Oct 7, 2011

TOMAS TRANSTROMER wins the NOBEL PRIZE!!!!!

AFTER DEATH    (translated by Robert Bly)

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Aug 25, 2011

STEPHANIE NOLEN on KASHMIR

Mr. Bhatt joined a local group called the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, which has waged a long campaign to force the army to account for what it says are at least 8,000 people who have vanished in the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
READ MORE
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Aug 22, 2011

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED by Siddhartha Deb


Not so long ago, New York-based Indian writer Siddhartha Deb reviewed a novel by Hari Kunzru. “Globalization,” Deb began, “the most pressing issues of our time … has usually proved a poor subject for fiction. Far too many of the Anglo-American novels referring to globalization are full of what the critic James Wood has called ‘irrelevant intensity,’ exhibiting an endless fascination for pop-culture trivia, post-structuralist meta-theories and self-referential irony.” Deb found Kunzru's Transmission an exception, partly because it betrays the irrelevant intensity after the 30th page or so “when it finds its course with something as simple as a man walking down a highway. … Kunzru seems genuinely interested in ideas and social problems, such as the predicament of the disenfranchised.”

Deb’s own book, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of New India, comes after two highly acclaimed novels (The Point of Return and Surface), and focuses on something as simple as five characters. Although categorized by the publisher as “Social Science – Business Affairs,” it reads more like a nonfiction novel, that all-encompassing fuzzy genre.
“Everywhere there seemed to be construction and ruin, hard to distinguish from each other.”

Jan 29, 2011

In Kashmir: a Quiet and Contemplative Man

 "(The author) explores the physical and emotional landscape of Kashmir — its beauty and terror — with restraint and sensitivity in this affecting and moving novel. The story often unfolds in a series of disjointed episodes as Kip’s mind, with its “islands of lucidity”, grapples with memories, reveries, dreams, and hallucinations."
http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/review_book-review-chef-depicts-the-beauty-and-terror-of-kashmir_1473157

Jan 24, 2011

Michael Palin

"I enjoyed Chef by Jaspreet Singh (Bloomsbury). Its themes of food and war and love and poetry form a series of intricate tightropes that the author treads skilfully, bringing us, in a short book, a lot of pleasures."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/14/best-books-of-year-2010-franzen