I am surprised by how disappointing I found "The Lowland." For about 100 pages, in the middle of the novel, I was interested in seeing how the characters' fates unwound. But that is entirely too small a percentage of a 350 page book. Most of the time, their circumstances and internal struggles we...
~~SPLENDID BOOK~~Big Bright & Shiny Five Stars to this excellent work by Jhumpa LahiriBooks of Jhumpa Lahiri have been lying since very long in my TBR, but ocean size thanks to Ashu for this personalized gem and making me read this.The first story Temporary Matter is about a couple who has lost t...
What can I say about Malgudi Days? Malgudi is a fictional Indian town created by R.K. Narayan, conceived in such realistic detail that the University of Chicago Press once mistakenly put it in their atlas. But can you blame them? Most of Narayan's works take place in Malgudi, and the more you rea...
To return to my lecturing days: I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase "sincere and simple" - "Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple and sincere" - under the impression that this was the greatest compliment payable to prose or poetry. When I struck th...
He was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so I was taught to cal...
In May he graduated from the architecture program at Columbia. He's been working since then for a firm in midtown, with celebrated large-scale commissions to its name. It's not the sort of job he'd envisioned for himself as a student; designing and renovating private residences was what he'd want...
Through a dense and lively correspondence between Turin and Cesena, Pavese, who didn’t know the translator in person, pushes her to translate Homer into a faithful but modern Italian, aiming at a less archaic, plainer language. Reading with close attention, meticulously comparing the translation ...