Just as I thought I was done with the ash-berries tossed at me by the departing year, suturing up my tattered ego with a ghazal in the reigning obscurity, Mr D. P. Dash ruffled the quiet of my languid existence.…
Tag: Book Review
A Passing Shower —A Review
My student life ended abruptly, or shall I say, comic-apocalyptically, with the postmodernist classic by Joseph Heller, Catch-22. It happened when I wrote a chapter for my doctoral thesis that would soon be abandoned, on the anti-war anti-novel with an…
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan
“Those who can really represent China are digging dirt and paving roads with their bare hands." ~Mo Yan Sidestepping the polemic surrounding the Nobel citation of Mo Yan, and the seeming incompatibility of the Chinese tongue with English hoes and…
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Somewhere in the pages of his unforgettable autobiography, Paul Kalanithi alludes to the concept of areté, the ability achieved through a confluence of human faculties at their peak, to describe neurosurgery’s unforgiving call to perfection. Neurosurgery, where a scalpel’s journey…
The Palace of Illusions —A Review
‘Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you'll spend your life yearning for a man you can't have.’ ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni It has been raining stories set…
Sorting Out Sid –A Review
A man may put his foot in his mouth once in a while and then a man may stick it there forever. Can it get weirder than that? What if that lean, clean-cut, boyish man of 36, with carefully gelled…
The Cuckoo’s Calling -A Review
“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.” ‘J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith’, proclaims a round, black sticker on the volume of The Cuckoo’s Calling,…
The Blind Man’s Garden –A Review
Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden is a dark story of a devout Muslim, proud and penitent of the lost glory of Islam, set against the turbulent aftermath of 9/11 massacre. Afghanistan is smoldering in the grisly conflict between Al…
Red Sorghum by Mo Yan
Mo Yan is not quite the toast of the writing community west of China. When the Nobel Prize for Literature went his way in 2012, it was deemed a ‘catastrophe’, a ‘betrayal’ and an ‘ominous signal’ by the fraternity, including…
The Box by Günter Grass
Günter Grass is a versatile artist, a colossal literary, cultural and political figure of Germany. He has been a recipient of several high prizes for his works, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. More than that, he has…
Beloved by Toni Morrison -A Review
'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness.' -Toni Morrison Man is not God yet he has played God not only with his fellow animals but his fellow humans too. And what a God he has…
Manto: Selected Short Stories –A Review
Manto: Selected Short Stories has been exquisitely prefaced by Aatish Taseer, the grandson of noted Urdu poet M. D. Taseer, who puts Manto’s work, his life and translations under a critical lens, before moving on to present a version of…
One Grain Amongst the Storm 