his book Bunker 13.

Rushdie and Tejpal's book are two of the 11 titles short listed for this year's award. Others in the running include literary greats like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike and Paul Theroux.

The prize, which only targets works of fiction, aims "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".

The winner, who will be announced on December 1 at the In and Out Club, will win a semi-abstract statue representing sex in the 1950s and a bottle of champagne.

On the list:

The Olive Readers by Christine Aziz (Macmillan)

Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble (Dedalus Ltd)

Blinding Light by Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton)

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Jonathan Cape)

Lovers and Strangers by David Grossman (Bloomsbury)

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)

The First Casualty by Ben Elton (Bantam Press)

The Alchemy of Desire by Tarun Tejpal (Picador)

Winkler by Giles Coren (Jonathan Cape)

Fan Tan by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell (William Heinemann)

Villages by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton)

PAGE_BREAK

Excerpts

Salman Rushdie?s Shalimar the Clown (nominated for the 2005 awards)

" ... Let's, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let's not get carried away." In reply, Boonyi pulled her phiran and shirt off over her head and stood before him naked except for the little pot of fire hanging low, below her belly, heating further what was already hot. "Don't you treat me like a child," she said in a throaty voice that proved she had been unsparing in her drug abuse. "You think I went to all this trouble just for a kiddie-style session of lick and suck?"

Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire (nominated for the 2005 awards)

"Leaving everything else for later, I went looking for where her hair began and worked my way through its musky trails to where there was none. And having found her burning core, and having drunk of it, I left it, and wandered her body, only to keep circling back to it for sustenance.

We began to climb peaks and fall off them. We did old things in new ways. And new things in old ways. At times like these we were the work of surrealist masters. Any body part could be joined to any body part. And it would result in a masterpiece. Toe and tongue. Nipple and penis. Finger and the bud. Armpit and mouth. Nose and clitoris. Clavicle and gluteus maximus. Mons veneris and phallus indica."

Aniruddha Bahal?s Bunker 13 (winner 2003)

She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time...

"She picks up a Bugatti's momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen's steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she's eating up the road with all cylinders blazing..."