bookblog and...
Apr. 20th, 2007 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedSorry, I think I must've turned off all the "sanity check" parts of my brain so I could avoid working on this paper, normally I'd keep this kind of pointless naval-gazing to myself.
But first!
Upamanyu Chatterjee - English, August
The story of an unhappy, unambitious officer of the IAS (India Administrative Service) who drifts desultorily through life, spending way too much time in his own head. I bought this book after I saw it mentioned with God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy, and Hungry Tide as a bestselling contemporary cosmopolitan Indian novel that deludes people into believing they know something about India.
...to unfairly paraphrase the amazon.com summary of this book by Bishnupriya Ghosh. Seeing those three books grouped together intrigued me, because aside from being about "India" and massively popular, they really aren't all that similar -- God of Small Things is set in 1950s Kerala, A Suitable Boy in 1950s Mumble Pradesh (for the most part), and Amitav Ghosh writes about Bangladesh and the distant past as often as he writes about India and the present day. So it's a little weird to put them together and get India Today. They're also about very different things, though all three contain a METRIC TON of factual information, which I suppose is why they are sometimes mistaken for history textbooks. Anyway, is trying to understand another country through its award-winning literature really that great of a sin?
On to the review: I picked up English, August because I was curious to see how much it would have in common with those other three books. Short answer: very little. This time the setting is Madna, a small town in rural India (population: 300,000) where Agastya is sent to learn how to be a District Collector, and where he experiences severe culture shock. The book is a series of events told chronologically, but that's about as organized as it gets. At the paragraph level, it's completely DIS-organized. Sentences go on forever and don't go where you expect them to, there are infodumps in weird places, the immediate future is mixed in with the present for no discernible reason, many of Agastya thoughts are fragmentary and don't lead anywhere, and there's a lot of repetition. It's pretty awesome. ^^; Not unreadable like my description is making it sound, but very readable, and quite distinct.
Another highlight: I could identify with the Agastya, though thankfully only for short periods of time. (This might be the only book I liked this year that I didn't read in one obsessive seven-hour marathon, my usual MO.) I say thankfully because Agastya is not exactly an admirable guy -- aimless, lustful, moody, petty, perpetually unsatisfied... For a little while this is okay, but no matter what happens to Agatya, he always seems to return to the same place. This gets wearying after a while, as well as being anti-novelistic (no character development). But in small doses, it's perfect. On the other hand, the solidarity I was feeling with this directionless urban exile dimmed a bit in the last chapter, when it suddenly occurred to me that most of Agastya's more serious problems -- detachment, apathy, concentration issues, restlessness, insomnia -- read like textbook symptoms of cannabis dependency. In other words, forget the metaphysics, he should smoke less grass.
Anyway, this is getting long, and you've probably gotten the idea, so I'll end by saying there's a ton of stuff on the IAS in here, which I really enjoyed, and that generally I liked the book while I was reading it. But I'm not sure whether I like it in retrospect.
Hopefully that made sense.
...You know what, I've changed my mind about posting the rest of this entry. (Let's not go to Camelot, it is a silly place.)
But first!
Upamanyu Chatterjee - English, August
The story of an unhappy, unambitious officer of the IAS (India Administrative Service) who drifts desultorily through life, spending way too much time in his own head. I bought this book after I saw it mentioned with God of Small Things, A Suitable Boy, and Hungry Tide as a bestselling contemporary cosmopolitan Indian novel that deludes people into believing they know something about India.
...to unfairly paraphrase the amazon.com summary of this book by Bishnupriya Ghosh. Seeing those three books grouped together intrigued me, because aside from being about "India" and massively popular, they really aren't all that similar -- God of Small Things is set in 1950s Kerala, A Suitable Boy in 1950s Mumble Pradesh (for the most part), and Amitav Ghosh writes about Bangladesh and the distant past as often as he writes about India and the present day. So it's a little weird to put them together and get India Today. They're also about very different things, though all three contain a METRIC TON of factual information, which I suppose is why they are sometimes mistaken for history textbooks. Anyway, is trying to understand another country through its award-winning literature really that great of a sin?
On to the review: I picked up English, August because I was curious to see how much it would have in common with those other three books. Short answer: very little. This time the setting is Madna, a small town in rural India (population: 300,000) where Agastya is sent to learn how to be a District Collector, and where he experiences severe culture shock. The book is a series of events told chronologically, but that's about as organized as it gets. At the paragraph level, it's completely DIS-organized. Sentences go on forever and don't go where you expect them to, there are infodumps in weird places, the immediate future is mixed in with the present for no discernible reason, many of Agastya thoughts are fragmentary and don't lead anywhere, and there's a lot of repetition. It's pretty awesome. ^^; Not unreadable like my description is making it sound, but very readable, and quite distinct.
Another highlight: I could identify with the Agastya, though thankfully only for short periods of time. (This might be the only book I liked this year that I didn't read in one obsessive seven-hour marathon, my usual MO.) I say thankfully because Agastya is not exactly an admirable guy -- aimless, lustful, moody, petty, perpetually unsatisfied... For a little while this is okay, but no matter what happens to Agatya, he always seems to return to the same place. This gets wearying after a while, as well as being anti-novelistic (no character development). But in small doses, it's perfect. On the other hand, the solidarity I was feeling with this directionless urban exile dimmed a bit in the last chapter, when it suddenly occurred to me that most of Agastya's more serious problems -- detachment, apathy, concentration issues, restlessness, insomnia -- read like textbook symptoms of cannabis dependency. In other words, forget the metaphysics, he should smoke less grass.
Anyway, this is getting long, and you've probably gotten the idea, so I'll end by saying there's a ton of stuff on the IAS in here, which I really enjoyed, and that generally I liked the book while I was reading it. But I'm not sure whether I like it in retrospect.
Hopefully that made sense.
...You know what, I've changed my mind about posting the rest of this entry. (Let's not go to Camelot, it is a silly place.)