This week CHAITANYA KALBAG takes off on Sasthi Brata’s best-selling novel “Confessions of an Indian Woman-Eater”. Vrata is one of those typical Indians who have followed in Nirad Chaudhuri’s footsteps: the man who lives off dishwashing in some seedy Gulf restaurant while writing home about the cushy job he’s got, working in pile-carpeted comfort. …
Fortnightly Take off on Bestsellers A short, spicy travelogue-cum-novel, “Train To Uzbekhistan” is replete with descriptions of the locomotive that hauls the assortion of bogies, one of which holds Dukhwant Singh. The author has drawn obvious inspiration from Agatha Christie and we find him attempting half-heartedly to describe the distribution of the compartments, just like…
A newspaper cartoonist once went into deep Africa and found that some German scientists had frozen to death a scant hundred miles from the equator. He came back to America and told his readers. Robert Leroy Ripley also told them a lot of other things that they found rather difficult to believe. In the process…
Hovel is another masterpiece in analytical fiction by Bailey, whose previous successes included Hangar Zero Nine and Tyres. The book measures 11 cms by 18 cms, is printed on glazed 20 Ibs paper and is set in Monotype Garamond. The blurb on the jacket tells you that Bailey is a master at looking into…
The Buns of Camerone is MacFat’s sixth book. The dust-jacket says it’s a thriller in the true Fleming Le Carre tradition. I would prefer to call it a thriller. it combines the preposterousness of a thriller with the eleventh-hour look of a filler. If you are ignorant of what ‘filler’ means, ask the nearest journalist. …
Our fourth bestseller take-off this fortnight is the controversial ‘Freedom at Midnight’, a book that sold the maximum hardcover editions in India in the past ten years. SLAVERY AT NOON by Harry Rollins and Feminique Rapierre. Published by Lucas. 555 pages, Rs. 55. The authors attempt to present fiction as pulp history. Rollins and…
A thriller is the sort of book that you take to bed with you and then read on through the night, impatient that the pages aren’t turning fast enough. The sort of book whose ending you are tempted to read in the beginning just so that the agony of not knowing what happens or whodunit…
It is difficult to judge Indian writing in English, saturated as it often is with the smells, sights and sounds of the ethos it springs from. Punjabi writing in English is a case in point. It carries strong overtones of the earthiness and directness of the people of that region. But if the writing is…
It took me some time to discover Rasipuram Krishna Swami Narayan’s house. Yadavagiri, the suburb of Mysore City, where Narayan stays, is an incredibly quiet area, with long, neat streets, tree-shaded bungalows lining them. It was late afternoon, and the neighborhood was just emerging from its siesta. “R. K. Narayan?” asked the passerby I stopped,…
So much is being written about political prisoners in India these days, that the layman might succumb to the temptation of focusing more on the issue than on its human aspect. Jayaprakash Narayan’s Prison Diary, as well as that of Snehlata Reddy, for instance, have offered some glimmer of the goings—on behind India prison walls.…
It was a browser’s dream come true – kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For eleven days last fortnight, Delhi’s Pragati Maidan became a meeting-place of minds. From a distance. as the Fifth World Book Fair moved to its finish in a welter of…