Saturday, November 07, 2009

Some reviews

Soutik Biswas discusses Dalrymple's 'Nine Lives' in Faith and Pelf and Dilip D'Souza points to some of the lapses in the book India Untold . Dilip's comment:
"Nine Lives is proof that Dalrymple knows this country better than most Indians, but it also displays a creeping complacency in writing about it."
Amitava Kumar and V.V. Ganeshananthan discuss South Asian diaspora literature, war, and conflict—and their fiction selections for Guernica in I Don’t Want To Fight:
"Amitava Kumar: You are asking what is South Asian writing. It is fiction which has at least three of the following: a large family or two, arranged marriage, misery, some violence, Bollywood, the interior design of nostalgia which uses the furniture of loss. You can choose the stylistic beverage-to-go: verbal exuberance or hushed poetry.

This is a caricature. But only partly. Give me an example of a novel you’ve read recently by a South Asian or about South Asia that departs from this model."

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