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More 'internalisations' by Kaavya
Published on Wed, May 03, 2006 at 07:36, Updated on Wed, May 03, 2006 at 08:45 in Entertainment section
Tags: Opal Mehta, Kaavya Vishwanathan , New York
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New York: First the celebration and then the fall to disgrace - Kaavya Viswanathan's two book deal with her publishers has fallen through.
Her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life has been permanently withdrawn by publishers.
It seems it took Kaavya Viswanathan a lot of reading to put together one Opal Mehta. And Megan McCafferty's books might not be the only inspiration.
The young author has gotten involved in a new plagarism controversy - this time with authors Meg Cabot and Salman Rushdie.
According to New York Times, passages in Kaavya's plagiarism-slapped Opal Mehta bear striking similiarities with those in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries.
Page 12 of Meg Cabot's 2000 novel "The Princess Diaries" reads:
"There isn't a single inch of me that hasn't been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized. Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blond highlights... I don't even know who I am anymore. It certainly isn't Mia Thermopolis. She's turning me into someone else."
And page 59 of Viswanathan's novel reads:
"Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized. I didn't look a thing like Opal Mehta. Opal Mehta didn't own five pairs of shoes so expensive they could have been traded in for a small sailboat. She didn't wear makeup or Manolo Blahniks or Chanel sunglasses or Habitual jeans or Le Perla bras. She never owned enough cashmere to make her concerned for the future of the Kazakhstani mountain goat population. I was turning into someone else."
In an exclusive interview to CNN-IBN, Author Salman Rushdie thought Kaavya's lapses as anything other than "unintentional and unconscious".
"I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidently or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are two extensive. And I am sorry that this young girl pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and no doubt by her own ambition should have fallen into this trap so early in her career. I hope she can recover from it," said Rushdie.
Imitation may be the best form of flattery, but Rushdie is clearly not impressed.
In Rushdie's novel, Haroun enters a bus depot and passes by several posters written on the walls surrounding the depot's courtyard.
Likewise, in Viswanathan's novel,Opal helps another student place posters on a wall that discourage drug and alcohol use.
The poster in Rushdie's novel reads: "If from speed you get your thrill / take precaution-make your will."
The poster in Kaavya's reads: "If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution-write your will."
Another one from Rushdie goes: "All the dangerous overtakers / end up safe as undertaker's."
It is matched by Kaavya's, "All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers."
For now the distributors of the novel have recalled all editions from the shelves and have said that future printings of her novel will be revised 'to eliminate any inappropriate similarities' to McCafferty's novels.
But at the rate at which more similarities are cropping up, it seems Viswanathan may have to begin from scratch to revise her book of "internalisations", as it were.
(With inputs from Atika Rao)
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