Books / On a Knife Edge

 

2019 HIGHLIGHTS: BOOKS: FICTION

On a Knife Edge

From Amitav Ghosh to Ian McEwan

 Nandini Nair | 03 Jan, 2019

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh (Hamish Hamilton)

On a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. While visiting a temple, deep within the mangrove forests of Bengal, he has a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a King Cobra. This is followed by a series of uncanny episodes that seem to dissolve the borders of the human and non-human.

Anuk Arudpragasam / The Wages of War

 

Anuk Arudpragasam

The Wages of War

The Sri Lankan novelist Anuk Arudpragasam, whose new book portrays the island after the civil war, speaks to Nandini Nair about the spectatorship of violence and the persistence of grief

 Nandini Nair  | 16 Jul, 2021

ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM’S A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton; 304 pages; Rs599) is a novel where nothing much happens yet everything happens. It begins with Krishan receiving a phone call from Rani’s daughter (Rani was his grandmother’s nurse) informing him that she has died after falling into a well. Krishan, a young middle-class man, decides to take a train from Colombo to the Northern Province to attend the funeral to pay his respects and also in the hope of finding out more about Rani’s death, which he feels might not be just an accident. The novel is essentially his rumination as he travels on the train, and later attends the cremation rituals. During the train journey we will come to know Anjum, an activist he had a relationship with while he lived in Delhi, and the backstories of Rani and his grandmother.

 

Maya Jasanoff

Maya Jasanoff: The World Is What It Was

Maya Jasanoff uses Joseph Conrad as a guide to globalisation in the modern world. The historian in conversation with Nandini Nair

Nandini Nair 

07 Mar, 2018

MOST OF US first encountered Joseph Conrad as high school students. His novella Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, exposed us to ideas of civilisation and modernity, empire and colonialism. Written over a mere seven weeks, Heart of Darkness maps Conrad’s own journey to the Congo Free State. It tells the story of a Charles Marlow who must travel up a river to rescue a renegade ivory collector named Kurtz. Over the last century, the book has retained its position as one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century. Conrad’s books are so entrenched in the canon of English literature that we often forget that he learnt the language only in his twenties.