The fear of the firangi

Ramachandra Guha discovers that "Bitter enemies though they might be, the Marxist left and the saffron right are united by what can only be described as an irrational fear of the foreigner."

He was at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University recently, and asked who had spoken before him:
"They named a Marxist economist. And what did she speak on, I enquired. On how multinational outfits such as this one should not be allowed to contaminate the purity of the JNU campus....
“Why does your professor oppose this Nescafé outlet?” I asked. “Because she feels we should encourage indigenous initiatives,” they answered. “Do you know where her own doctoral degree is from?” I asked. They didn’t know, so I supplied the answer — the University of Cambridge. “When you next meet your professor,” I said sarcastically, “ask her one question on my behalf — when she travels by plane to international meetings, does she carry a south Indian filter and Coorg coffee powder with her, or does she quietly drink the beverage offered her on the flight?”"

Vikram Seth, NRI?

Vikram Seth just received an award intended to honour diaspora Indians.
"After the ceremony, Mr. Seth said: "It feels great to get an award from your own country." In a lighter vein, the writer, who divides time between London and New Delhi, said, "but I don't feel completely pravasi."

I remember an earnest session on diaspora writing a year ago.
Someone with many letters after her name asked: "What is the official name for writers who live in the home country as well as somewhere abroad and sometimes in a third place also? They are not really diaspora authors. They are not really NRIs. So what do we call them?"
We all turned to the Very Famous Author in our midst who lived in two and sometimes three countries.
"Well-travelled?" he suggested.

Irresponsible conspiracy theory of the week

In which we discover that the author of the Opal Mehta books (big bucks advance) wants to be an investment banker.
And Lavanya Sankaran, author of The Red Carpet (hailed, hallelujahed and blessed with the ritual advance plus inevitable comparison with Jhumpa Lahiri) is an investment banker.
I know. It's a weak conspiracy theory. But it gives me something to say to hopeful authors seeking advice. "You want to be a writer? Go join Lehman Bros. Right now."

Oh, and Sankaran has a neat sense of humour.

From 'Alphabet Soup':

"Later, Priya had written a few emails.
To her friends at the Tree Hugger's Cafe, she wrote: I met some people our age in a social setting, and it was such a pleasure to see that they spanned the spectrum of India: punjabi, keralite, bengali, christian, muslim, brahmin, sitting together in a spirit of great communal accord and brotherhood.
She did not mention that this meeting had taken place in a coffeehouse that looked like an upmarket Starbucks, and that the women were dressed in tank tops and in skirts that ended mid-thigh; that the men had argued over the relative aesthetics of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears, and everybody seemed to be recovering from a hangover. That would be unnecessary local colour and would simply muddy the issue."

Raymona Chandler to the rescue

Otto Penzler, dean of mystery-writing in America,
flaps his sexist lip(link via Sarah Weinman):
“The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a recipe, or take care of cats,” he says. “Cozies are not serious literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There are wonderful exceptions, of course—P.D. James, Ruth Rendell.”

So if Raymond Chandler had been Raymona, would The Long Goodbye have read like this?

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers, so drunk that he had gotten all the ingredients to Miss Stella's Mystery Cake mixed up. The secret ingredient is tomato, lots of it. I knew that. But then I knew that the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Terry Lennox didn't.
The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one....You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other. I know the feeling. I've been in a Walmart or two during discount sale season myself.
There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulders she had a blue mink (you can get two for the price of one at Macy's) that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn't quite. Nothing can…
The drunk promptly slid off the seat and landed on the blacktop on the seat of his pants....I got him under the arms and got him up on his feet.
'Thank you so very much," he said politely.
The girl slid under the wheel. "He gets so goddam English when he's loaded," she said in a stainless-steel voice. "Thanks for catching him."
"I'll get him in the back of the car," I said.
"I'm terribly sorry. I'm late for an engagement." She let the clutch in and the Rolls started to glide. "He's just a lost dog," she added with a cool smile. "Perhaps you can find a home for him. He's housebroken--more or less." You couldn't say the same for the cat that was shedding orange fur all over her blue mink. "Here, Kitty," I said politely. The girl turned up the frost on the smile. "Her name," she said in a voice that would have made a Glaser stainless-steel knife seem blunt, "is Princess Wuffles."

