Tag: amitav ghosh (last 300)
Old-skool novelists
(WSJ) How Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, Junot Diaz write: mostly longhand, sometimes in the bathroom.
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(Guardian) ‘The White Tiger’ is the frontrunner for the Impac Dublin award, nominated by librarians and the most valuable one for a single English work. Longlisted: Rushdie, Kureishi, Ghosh, Anuradha Roy, Ruana Rajepakse, Jaspreet Singh. (ht: S)
Amitav Ghosh on NPR
A Sea of tulips, of orchids, of mogra, of gulmohur...
(TO Star) Ghosh has material for three or even nine more in a series. In town for the Festival of Authors, he discusses his work, his plans for the future and throws in some insights on multiculturalism and the opium wars. I missed it :-(
Melville wrote of lascars
(WSJ) Melville’s greatest book is his memoir of his trip to Liverpool as a boy called ‘Redburn.’ Indian sailors were ubiquitous but never written about. Melville was one of the very exceptions... ‘Can do’ is a direct translation from Cantonese.
Sea of metaphors
(New Yorker) Ghosh writes with imagination. A woman’s tooth protrudes ‘like a tilted gravestone’; an opium addict’s writhing spasms are akin to ‘looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack’.
‘White Tiger’ reinforces Indian stereotypes
(Aninditaghose) The fact that ‘The White Tiger’ triumphs over ‘Sea of Poppies’ (‘anti-imperial fiction’) speaks for national stereotypes, the politics of award ceremonies and most of all — imperialism. [Disagree.]
Tharoor on ‘Poppies’
(WaPo) Tharoor: In ‘Sea of Poppies,’ Ghosh’s Ibis sails in Joseph Conrad territory, but he relegates his British colonists to the margins. I can’t wait to see what happens to the transgendered mystic and dispossessed raja in the next volume.
Barry leads Booker bookies
(Google) Irish writer Sebastian Barry is the bookies’ favorite for tonight’s Booker announcement for ‘The Secret Scripture,’ a story of misery, memories and secrets in 1930s Ireland. Amitav Ghosh is favored second.
Sea of dilatory poppies
(BBC) ‘Sea of Poppies’: Amitav Ghosh may yet be responsible for a resurgence in ‘cacatorium’ and ‘puckrow.’ It’s not until three-quarters of the way in that we are actually on the ship.
Ghosh ‘master of insipid writing’
(Tomehome) Amitav Ghosh is supposed to be historically very authentic. But he’s also a master of insipid writing, the opposite of Salman Rushdie. ‘Glass Palace’ is the worst in this regard.
Amitav Ghosh continues to talk up Goa
(HT) Ghosh said he had been coming to Goa for 30 years, and one of the pleasures was “to have discovered the literary tradition". “I say this though I read neither Konkani nor Portuguese...." he commented.
Ghosh: British a disaster for India
(BBC) Amitav Ghosh: Before the British, India was one of the world’s great economies. For 200 years she dwindled into almost nothing. 25% of the world trade originated in India. By the time the Brits left it was less than 1%.
Ghosh’s motley lingo
(Indep) Discontinued as a ‘blackbirder’ with the abolition of the slave trade, the Ibis will transport girmitiyas — indentured coolies — to Mauritius. The novel features the mingling of Bhojpuri, Bengali, Laskari, Hindustani, Anglo-Indian words.
‘Sea of Poppies’ sprawls
(Economist) Set before the opium wars between Britain and China, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea of Poppies’ is a sprawling book — the Sudder Opium Factory with dead-eyed labourers slaving ‘as slow as ants in honey’ in air as fetid as a ‘closed kitchen.’