Minimalism. It's Good.

Buku Sarkar Makes the Case for Clarity and Simplicity

Dear Republic,

We continue our exchange on maximalism v. minimalism, purple prose v. beige, wild pyrotechnics v. le mot juste et simple.

-ROL

MINIMALISM. IT’S GOOD.

I was trying to explain to my brother-in-law, the exquisite meaning of the French word Incroyable, which is grossly different from its English counterpart incredible. For one, the French don’t throw around the word Incroyable as flippantly as one does incredible in English. If it’s Incroyable, it really is Incroyable. It’s so Incroyable I decided it requires the capital ‘I’.

I was accused of turning into a Frenglish speaking expat.

What I was trying to get at is the subtlety and nuance of words, which, having recently transplanted to Paris, I am more sensitive to these days.

Genteel.

When you call someone Genteel in French, you are really telling them that they are very kind, in a very genuine, benevolent way. Almost as if they were Florence Nightingale reincarnated. It comes from the abdomen in a way that ‘gentle’ does not. Its utterance is light but it carries a kind of substance its English counterpart simply cannot.

Why am I telling you these things? Because words, the exact words, the very precision of words, is what differentiates an average piece of writing from a good one.

I was trying to write my own memoirs of living with illness for twelve years. But I just couldn’t find a way in. Not even the first sentence. All I knew was that I want to, I must, write about these sometimes horrifying, sometimes amusing events.

Six years later, I discovered Annie Ernaux. It was 2018, or 2019. I cannot remember. Maybe the first lockdown of Covid.

The book was Happening, which I discovered by chance —I used to blindly buy anything her publisher, Fitzcarraldo Press, published.

I went on to buy The Years and three others.

There is one paragraph in Happening that I will never forget. She writes:

I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside me…Above all I shall endeavor to revisit every single image until I feel that I have physically bonded with it. Until a few words spring forth of which I can say, ‘yes, that’s it.’

This, I realized, was how I had to write my own saga. Not with nostalgia but almost through a stone wall. That the only way to write about something one couldn’t speak of was through its absence, a kind of silence.

Happening is a short account of Ernaux’s abortion as a young woman, at a time when it was illegal in France. The book spans only those three months of her life and contains some gruesome details. There was not a mention of the word trauma in it.

Instead, in very plain, staid, un-Didion like language, she observes names of streets on placards, a couple kissing on the sidewalk, a teapot in the house of the woman who would perform the brutal abortion.

There is something in her sparse, plain tone that speaks more powerfully of the absence of the thing (trauma) itself.

By describing these staccato-like images, Ernaux writes about feeling shock, not what is actually shocking. She writes:

To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as ‘I’m expecting,’ ‘pregnant’ or ‘pregnancy.’ They endorsed a future event that would never materialize. There was no point naming something that I was planning to get rid of. In my diary I would write, ‘it’ or ‘that thing,’ only once ‘pregnant.’

This silence, this linguistic void, is crucial to how trauma operates in the book. When we are in crisis, when our world has suddenly shifted beneath us, we often become hyper-aware of small, inconsequential details while the larger reality remains too enormous.

At the climax of the book, when Ernaux visits the woman who will perform the illegal abortion, she writes:

I can’t remember how long it took her to insert the probe. I was crying. It had stopped hurting, now I just felt a weight in my stomach…We both drank coffee in the kitchen. She too was glad it was over. I don’t recall handing over the money.

That’s it. The trauma was touched. Lightly. By a gentle almost non existent pressure of the index finger.

There.

Now away.

By the end of the hundred pages, Happening speaks of something so much larger than just her botched-up abortion—it speaks of a time in France in the sixties when abortion was illegal; it speaks of a bourgeois Paris; in fact it draws the entire map of Paris, street corner by street corner.

“Between finding the right words or a beautiful expression, I choose the right words,” Annie said.

That is what makes the book immense.

I often feel that bad writing reflects an inflated ego—or perhaps uncertainty on one side of the spectrum and laziness on the other. If you are confident, you do not try to impress. If you take time to think before putting down a sentence, you wouldn’t use jargons as crutches and every terminology you have come across in a pamphlet from a museum: impressionism, juxtaposition, duality, expressionism.

Please kill me as I cry.

What really does duality in life experience mean? How would you explain it to a little child? You might say: well, I grew up in one country but my father and mother were from somewhere else. So I am from two places and there is two of me. A little of this place and a little of that.

There is a problem with books written in the English language today. And I’m not fully sure why. Novels full of grand metaphors, proclaiming themselves to be Neo-post modern—or wherever we are in the ‘post’ world today (I’ve long lost track). A friend of mine reminded me: the minute you put terms like ‘Post’ and ‘Neo’ in your writing, you’re in trouble already.

What he meant was—as a writer, you really cannot be thinking in academic rhetorics. It’ll ruin you. Which is why I often think academia is a plague for any creative artist. In fact, in many ways, studying literature—at a (higher) academic level—is anti fiction writing.