How Opal Mehta cleaned up

Met an editor last year who said he was looking for "chicklit with a nosering in it". He should've talked to Kaavya Viswanathan, who's living every young writer's dream--she picked up a $ 500,000 advance from Little Brown for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got In.
"I had only vaguely thought of becoming a writer. But a book contract? From a major publisher? This is so incredibly unbelievable. It's so hard to believe that I'm going to be able to walk into a bookstore and see something that I wrote on display there," Viswanathan told Sun.

Not to rain on her parade or anything, but BookAngst has a cautionary tale for first-time authors with big advances. Think of it as the Cinderella story in reverse gear.

Why I Read (reprise)

Was re-reading Burton's The Arabian Nights on the grounds that I'd rather get my porn from a 19th century explorer's attempts at translation than the boring sleaze on television, and found myself hijacked by the footnotes.

Here's Burton on the institution of the Hammam:
"I have noted the popular practice amongst men as well as women, of hiring the Hammam for private parties and picnicking in it during the greater part of the day. In this tale the bath would belong to the public, and it was a mere freak of the bride to bathe with her bridegroom. Respectable people do not."

And on the subject of the whole roasted stuffed camel, he introduces the unwelcome suggestion that most beasts treated in this manner would have been roadkill:
"This is a favourite Badawi dish, but too expensive unless some accident happen to the animal. Old camel is much like bull-beef, but the young meat is excellent, althought not relished by Europeans because, like strange fish, it has no recognised flavour.... There is an old idea in Europe that the maniacal vengeance of the Arab is increased by eating this flesh; the beast is certainly vindictive enough; but a furious and frantic vengefulness characterises the North American Indian who never saw a camel."

Burton was no bowdleriser of the text, though he recognised the tendency and the necessity in others:
"It is an unpleasant fact that almost all of the poetry of Hafiz is addressed to youths... Sa'di, the 'Persian Moralist', begins one of the tales, 'A certain learned man fell in love with the beautiful son of a blacksmith', which Gladwin, translating for the general, necessarily changed to 'daughter'."

Several of his footnotes go into precise detail over how much interest may be charged, the distinction between the Jewish and the Moslem (sic) methods of circumcision, the nature and temperament of the Arab horse, and the exact nature of the paradisical tree that supplied every want.

Occasionally, he wields the footnote as a weapon of literary criticism:
"To my surprise, I read in Mr Redhouse's 'Mesnevi': 'Arafat, the mount where the victims are slaughtered by the pilgrims.' The ignorance is phenomenal. Did Mr Redhouse never read Burckhardt or Burton?"

And there are five volumes of The Arabian Nights that I have never in my lifetime opened, and that I must go off and read, starting, in tribute to Burton, from the bottom of the page up. Happiness is a warm footnote.

Why I Read

Salman Rushdie says it so that we don't have to. (It's a moot point that he says it rather better. Maybe we should ask him to come and be our guest blogger, hmmm?)
"Books come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature.
When a reader falls in love with a book it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives and those books become parts of the way we see our lives, we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours, they become ours."

Orange: new writers

From the BBC: "Three authors have been shortlisted for the first Orange Award for new female writers, to be announced on 7 June.
Journalist Diana Evans has been chosen for her debut 26a, about twins living in London brought up by their Nigerian mother and dissatisfied British father.
New York-based Nell Freudenberger's Lucky Girls is a collection of short stories set in Asia.
The third contender is Meg Rosoff's How I Live, about a girl sent to England from New York for one 'perfect summer'."

I have good reason to remember Nell Freudenberger's reading in Delhi. She read very well, it went down very well, and it was one of those crowds where everyone knew everyone, some in the deeply Biblical sense of the word "know". One of the few people I didn't know was this shy guy at the back of the room who sort of bobbed his hand in the air tentatively and shambled off eventually muttering, "I never got to ask my question". Bumped into him a few days later at a bookshop, we got to chatting about new fiction, and I asked him what he wanted to ask Ms Freudenberger. "It was an important question, not like the rest who were asking about advances and how long she stayed in Delhi and all that sort of thing," he said vehemently. "Oh, too bad you never got to ask it, then. What did you want to know?" "Her phone number," he said and slouched away into the darkness.
He bought The Da Vinci Code and The Road Less Travelled; Freudenberger has no idea just how lucky a girl she is.

