SUPERHUMANS AND STANDARD GODS
Ashok Banker's Krishna Coriolis Samit Basu's Turbulence is that customer-friendly thing—a racy read. Several hundred passengers on a flight from London to Delhi are suddenly endowed with superpowers—they miraculously become what they’ve always wanted to be. Basu leaves out the backstory—not just the previous lives of these once-ordinary people, but also their transformation into airborne gods. He cuts straight to the action. [Read full review in The Caravan, March 2011] _____________________________ YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION Dilip Simeon's Revolution Highway How best to write historical revolutions into fiction? Gustave Flaubert showed us one way in his grand 19th-century bildungsroman, Sentimental Education , in which events and ideas of great national significance are—seen through the novelist’s impartial eye—at par with private dreams about interior decoration. Protagonist Frederic and his friend Deslauriers are walking down a Parisian street, the latter declaiming nostalgically about one of the heroes of the French Revolution, Camille Desmoulins. Meanwhile Frederic, who has recently come into a large inheritance, is, unheeding of his friend, “looking at certain materials and articles of furniture in the shop-windows which would be suitable for his new residence.” [Read full review in The Caravan, January 2011] __________________ THE AMERICAN DREAM 0.0 HM Naqvi's Home Boy Tania James' Atlas of Unknowns Rahul Mehta's Quarantine What, exactly—“right here, right now, today, in the twenty-first century US of A,” as the rap song goes in HM Naqvi’s Home Boy—is the American Dream? [Read full review The Caravan, September 2010] ___________________ THE OUTSIDER Upamanyu Chatterjee's Way to Go In Upamanyu Chatterjee's 1993 novel, The Last Burden, the 20-something Jamun recalls a Faustian moment: he had once offered to take care of his parents until their death if they made over all their money to him. His father, Shyamanand, dismisses the idea, so Jamun says gravely, “Even when I urgently need money, I shall not thumb yours. When you feverishly need me, I won’t be within reach.” [Read full review The Caravan, June 2010] ______________ THE SYMPATHETIC IRONIST Eunice de Souza's Necklace of Skulls Late in her A Necklace of Skulls, Eunice de Souza says, “We push so much under the carpet—/ the carpet’s now a landscape/ A worm embedded in each tuft/ There’s a forest moving.” We’re almost a hundred pages in so can at this point say with confidence that de Souza’s poetry has a great deal to do with this metaphorical, infested carpet. [Read full review in The Caravan, April 2010] ________ CRACKING THE FROZEN SEA JM Coetzee's Summertime Do you really believe that books give meaning to our lives, John Coetzee asks his lover Julia in Summertime. “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us,” says Julia, paraphrasing Franz Kafka. The question Summertime asks but does not answer is: what if it is the novelist’s heart that is the frozen sea? Is it possible then to still hold to Kafka’s view about the power of fiction? [Read full review in the The Caravan, January 2010] _____________ OF YARNS AND YEARNING Parismita Singh's The Hotel at the End of the World Once while on the island of Majuli on the Brahmaputra, with the mist rising and slender canoes laden with earthen pots sailing past with regal slowness, I found myself in a forlorn dhaba at lunchtime. There seemed to be nothing for miles around except this rickety shack, with its walls of weather-beaten, plaited bamboo strips, and the great sea of the river. “Will you make us some omelettes?” said my companion to the boy who had been asleep on a bench. The boy looked at us with great weariness and finally answered, as if sharing classified information, “For omelettes you need eggs.” [Read full review in Biblio, Sept-Oct, 2009] _________________________ WALKING THE WORLD Junot Diaz's Drown
Diaspora narratives tend to be double mirrors. Thrown into relief against foreign backgrounds, characters become self-aware in new ways – they start watching themselves and we watch them watching themselves. Via writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, one has come to think of this as a necessary, if sometimes wearying, self-consciousness, but Junot Diaz’s American stories about Dominicans show that it is dispensable. None of his characters ever tries to encapsulate North America or his life in it. Diaz avoids all philosophising about identity and instead conveys everything through the grittier material of first-hand experience – the experience of people always learning to “walk the world”.
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