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Books
Indian
Writers
 Clear
Light of Day
Anita Desai
Houghton Mifflin Company; September 2000
ISBN: 0618074511
Format: Paperback, 192pp
Set
in India's Old Delhi, Clear Light of Day is Anita
Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family
scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and
tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the
moving relationships between the members of the Das family,
who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied
but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her
childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged
brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious, estranged
sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their
popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns
for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions
resurface and blend into a domestic drama that is intensely
beautiful and leads to profound self-understanding.
 Waiting
for the Mahatma
R. K. Narayan
University of Chicago Press; March 1989
ISBN: 0226568288
Format: Paperback, 256pp
R.K.
Narayan has been compared to Gogol in England, where he has
acquired a well-deserved reputation. The comparison is apt
for Narayan, is a writer of Gogol's stature, with the same
gift for creating a provincial atmosphere in a time of change
one is convincingly involved in this alien world without ever
being aware of the technical devices Narayan so brilliantly
employs. The experience of reading this very novel can be
compared with one's first reaction to the great Russian novels:
the fresh realisation of the common humanity of all peoples,
underlain by a simultaneous sense of strangeness like one's
own reflection seen in a green twilight.
 An
Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire
Arundhati Roy
South End Press; September 2004
ISBN: 0896087271
Format: Paperback, 200pp
1997
Booker Prizewinner Arundhati Roy's An Ordinary Person's
Guide to Empire offers us sharp theoretical tools for
understanding the New American Empire--a dangerous paradigm.
She examines how resistance movements build power, using examples
of nonviolent organising in South Africa, India, and the United
States. Deftly drawing the thread through ostensibly disconnected
issues and arenas, Roy pays particular attention to the parallels
between globalisation in India, the devastation in Iraq, and
the deplorable conditions many African Americans, in particular,
must still confront. With Roy as our "guide", we
may not be able to relax from the Sisyphean task of stopping
the US juggernaut, but at least we are assured that the struggle
for global justice is fortified by Roy's hard-edged brilliance.
These
reviews are downloaded from various sources on the net. compiled
by Sanyat Sattar
([email protected])
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(R) thedailystar.net 2005 |