Surfacing

Just finished reading Siddhartha Deb's Surface. For anyone, publisher, hack reviewer, omnivorous reader or ex-Babu, who faces a daily stack of books in the inbox instead of a daily stack of files, there's a moment you look forward to, the silent "yes" moment. It happens when instead of pretentious junk or boring twaddle or yet another could've-been-a-contender, you come across a book that makes your day. The book doesn't have to be perfect or even a masterpiece in order to do this: sometimes you hear the silent "yes" go off in your head when you know as surely as it's possible to know that the author wrote the book he really, really wanted to write, as well as he could write it. I'll post a review later, but here's what Tabish Khair has to say about Surface:
"What surfaces, to begin with, in Deb's Surface is a photo. It features a woman flanked by two masked, gun-wielding "insurgents" and on the back is the caption: "The MORLS leadership today exhibited a porn film actress as an example and warning to the people of the state. They shot her as punishment to impress upon the people the importance of desisting from all corrupt activities encouraged by Indian imperialism ..."
The photo is recovered from an old news file by Amrit Singh, a turban-less, Calcutta-based Sikh journalist, who has been surfing the bubbles of daily journalism for years and now wants to dive deeper. The photo (and other factors) takes Amrit to the "region" - unspecified but easy to locate generically in the northeast of India - where he uncovers a story in which nothing is as it appears on the surface...
The comparison to Naipaul, Conrad and Graham Greene that the publicity material suggests is, for once, justified, though for various reasons it is Greene who, with his possibilities of redemption in a bleak world, comes most often to mind."

Inbox

(Introducing an occasional listing of new releases; some of these were sent to me for review, some I go out and buy. 'Inbox' will come out once a month, and is intended to be an indicative rather than comprehensive listing of what's crossed my destop and is in Delhi's bookshops. As and when desktop clutter builds up, 'Inbox' might come out fortnightly or even weekly, or as and when laziness dictates.)

First Proof: The Penguin Book of New Writing from India
Penguin, Rs 295
“The future looks good (though we are constantly, casually told otherwise.” The fiction’s not half bad, but it’s the non-fiction that stands out.

The HarperCollins Book of New Indian Fiction
Edited by Khushwant Singh,
HarperCollins, Rs 295
The focus is sharply on short stories; pretty motley assortment, with a couple of decent pieces from Githa Hariharan, Amitava Kumar, Manjula Padmanabhan and others.

New Writing 13
Edited by Toby Litt and Ali Smith
Picador, special Indian price 4.99 pounds
The one where the editors got into trouble for confessing that submissions from women “were disappointingly domestic”; some great work here, though.

India In Mind
Edited by Pankaj Mishra
Picador India, Rs 275
“The reactions [India] evokes are complex, ranging from awe and wonder to repulsion and rejection. They tell us as much about the traveler as the world he describes.” Levi-Strauss, Forster, Ackerley, Naipaul, Chatwin, Jan Morris, Pasolini, Mark Twain and other travelers come together in this anthology.

Chasing the Monk’s Shadow
Mishi Saran,
Penguin Viking, Rs 495
“An Indian woman with a China craze, a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession; we had the same schizophrenia, the monk and I.” Mishi Saran follows in the footsteps of Xuanjang (earlier spelled Hieun Tsang.

Surface by Siddhartha Deb
Picador India, Rs 495
Cynical, burned-out journalist travels into the neglected heart of darkness of the North-East and discovers a web of illusions and half-truths in this disturbing and brilliant second novel.

Shakuntala, by Namita Gokhale
Penguin/ Viking (Rs 300)
Shakuntala’s reincarnation tells her story with the legend as the backdrop.

The Heart Has Its Reasons
Katha
Krishna Sobti’s Dil-o-Daanish in translation lacks the punch of the original, but her examination of the three-cornered relationship between Kripanarayan, his Hindu wife and his Muslim mistress retains its original sharpness. This isn’t in the same league as Mitro Marjani or some of her other classics, but read it for the flavour of pre-Independence Delhi.

