Books

Those Dog-Eared Bookmarks

<i>Outlook</i>’s best reviewers have never been overawed by the heft of an author on the literary scales. Read and savour.

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Those Dog-Eared Bookmarks
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Debut or swan song, prize-winner or advance-clincher, if it has a spine and something to say, it’s review-worthy. Over 15 years, Outlook’s best reviewers have been critical and celebratory, appreciative and acerbic; always insightful, often witty, never overawed by the heft of an author on the literary scales. Read and savour.

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Photograph by Jitender Gupta

An Equal Music | Vikram Seth
When I read Anna Karenina I loathed Anna and her lover Vronsky; the only reason to read that book is Levin's story. There are a few novels like that, which tell two reasonably separate stories and readers sometimes love one and hate the other. Vikram Seth's An Equal Music belongs to that list.

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A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry
The Emergency probably only encapsulated the basic savagery of survival in Indian life. Even for attempting to say this one thing, I gave Mistry full marks in the first 500 pages of the book. Mistry has the detailed descriptive passion of Balzac but doesn't quite possess the fire to raise prose to meaningful drama. Still, Mistry is an artist and, as you suffer the long description of Bombay life and Parsi idiosyncrasies (probably meant for the West), you bear it all for the sake of the first good novel about one of the most traumatic events of the century.

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The Road Ahead |  Bill Gates
Gates is no software guru; he is the shrewdest businessman on earth, who creates huge marketing successes out of other people's inventions. In The Road Ahead, Gates has used the vision of hundreds of scientists little known outside the field, especially from PARC and the MIT Media Lab, coalesced them into a carefully structured pseudo-treatise, and negotiated the biggest book deal of the century.

Full Disclosure | Andrew Neil
To be deemed successful, post-modern editors know that the stories must come, the bottomline sing, and the telephone wires hum—with celebrity invites. No longer are they cultured Oxbridgish pontificators from book-lined offices. Now they are working class busybodies, who have to manage, write, network, and posture in public. The post-modern editor is the most adulterated of professionals: part-politician, part-scholar, part-businessman, and part-social butterfly. In a word, his life story is interesting.

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Photograph by Getty Images. (From Outlook, November 01, 2010)

The Ground Beneath Her Feet | Salman Rushdie
With its banal obsessions and empty bombast, its pseudo-characters and non-events, its fundamental shapelessness and incoherence, The Ground Beneath Her Feet does little more than echo the great noise of the modern world; and in doing so it not only ceases to be literature but invites scrutiny as an alarming new kind of anti-literature.

The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy
Only fools read fiction for a reproduction of life and only phonies tear themselves to bits deconstructing novels. What most readers, this one included, demand of a good novel is a successful condensation of life, an intensification, even an illusion of the world around us. If that is one definition of the pleasure of reading, The God of Small Things is a very good book indeed…
Roy has a tendency to be carried away by her gifts…Many of the descriptive passages of the Ayemenen house, the river and the turning of the southern seasons are lovely. But I must confess that the repeated wordplay began to fizzle out for me after a while, as some of the metaphors flew out of control (“history's twisted chickens would come home to roost”) and the continuous use of capital letters began to set my teeth on edge.

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Photograph by T.Narayan

The Argumentative Indian | Amartya Sen
...one closes this stimulating book wishing that Sen would say more, from his unique vantage point, about the more unprecedented aspects of globalisation today—the all-powerful forms of corporate capitalism, for instance—that threaten much of what he cherishes….

The Idea of India | Sunil Khilnani
Khilnani's caffeine-rich narrative of the last 50 years is, mercifully, not slavishly chronological, decade after dreary decade. It is indeed in the nature of the enterprise that he is forced to operate at a variable distance from his area of expertise and commitment. Thus, whenever he is writing about Nehru or the Nehruvian era, he is consistently perceptive, pungent, insightful. But as he moves away from that obviously beloved zone, even his considerable gift of apt phrasing and poetic concentration is sometimes insufficient to prevent him from slipping into a journalistic montage of all the things you've always known but didn't think anyone would ever bother to ask.

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Alok Rai, 1997

Raga Mala | Ravi Shankar
You can even inhale the maestro's favourite incense provided with the book and the CDs. But grace does not come cheap for collectors and aficionados, at Rs 19,995 for a limited edition of 2,000 copies personally signed by the living legend himself.

Aparajito | Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay | Translated by Gopa Mazumdar
The author of Aparajito can't appear on television chat shows because he died nearly half a century ago. A book launch in the capital is out of question because no advance in hard currency has been offered for the book. The review circuit in London or New York has not told us what to think of this novel. Consequently one of the major fictional texts of our century is likely to remain unnoticed by the media even though it is available in English now.

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The Gin Drinkers | Sagarika Ghose
And, er, breasts quivering "like upright kulfis", is Pretty Bad Sex.

Global Soul | Pico Iyer
How does Iyer make the grade as a Global Soul? Easy: "because, having grown up simultaneously in three cultures [Indian, English and American], none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the sense of being loosed from time as much as from space....I had no history, and lived under the burden of no home...." Give me a break! So he's an nri. A bbcd. So he has a gazillion frequent flyer miles. He has a girlfriend in Japan and a friend who once had a mile high experience. Who cares?

