But it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. Of Gunter Grass's ''The Tin Drum,'' Laurence Sterne's ''Tristram Shandy,'' and Celine's ''Death on the Installment Plan'' as well as As a growing-up novel with allegorical dimensions, it will remind readers of ''Augie March'' and maybe It is a record of betrayalĪnd corruption, the loss of ideals, culminating with ''The Widow's'' Emergency rule. It is also a novel of India's growing up from its special, gifted infancy to its very ordinary, drained adulthood.
(and about the 32 years of his grandparents' and parents' lives before that). If I am to do more than describe my pleasure in this book, if I am to summarize and interpret, I would have to start by saying that ''Midnight's Children'' is about the narrator's growing up in Bombay between 19 Now, in '' Midnight' s Children,'' Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago-born, and goingĪt things in its own special Bombay way. What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. For a long time it has seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling. The Indian novels of Paul Scott and Ruth JhabvalaĪlso fall comfortably between those two poles. Narayan's novels and the cool pastels added by the later fiction of Anita Desai. Realities hence the vivid patches of local color provided by the timeless South India of R.K.
Serious English-language novelists from India (often called Indo-Anglians), or those from abroad who use Indian material, have steered a steady course between these two vast, mutually obliterating Forster's outline essentially -will always be there, because India will always offer the dualities essential for the Forsterian vision: the open sewer and the whispering THE literary map of India is about to be redrawn. Section 7, Column 2 Book Review Deskīy CLARK BLAISE Clark Blaise's most recent books are ''Lunar Attractions,'' a novel, and ''Days and Nights in Calcutta'' (with Bharati Mukherjee), a memoir. The New York Times: Book Review Search ArticleĪpril 19, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
0 kommentar(er)