My Days in Prison
Ifthikar Gilani
Penguin, Rs 195
A journalist from the Kashmir Times uses the true story of his jail term—he was unjustly accused of being a spy—to examine the dark underbelly of the beast we call Indian democracy.

Mantras of Change: Reporting India in a Time of Flux
Daniel Lak
Penguin Viking, Rs 375
Well-turned essays on India from a seasoned reporter, but not enough to make this stand out from the perennial crop of Whither India and Understanding India books. Lak’s well-liked, though, so expect this to sell in thousands, if not in lakhs.

Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged The World
Hugh Miles
Abacus, special Indian price 4.99 pounds
“…The story of this network is the story of the upheavals that have taken place in this troubled region for years.”

The Year Before Sunset
Hugh and Colleen Gantzer
Penguin, Rs 250
The twilight of the Raj, seen through the eyes of a priggish but remarkably horny Philip Brandon; the Gantzers offer some moving insights into the Anglo-Indian community in this sweet but slight book.

Coronation Talkies
Susan Kurosawa
Penguin Viking, Rs 475
According to marketing whizzes, this is the next big Asian bestseller. According to me, this is the best revenge anyone could perpetrate on the British Raj: turn it into a soap opera populated by ham actors and force the resulting pishpash down the throats of a credulous public.

The Geographer’s Library
Jon Fasman, Hamish Hamilton
Alchemy, intrigue in the fragmented states of the erstwhile Soviet Union, the dark tales behind 15 obscure and fascinating objects, a dashing but slightly foolish journalist and murder most foul: pretty much what you’d get if the Titanic bulk of The Da Vinci Code collided with The Rule of Four.

Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries
Suad Amiry
Granta, special Indian price 4.50 pounds
With irony, humour and anger, Suad Amiry speaks of what it’s like to be a Palestinian living on the West Bank.

The Turning
Tim Winton,
Picador, special Indian price 9.75 pounds
Short stories linked by a common thread tell tales of losers, drifters and survivors; Winton hits perfect pitch every so often.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Hamish Hamilton
Extremely gimmicky and incredibly tedious, IMHO, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading the wonder boy who’s been dubbed one of the great talents of his generation.

Saleh to the defence

Al-Tayib Saleh on writing in the Arab world:
"If you find a publisher who believes in Arab literature and takes a risk on it, not just publishing a few thousand books, you will find readers for it," said the 76-year-old writer, who is married to a Scot and has lived much of his life in England.
"The Arab novel has reached a very high standard which is comparable to any standard, anywhere in the world. The fact that this is not recognised abroad is a matter either of criteria ... or it is a lack of enthusiasm for foreign products," he said...
"The lack of Arab literature translated over the decades has not helped to further public understanding of the Arab and Muslim world in the West, says Salih, who left Sudan in 1953 to work for the BBC Arabic service in London.
"The Arabs and the Muslims have become 'the other', the unknown quantity," he said. "People make such dreadful assumptions and mistakes about the Arabs out of sheer ignorance. I wouldn't say malice, but it is ignorance."

It was only idol lust...

In which idol worship takes on a whole new meaning:
"Indian police are investigating a complaint against an award-winning author after he wrote he had been sexually aroused in his youth by clay idols of a revered Hindu goddess, a police officer says.
Police acted after a complaint was filed by a former police officer against Sunil Gangopadhyay, who has written over 250 books in the Bengali language, alleging he had hurt the sentiments of Hindus by referring to Saraswati, the goddess of learning and knowledge, in a sexual manner...
'Sunil has defiled and desecrated an object held sacred and worshipped as the goddess of learning by the Hindu community, which is a crime under Indian laws,' said complainant Bibhuti Bhusan Nandy, a former top federal police officer."

Blocked? We feel your pain...

I must confess that before linking to this piece on prolific authors, I took great pleasure in emailing the paragraph about McCall Smith's working habits to the six author friends I know who're suffering from writer's block. Even as I type, my inbox is filling up with anguished cries from tormented souls. Mwahahahahaha.