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Photograph by Narendra Bisht

The Inheritance of Loss | Kiran Desai
Despite its lugubrious title, Inheritance...is a paean to Kalimpong. Not just the magical Kanchenjunga but the very mould on the damp clothes in Cho Oyu achieves real presence. Desai's eye for detail is meticulous, but her rich fund of humour makes her images delightfully spontaneous. The luxurious prose almost makes up for the novel's lack of emotional heft.... Definitely a book to hoard and cherish.

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Photograph by Prashant Panjiar

A Writer’s People—Ways of Seeing and Feeling | V.S. Naipaul
There is a tragedy here. As Philip Roth has so dramatically shown, old age need not mean the end of a great writer's productivity. Humility, energy and ambition can still spur even the finest writer to attempt to scale ever greater peaks. Naipaul, in contrast, has died as a writer: the more he writes about his calling, the more impotent his pen seems to have become. The wisdom, the warmth, the humour and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose; and what we are left with now is only the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain.

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The Alchemy of Desire | Tarun Tejpal
There is sex heterosexual, homosexual, voyeuristic, bestial, quasi-tantric, onanistic, even sex with ghosts; sex in bedrooms, bathrooms, under trees, over tables: sex withheld, sex embraced; brusque couplings, long, multiple-orgasmic symphonies; there is even a rape—by a hysterically enraged Sikh driver of his broken-down antique of a bus. Almost every page seethes with erotic overtones, undertones, and mid-tones. Tejpal makes even toothache sexy: "Throb, ebb. Pain, peace. Throb, ebb."

Anita Roy, 2005

The Impressionist | Hari Kunzru
There are two things you need to put aside in order to read Hari Kunzru's first novel, The Impressionist. The first is the hoopla about the huge advance he has received, and the second is the shitty pink and gold cover his publishers have felt obliged to gild their lily with. If you are an Indian reader then there is possibly a third divestment...the idea that this is an ‘Indian’ writer writing an ‘Indian’ novel in English.Get rid of the white noise, begin to read and it is likely that you will be reminded of why one reads novels in the first place—diversion and enjoyment.

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The Last Song of Dusk | Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi
Some reviewers, presumably to save themselves the trouble of writing down the full title, have nicknamed this book LSD. It is curiously apposite, for parts of it read as though they were written under the influence of that interesting substance. LSD is ingested by letting it melt on the tongue or sucking it. Many have praised the book and the author too copiously. One might say that it and he have made suckers of them all.

Night River: Poems | Keki N. Daruwala
It’s the height of crassness to associate poetry with price tags, and yet this one was glaring. Ninety-five bucks is less than the current price of admission to a Hollywood blockbuster at most Delhi theatres; but it's enough to gain the reader access to the first volume of poetry Keki Daruwalla has published in five years. Forget watching What Lies Beneath and Gladiator; this is a better way to spend three hours.

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Photograph by Narendra Bisht

Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence | Jaswant Singh
It is less heartfelt admiration of Mohammed Ali Jinnah than visceral dislike of Jawaharlal Nehru that drives this book. It makes one wonder what makes Jaswant so disparage Panditji. Perhaps psychiatrists might tell us whether emotion overcame young Major Jaswant Singh as he faced the Chinese hordes swarming into the North-East Frontier Agency in the autumn of 1962.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives | Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni
NRI nostalgia-trips are bad enough, but when they’re couched in this getting-in-touch-with-your-inner-Indian Californian therapy speak, my inner Fascist will out. For a start, Chitra, the rhetorical questions you are posing are not illustrative of ‘tenses’, exact or otherwise;  secondly, aftershave lingers on bedsheets, not in them; and finally, what precisely is a heart warp?

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Anita Roy, 2001

Spouse: The Truth About Marriage | Shobhaa De
Shobhaa De is eminently qualified to write on man-woman relationships and the pitfalls of matrimony. Her latest St Valentine's Day gift to her innumerable admirers is a box of mithai with her motto: “If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.”

Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince | J.K. Rowling
By now, you've either read HP6, are reading it, waiting for your kid to finish it, or are fulminating against Pottermania. Never has a book been less in need of reviewing.

India After Gandhi | Ramachandra Guha
Most of our academics—historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists—seem to think that profundity of thought is best reflected by prolixity of expression. Guha, like the man he admires most in academics, Andre Beteille, is an exception, and this book is testimony to that.

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Fireproof | Raj Kamal Jha
[On a bare stage, a book, Raj Kamal Jha's FIREPROOF, and the REVIEWER]
Reviewer: Well, Book! What do you think of this approach to your review? I'm imitating your technique, avoiding straightforward prose for something more creative....
Fireproof: I don't like it. It's distracting.
R: Hmmm. Funny you should say that.

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Photograph by Getty Images. (From Outlook, November 01, 2010)

The White Tiger | Aravind Adiga
The tone of the writing is breezy-absurd, which means we can’t hold the writer accountable for anything that happens in the book. Two-foot-long geckos and corpses whose toes send messages from beyond the pyre? No problem....Echoes of the Indo-internationalist club of literature can be heard throughout. I discerned traces of Kiran Nagarkar's Ravan & Eddie in the compassion for the underdog, I. Allan Sealy in the irony, Salman Rushdie in the surreal flourishes. But the composite result has none of the genius of these authors, neither the complexity of plot, nor the brilliant command of language, nor the depth of vision. Yes, the India Shining image that so many of us find nauseating in its dishonesty and complacency deserves to be reviled. But is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?

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The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems | Agha Shahid Ali
“.…There is really very little to be said about The Veiled Suite, Agha Shahid Ali’s collected poems, beyond this: go get it!”

Alok Rai, 2010

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