More reviews: Transmission, Hungry Tide

Dirda seems to have liked Transmission--for those of you in Delhi, Hari Kunzru's in conversation about the book at the British Council on Wednesday evening--in a slightly baffled way:
"Like most people, I understand next to nothing about the arcana of computer programming. I also possess only the fuzziest conceptions -- misconceptions, more likely -- about venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses. As for jet-setting Eurotrash and Bollywood movies, well, I've looked at pictures in magazines of sloe-eyed Italian beauties (of both sexes) and had a few casual conversations about Indian film-making with friends who are far more knowledgeable on the subject.Transmission, however, touches on all these trendy matters, and is utterly captivating: a deliciously satirical, humane and very enjoyable novel. Hari Kunzru, who lives in London, may be a new name to many Americans, but he is an exceptionally ingratiating writer, with a skewering wit, wide sympathies and a gimlet eye for the killing or illuminating detail."
Alfred Hickling deals with Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide in more depth:
"But Ghosh's subject remains the mutability and mysteries of language. Urbane, educated and more than a little arrogant, Kanai is a businessman who abandoned his early enthusiasm for Bengali poetry to found a successful interpretation agency in New Delhi, specialising in the lucrative field of accent modification for call- centre employees. "There's a lot going on in India right now," he says complacently, "and it's exciting to be part of it." At the behest of an aunt, Kanai returns to his homeland in the Sundarbans, the hostile archipelago of islands at the mouth of the Ganges, and for tuitously bumps into Piya, the dolphin specialist, on a train.
If Kanai seems to represent the commodification of Indian languages, Piya stands for their suppression. Raised in Seattle, she remembers Bengali simply as the language her parents argued in. As a child she tried to shut her ears to these sounds: "She wanted ... sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon's instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary - empty of pain and memory and inwardness."