Andre Mayer writes: "We have this enduring mental image of the author at work. He or she is sequestered in their den, hunkered in front of a typewriter. (The computer has been a tremendous boon to writers, but there’s just no romance in the phrase “word processor.”) The cigarette on their lips has smouldered to the filter, they’re nursing their sixth cup of coffee and struggling to craft a sentence that won’t cause them to throw up their hands in futility and jettison the page to the wastepaper basket. Such is the life of an artist: intense, grueling and without exception, an ordeal.
And then along comes a chap like Alexander McCall Smith, who seems to regard book writing not as some rarefied art but as a form of daily exercise, like sit-ups or squats. Where most authors sweat to produce 1,000 words a day without self-mutilation, McCall Smith has been known to bang out three times that in a single sitting. He’s a living rebuke of the notion that novel-writing is the least bit arduous."

The invisible reader

Martin Gilbert on the hazards of recommending books, and on the "postliterate society":
"With novels, it becomes dicier. There is a risk in admitting you are moved by a bunch of words made up by someone you (probably) don’t even know. It is specious to pretend that novels, even those that win Pulitzer Prizes, occupy more than a minor place in American culture — novels are generally rough drafts of movies that are never realized, or the hobbies of academics, or the fever dreams of less-than-serious people. have their curious cult.
Occasionally one breaks through — like The Da Vinci Code or Cold Mountain — but for most of us, novels are something we would love to read if only we had the leisure..."
Several paras down, Gilbert makes his second point:
"Novelists seem to have as much to say as ever, but maybe books are becoming more and more dispensable to the modern human animal. We have other ways of telling ourselves stories — movies, television, even the thready and interactive labyrinth of the so-called New Media."

I've heard this lament before, and one of the best ripostes to this came from the late Saul Bellow. Bellow was responding to an argument made by Terry Teachout, who now has a very popular blog over at Arts Journal. Teachout had written--this was decades ago--"My guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century."
Bellow's argument, in this essay for the New York Times, was far removed from the normal books-vs-films discussion:
"I am not at all certain that in their day Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter had any considerable influence on 'the national conversation'," he wrote. "...The literary masterpieces of the twentieth century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity."
Later in the essay, Bellow writes of the reader as an inevitable member of a minority:
"But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind... They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods...
We have no way of guessing how many independent self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need."
"

Back. We hope.

Yeah, I know. Blogger burnout's been happening in a big way over the last few months at Kitabkhana, and we apologise. When I say "we", I mean it this time: many of you already know the identity of Hurree Babu, but for those who didn't, well, the Babu's been officially outed, in a passing line in an India Today story about blogs. (Drop by here if you want to check out some of my non-Babu stuff.)
Anyway. The blog was down because I had cerebral malaria, which they treat these days with fancy drugs that make you want to upchuck all the time, which makes the choice between blogging and not blogging very easy. (Blogging + messy keyboard vs no blogging + sleep = no contest.)
While I was sleeping, some of my favourite litbloggers decided it was time to change the world. They've started Read This!, under the umbrella of the Litblog Co-Op.
Ron Hogan sums it up: "In some ways the litblog is still a reactive genre--we get many of our stories by noticing what's in the news, and declaiming whether we're for it or against it--but one of our more significant strengths lies in our ability to react to what is missing from the usual media coverage of literature and the publishing industry. As mainstream book coverage, particularly the coverage of new fiction, contracts, blogs can present a new forum to address books and authors that aren't getting noticed elsewhere. Or maybe they do get noticed, but not nearly enough."
Because of the multiplicity of voices on the Co-op, the range of recommendations coming in is delightfully varied. And it's particularly useful for those of us who're sitting here in Delhi instead of London, New York and other publishing hubs: McEwan and Ishiguro and Murakami are easily available here, but authors like Mitch Cullins or Zoran Zivkovic are much harder to track. News about them doesn't filter through and their books don't reach Indian bookstores in the main: it's nice to be offered a wishlist, an alternative view. It's a bit like trying to find graphic novels--until very recently, there was nothing. Maybe Spiegelman's Maus, but not even something as mainstream as LXG. But then the films happened, or else the bookstore that I and the husband frequent figured out that we were secret addicts, and now at least the mainstream titles are coming in. In dribs and drabs, but well, they're sort of around. Enough from me: go visit the LBC, have fun, add to their list.

And speaking of penguins...

...haven't seen a piece on Andrey Kurkov all that often.

