4 posts tagged “books”
I really enjoyed this book. So much that... I will launch into some hyperbole now...I think Maximum City is to Suketu Mehta what Taj Mahal was to Emperor Shah Jahan.
Throughout the time I was reading this book (and it took me weeks to get through the 400 odd pages) I was keenly aware of Suketu's love for the city. I felt that this deep love for the city is expressed in how he engages with each of the key players in the book. The reader truly gets to know these people and starts to get a sense of the city through these players.
I wish someone writes a book like this for my city: Delhi.
Until then these books will have to do:
In the search results, I found this article about about Yiyun.
I have been struggling to make sense of what disappoints me in most of the writing I come across here in the US. A passage from the article just explained it perfectly:
"McPherson's Southern accent flummoxed her -- "I couldn't understand most of what he said" -- but one particular point he made got through. In the Western world, and especially in America, he told the class, the focus is so much on the individual that "we have lost the community voice." But that voice is still present in writing from countries such as China and Japan.
Something clicked. Before long, Li was showing McPherson a story called "Immortality." Written from the point of view of an entire town, using the first person plural, its first sentence reads: "This story, as the story of every one of us, started long before we were born."
McPherson thought it was wonderful. "It's what a teacher lives for," he says."
Read the entire article: Will Words Fail Her?
Buy Yiyun Li's book
"Rajkumar was at a loss to understand this grief. He was, in a way, a feral creature, unaware that in certain places there exists invisible bonds linking people to one another through personifications of their commonality. In the Bengal of his birth those ties had been sundered by a century of conquest and no longer existed even as memory. Beyond the ties of blood, friendship and immediate reciprocity, Rajkumar recognized no loyalties, no obligations and no limit on the compass of his right to provide for himself. He reserved his trust and affection for those who earned it by concrete example and proven goodwill. Once earned, his loyalty was given wholeheartedly, with none of those unspoken provisions with which people usually guard against betrayal. In this too he was not unlike a creature that had returned to the wild. But that there should exist a universe of loyalties that was unrelated to himself and his own immediate needs--this was very nearly incomprehensible. "
Brilliant!
This extract from an article in the New Yorker about the Spanish Author Javier Marias is the best writing I've read in the past months:
....The first page of his novel "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me" (1994), for example, features this excursus on the misfortune, and humiliation, of sudden death:
Seafood poisoning, a cigarette lit as the person is drifting off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets or, worse, to a woollen blanket; a slip in the shower—the back of the head—the bathroom door locked; a lightning bolt that splits in two a tree planted in a broad avenue, a tree which, as it falls, crushes or slices off the head of a passer-by, possibly a foreigner; dying in your socks, or at the barber's, still wearing a voluminous smock, or in a whorehouse or at the dentist's; or eating fish and getting a bone stuck in your throat, choking to death like a child whose mother isn't there to save him by sticking a finger down his throat; or dying in the middle of shaving, with one cheek still covered in foam, half-shaven for all eternity, unless someone notices and finishes the job off out of aesthetic pity; not to mention life's most ignoble, hidden moments that people seldom mention once they are out of adolescence, simply because they no longer have an excuse to do so, although, of course, there are always those who insist on making jokes about them, never very funny jokes.
Into the two hundred and one words of this sentence, resourcefully translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Marías crams many tiny triumphs of imagination and elaboration: a slip in the shower enhanced by a locked door that protects no one; decapitation made oddly worse for happening on vacation; an incongruous postmortem shave made comically touching by the phrase "aesthetic pity"— piedad estética.
From:
A MAN WHO WASN'T THERE
by WYATT MASON
The clandestine greatness of Javier Marías.
Issue of 2005-11-14
Read the full article at: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051114crbo_books
