Chachaji points us to this Time story on Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book which states the obvious:
Among the things you will not find in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction are: humor, suspense, cleverness, profound observations about life, vocabulary above the 10th-grade level, footnotes and typographical experiments. It is debatable whether her keyboard even has an exclamation point on […]
Why NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani can’t abide Salman Rushdie:
Kakutani appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do. Here, she tries to energize [her own] prose with lapel-grabbing intensifiers like utterly and wonderfully and […]
Received this email today:
The subject line? **JUNK**
My spam filter has surprisingly good taste.
Previously: ‘Five Point Someone’, Beware Indian mass-market fiction
One and a half months ago, 23-year-old math prodigy Sufiah Yusof was exposed by a British tabloid earning a living as a call girl. She entered Oxford as a 13-year-old, dropped out after a year and demanded to be placed with a foster family because of her tyrannical father.
Nikita Lalwani builds her Booker-nominated novel […]
Sir Vidya once slagged off his former friend Paul Theroux, who retaliated by writing a poison pen memoir. After reading Theroux’ latest collection, I’m afraid Naipaul had the right idea. The Elephanta Suite, a three-novella collection linked by an eponymous luxury suite at a Bombay hotel, is full of tell-not-show summary and pages of philosophy […]
Finally finished the book Charlie Wilson’s War, a sprawling, 500-page work about the Soviet war in Afghanistan published in ‘03, and the tale it tells is wild.
The war
The most successful Islamic jihad in modern history, Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, was run by the CIA, which along with the Saudis pumped in up to ~$800M/year over […]
The narrator of Hanif Kureishi’s new novel Something to Tell You is Jamal. He is half Pakistani-half English, slim, sexy and successful. Before becoming an analyst of the Freudian variety, he directed pornos, was beaten up by his sister Miriam, murdered a man and had a nervous breakdown (not in that order so don’t look […]
Here are some key excerpts from Aravind Adiga’s excellent class revenge opus The White Tiger. On what fuels the Dickensian bitterness of the Indian underclass. How servants are kept in line:
He must have phoned his man in Laxmangarh… ‘He’s got a good family. They’ve never made any trouble… No history of supporting Naxals or other […]
Bodhi Art Gallery organises talks with reasonable regularity. It is generally sparsely attended. A good show is one where 80% of the chairs are occupied. Yesterday, critic Ranjit Hoskote was in conversation with Atul Dodiya, one of the few artists who can cheerfully call himself a figurative painter without any fear of being outdated, and […]
The White Tiger: Jai’s nailed it, Aravind Adiga’s novel is solid. Corrosive first person voice is like Animal’s People. A howl of anger, Richard Wright’s Native Son transported to Delhi. For anyone who’s wondered how what life as Indian underclass, as part of the ‘Darkness,’ the opposite of India Shining, is really like. Tips on […]
The jacket of Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger carries a blurb by Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, and reading the book it struck me that the narrative framework is similar to that of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. That novella took…
Longtime readers will be familiar with my sentiments on sari covers and mangoxotic titles. I approached my friend V.V. ‘Sugi’ Ganeshananthan’s new novel Love Marriage with some trepidation. Fortunately, the innards belie the sari wrapper. This is not curry lit.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this book — my loyalties lie more with its smart, personable […]
Inspired by Neale, I went to Anu Garg’s Internet Anagram Server, which also works out to I, Rearrangement Servant, to see what khichdi could be made of famous authors’ names:
Jhumpa Lahiri: a prim jail, huh
Her given name, Nilanjana Lahiri:
a halal rain jinnihi, anal ninja liar
Vikram Chandra: vain, dark charm
Salman Rushdie’s are more voluble:
slushier admanlush adman, […]
It all began, as it often does with a Bengali that isn’t from the Boston area, with fish and flights of fancy. It was two years after a book had been excitedly smuggled into our house and read at top speed by my dad because it had to be returned to its rightful owner within […]
Travel writer and veteran Time journalist Pico Iyer stopped by Harvard Book Store tonight to read from his new book The Open Road, a profile of the Dalai Lama. He said that five years ago when he began his book, he planned its release for this spring because he knew Tibetans would be protesting […]
In fiction at least, if not in Hollywood, desi doctors get to anchor ER teams. Take Bloodletting & Miracle Cures, the Giller Prize-winning story collection by young ER doc Vincent Lam, and his character Sri, M.D.:
Winner of Canada’s Giller Prize, Lam… an emergency room physician, looks beyond blood and guts… Fitz (short for Fitzgerald) has […]
Book editor Anjali Singh acquired Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and translated her later graphic novel Chicken With Plums from French. She’s soon publishing a graphic novel written by my college buddy, filmmaker Keshni Kashyap:
Singh also plans to publish an original graphic novel tentatively called Tina’s Mouth, written by Keshni Kashyap, a screenwriter, and illustrated by Mari […]
Every Jhumpa story ever, until the very last:
A professor A surgeon An architect An engineer in Cambridge Lexington Brookline with a Ph.D. master’s from Harvard Yale MIT Cornell Swarthmore Bryn MawrWilliams grapples with Bengaliness in a dreary suburban relationship with a charming white personan arranged-marriage dweeb.
Oh, how I’ve longed for my very own literary feud. Rushdie-Greer, Naipaul-Theroux, Amis-Eagleton sniping from highfalutin’ British papers and lit mags. And now I have one! A bloodthirsty throwdown between British author Nirpal Dhaliwal, Bombay UB contributor AnonAndOn and me. It takes place not in the London Review of Books, but rather in Tehelka and, […]
I was a bit harsh with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions when I mentioned it in an earlier post. Having sped-read it at the time (out of idle curiosity, not for a review), my rough impression was that the narrative lacked intensity…