Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Reviews
I had read this book sometime back and re-read a random passage today morning while having breakfast and re-realised what an absolutely fantastic book this is. The book deserves all and more of the praise in the reviews.
Most books have a narrow scope. They lack ambition to begin with. The narrative of this book has a very Indian, expansive and all inclusive structure. I say Indian because this kind of "complexity" is commonplace in our folklore. Contrast this with the comments in the Guardian review for example.
On some level, one can say that Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra have a lot in common - scope, narrative, improvisation etc. - but I'm surprised that Chandra's book isn't as popular as some (or even the best) of Rushdie's tomes.
posted by Prashanth Pappu @ 1:29 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
How have "Indian"and "expansive" come to be so comfortably together? Stasis is the Indian condition. R.K.Narayan knows it, Amit Chaudhuri remembers of it, they complain of his books that nothing happens. Myself, I like books where nothing happens. The world is too full of things anyway - right here, right now, marks on a whiteboard, a paper napkin, "Facing Reality" by J.C.Eccles, a map of the space itself (taped to the whiteboard), softball gloves, more things in the mind than the mind should allow... Most significantly, nothing is happening.
peach, yes that's an idea that hasn't flown, time not ripe perhaps, but myself, as a traditonalist, I am happy. The most important function of books is to gather dust, and they go about this more inventively than an Apple could ever hope to do.
The Cheshire Cat has forgotten to mention another important function of books -- to get lost in remote corners of cartons which are either hard to locate or hard to reach.
The joyful act of overturning these cartons and wading through the stockpiles provides the daily physical and mental exercise that is, as we all know, crucial for the well being of any cat.
C.Cat, stasis is the condition but the scope doesn't have to be limited right? You could talk about your day (nothing) and in the process end up talking about everything. Or you can talk about everything and in the process make the reader realise that you are talking about nothing. Nothing, everything - its all the same thing.
Agreed, from this point there arises a bifurcation of writers. Some are enthused by everything, each thing in itself - Chandra, Rushdie... For others (Naipaul, Coetzee, Beckett most of all), everything is always lapsing into the same thing, or nothing, the one Idea. (Or perhaps Language is a puppet pulling the strings?) Really it is a question of the location of meaning, or the trajectory of meaning.
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