When I was working on my MFA dissertation and struggling with what I thought was a grand metaphor, my advisor, the head of the program, told me: you will labour over these metaphors till you die but ultimately no one but you will know they exist.

Major prizes like the Booker and consequentially publishers, agents and writing programs now encourage a certain kind of book. The ‘big book’— the kind of book that addresses all the existing world problems in bullet points.

The Booker judges themselves complained that many recent submissions were “too long-winded…it felt as if inside the book we read was a better one—sometimes a thinner one—wildly signalling to be let out.”

Data back them up: early Booker winners averaged c. 300 pages; the past decade hovers near 520 pages, with some topping 800.

As a young college student who never went to class, I spent most of my college days at Peter Mayer’s Overlook Press, post his days at Penguin.

Peter was a terror who made every single adult in that office cry. Luckily in all my time there, I managed to squat behind bookshelves every time I heard his footsteps and escaped humiliation.

They would tease me at the office—so when are you writing The Great American Novel? I had always wanted to be a writer (working in publishing muted that dream for some time) but I hadn’t heard this terminology before, not in India —The Great American Novel. Nor did I know that a writer was expected to write one.

I simply wanted to write because that’s what I did, and I wanted to emulate the writers I read—some of them Bengali, whom the world had never heard of. So, yes, although I aspired to be read by the world, I never aspired to write anything that would change the world.

Perhaps this sort of grand aspiration is what creates a certain kind of book that one can read fifty pages of. A kind of disengaged book because the writer is always thinking of the larger picture as, consequently, the humanness of the book suffers.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of Emperor of Maladies and a doctor himself, said that, after all, the opposite of anesthetic is aesthetic.

Think micro, micro, micro—like Alice Munro—and what you’re writing will automatically speak of a larger context.

“The complexity of things—the things within things—just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple,” she said.

And so, like Annie, she focuses on what might seem to many readers— insignificant: a kitchen quarrel, a misaddressed letter. But, take five of her stories— the little droplets of water together —and a larger world emerges: class, gender, history.

Munro and Ernaux both tackle the notions of memory, illness, class—subjects easily swamped by rhetoric.

In the end, the power of their writing comes from its understanding that sometimes the most truthful way to speak about the unspeakable is through the careful arrangement of silence, through the precise placement of what can be said around the vastness of what cannot. Ernaux shows us that shock is not just what happens, but something lived, breathed, noticed, documented in the smallest persistence of being human when being human becomes almost impossible to bear.

I have the misfortune to teach a course called Writing for Visual Artists and it does my head in because visual artists of any discipline cannot articulate themselves in words. It’s not their fault. Visual imagery comes from a very different part of one’s brain than words do. It comes from the part of the brain a child uses to associate words with objects. It’s instinctive, spontaneous, whereas writing a sentence requires a more constructed and thought-out approach.

The first thing I tell them in the class is:

When writing your artist’s statement, please do not say: My art is a way of survival.

Please do not do this.

An artist’s statement should add to, not summarize, their work. It is like stepping out of your little world and inviting others in.

This is no different when writing an essay—remember, you are inviting the reader into your world.

Louise Bourgeois said: “An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or wished to express when he began.”

The goal of good writing ought to be— how do you get the attention of someone who may not be interested in this subject matter. And one of the crucial answers should be— clarity. But the first clarity is within yourself. If that happens, language will flow naturally.

The trouble is, to write simply is the hardest thing of all, which is why writing is often filled with banalities and clichés. To write simply means to completely and intrinsically understand what you are trying to say.

Here are some sentences I’ve come across in artists’ statements that make me want to fling the paper across the room:

My art is a minimalist approach to…

Sorry, you’ve lost me already. I’m so bored I’m going to go to the next letter.

Art is a way of life for me….

Oh dear. I feel terribly sorry for you because if you don’t have another life, what are you bringing into your art?

I believe we can see beautiful art everywhere we look. I believe that by opening people to new experiences and ideas, it can open their arts to others.

Or destroy their nervous systems forever.

There is an essay I read, a long time ago in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande.

It was about the healthcare system in America—a subject I had zero interest in. In the essay, he compares the way the healthcare system works to that of a cheesecake factory.

It was so riveting I read the entire essay in one sitting and since then began to read every piece of his in the magazine.

He could have easily slipped into medical speak and turned the essay into a text book.

But he doesn’t. He does not try to sound smart. He writes by assuming that his audience knows nothing.

If this sounds easy, it’s not. Most of the time I see sentences blazing with jargons and five syllable words that make a part of my brain shut down. A foggy sentence only reflects a foggy mind.

Filmmaker Satyajit Ray, too, once said, “I believe in the power of simplicity; it is often where the true beauty lies.”

I tell my students—write the way you would explain something to a young child. Write how you would tell them what death means. Or sadness.

I tell my students—you want to learn how to write?

So tell me a story.

Buku Sarkar is a writer/photographer from Calcutta and New York. Her collection of stories Not Quite a Disaster After All is forthcoming Fall '25, (Flowersong Press). Her first collection of poetry is forthcoming Dec '25 (HarperCollins).