book reviews

My discovery of Maitreyi Devi happened, probably like so many outside of India, through Mircea Eliade’s novel which I read in French, La nuit Bengali, written in 1933 three years after this Romanian scholar, who later rose to become an influential ethnologist...

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Woman to woman is the first book I read by Madhulika Liddle. She’s written more, of which I had been aware, since I read her blog where she had mentioned them, but for some reason I had relented until now. It’s a quickly read collection of 12 short stories,...

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For those who need the summary of the story, please check Goodreads. The Good Indian wife is a novel of many qualities, in spite of a few flaws, perhaps because it’s Anne Cherian’s first. First a simple but effective story, based on a simple theme: can...

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The little world of The sari shop (2003) feels very familiar; Rupa Bajwa clearly belongs to it, not only because she’s from Amritsar, where the scene takes place exclusively, but also because she’s on the side of the crowds of people who mill around its...

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Here’s an addition to my collection of reviews of R.K. Narayan’s novels: Mr Sampath, the printer of Malgudi (first published in 1949). As usual with Narayan, what’s most pleasant is his style, the brisk eventfulness which he masterfully conveys, and how...

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Famous, witty, challenging… and brilliant in the way some works of genius are, but Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie pleases and displeases at the same time. It certainly strikes the reader as a fascinating work of art, technically and stylistically;...

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The 2008 collection of short stories entitled « Unaccustomed Earth » by author Jhumpa Lahiri, well-known for her novel The namesake, which Mira Nair shot in 2006, has the unusual quality of being (in fact) a collection of little novels, rather than actual...

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This is a lovely, very readable, and at the same time, a rather unusual little book. Unusual because it doesn’t follow the common pattern of what might be expected from such entertainers. It gears itself towards an all-important cricket match, which the...

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I am not sure I shall be able to do justice to Khushwant Singh’s little novel (published in 1956). It seems both too simple, too factual, and so because of that, too deeply rooted in Indian history and drama (for those who need the plot, go here ). Not...

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Have you heard of an author called Heather Wood ? Have you heard about this book “Third-class ticket” (1980)? No? Neither had I, until recently. But someone gave it to me, suggesting it might be interesting to read, and I took it along with me during...

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The reluctant fundamentalist is a strange and powerful little book. It’s clearly got some autobiographical elements in it, and because of that has manage to net some darting fishes of life that jump and flash and look up from their prison wondering what...

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T here are two « mysteries » in Rohinton Mistry’s 2002 novel Family Matters. One concerns the character of Nariman Vakeel, the 79 year old Professor suffering from Parkinson and osteoporosis, who lives with his two adult unmarried step-children, Jal and...

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The white tiger is a rare genetic variation of the normally ochre-skinned feline that is both feared and respected as the king of animals in Asia. But it’s also a 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga which the press has acclaimed and which I’ve just finished reading....

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R.K. Narayan’s short novel The vendor of sweets (1967) is the story of a wise man, called Jagan, who lives in the narayanian town of Malgudi and prospers by selling quality sweetmeats appreciated because they aren’t overpriced or watered down with cheap...

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Memories of rain, by Sunetra Gupta (1993) is a dark jewel of a book, a sombre and dense memorial stone made of darkness and yearning, frustration and anger. We are inside a sort of cenotaph: a young Bengali woman’s stream of consciousness and we never...

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