novel
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A Strange and Sublime Address: Calcutta as it was
A Strange and Sublime Address vividly recalls Calcutta as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Amit Chaudhuri’s first novel, published in 1991, A Strange and Sublime Address tells the story of a Bengali boy’s visits to Calcutta. Ten-year-old Sandeep goes with his mother from Bombay (Mumbai) to Calcutta to spend his summer holidays at… Read more
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Martin Amis, 61 today, on ageing
Martin Amis is 61 today. Happy birthday. Here’s his own take on ageing from his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, published this year. Martin Amis – never amiss with words: This is the way it goes. In your mid-forties, you have your first crisis of mortality (death will not ignore me); and ten years later… Read more
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Good old writers
Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from… Read more
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Amit Chaudhuri, The Immortals
It’s been a long time coming. Except that Amit Chaudhuri wouldn’t have used those words sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The gifted Indian writer,who teaches contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, prefers Indian classical music. An accomplished singer himself, he pays homage to the music in The Immortals. Now don’t let… Read more
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A Truth Universally Acknowledged: About Jane Austen
Janeites will love A Truth Universally Acknowledged, a collection of essays by 33 famous writers and critics acknowledging the genius of Jane Austen. Her admirers will have the pleasure of discovering their feelings shared by writers like Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Somerset Maugham, CS Lewis, JB Priestley, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, David Lodge and critics… Read more
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William Golding tried to rape 15-year-old, made schoolboys fight
Will the Lord Of The Flies author William Golding now be remembered as a would-be rapist, asks the Guardian. Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, three years after bagging the Booker for Rites Of Passage, admitted trying to rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he was an 18-year-old student at Oxford, according to a… Read more
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The Singapore Grip
The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell Anyone who loves Singapore should read The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell. He won the Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur about the 1857 War of Indian Independence. The Singapore Grip is also a historical novel, describing Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion during… Read more
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Le Carre’s Most Wanted Man
A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre John Le Carre hates the “war on terror” and sympathizes with its victims. But he has let his feelings get the better of his art in A Most Wanted Man, for sympathy alone cannot animate the title character. Issa Karpov doesn’t come to life like George Smiley.… Read more
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The Widows of Eastwick
The Widows of Eastwick is a reminder of the extraordinary talent of John Updike. He died last month of cancer at the age of 76. This is his last book, published last year. But this doesn’t read like the work of an old man. It has all the zest for life and interest in sex… Read more
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