From The Financial Times:
"Long before two novels about a depressed writer in Kiev who lives with an even more depressed penguin became best-sellers in the west, Kurkov, who has been translated into 23 languages, was needling the authorities back home.
The genius of his sparse satires, which lampoon Russia and the Ukraine as places brutalised by shortages, bribery and gangsters, is their intimacy and compassion. Penguins, he says, do everything the same way, generation after generation. “In this sense they are similar to Soviet people,” he suggests.
”Suddenly, when the Soviet software... “ he pauses and corrects himself with a gale of laughter. “No, hardware, very hardware, was broken, defunct, they didn’t know what to do and found themselves disorientated, separated from reality. Both characters in these books are, in one sense, Soviets and in another, disorientated penguins.” Ukrainians, by the way, he likens to a “friendly, happy, very often lazy animal” and also a smell: cinnamon."

Penguin in many bhashas

From The Bookseller:
"Penguin is stepping up its attack on the growing Indian market with a local language program, the first non-English publishing from the 70-year-old house.
Penguin India will publish four Hindi titles in April, including Hamara Hissa, an anthology of contemporary Hindi stories edited by Arun Prakash, and Shakuntala: The Play of Memory (Shakuntala: Smriti Jaal) by Namita Gokhale.
It will begin publishing in Marathi and Malayalam later this year, and is planning 25 titles in each of the three languages this year with similar output for the next two to three years. It plans to move into more Indian languages from 2006, and claims it is the first U.K. publisher to publish in regional Indian languages."

It's going to be a fascinating experiment: there's no such thing as a "regional language market", given that every local language has its own, very quirky publishing map in India, so Penguin will have to bear the cost of making mistakes. And mistakes will be inevitable in the early stages. On the other hand, this could actually expand readership for some writers in English, if they're translated into local languages, and it could tap potential readers in small towns far better than current efforts. This should be fun to watch, especially if some of the other publishing houses in India--HarperCollins, Roli, Picador--follow in Penguin's footsteps.

Sects sects sects...

There's the one about the monk who spoke of monasteries, lamaseries and hermitages at such length that he finally exasperated his friend, who admonished him: "Sects, sects, sects, is that all you can think about?"
Well, Anita Roy read The Alchemy of Desire and now she's celibate. (Just kidding. But she clearly had fun doing the review:)

'This is a big book. In all senses of the word. But in literature, as in sex, less is often more and size isn’t everything. We get to the "plot"—a historical drama travelling from an orientalist curio shop in turn-of-the-century Manhattan, via a Paris so louche it would make the Moulin Rouge blush, to an explosive menage a trois in the foothills of the Himalayas—only in Book Four, nearly two-thirds of the way through. By this time, exhausted by the unflaggingly enthusiastic sex of the narrator and his wife, the reader is impressed less by their inventiveness, athleticism and earth-shattering passion than by their sheer stamina.
There is sex heterosexual, homosexual, voyeuristic, bestial, quasi-tantric, onanistic, even sex with ghosts; sex in bedrooms, bathrooms, under trees, over tables: sex withheld, sex embraced; brusque couplings, long, multiple-orgasmic symphonies; there is even a rape—by a hysterically enraged Sikh driver of his broken-down antique of a bus. Almost every page seethes with erotic overtones, undertones, and mid-tones. Tejpal makes even toothache sexy: "Throb, ebb. Pain, peace. Throb, ebb."'

Things not to read on an empty stomach

Jhumpa Lahiri on the days before every store in the US stocked saffron and cardamom, when her family would pack nostalgia into a Food suitcase bound for America:

"My parents created lists on endless sheets of paper, and my father spent days in the bazaars, haggling and buying by the kilo. He always insisted on packing the goods himself, with the aura of a man possessed: bare-chested, seated cross-legged on the floor, determined, above all, to make sure everything fit. He bound the Food Suitcase with enough rope to baffle Houdini and locked it up with a little padlock, a scheme that succeeded in intimidating the most assiduous of customs inspectors. Into the suitcase went an arsenal of lentils and every conceivable spice, wrapped in layers of cloth ripped from an old sari and stitched into individual packets. In went white poppy seeds, and resin made from date syrup, and as many tins of Ganesh mustard oil as possible. In went Lapchu tea, to be brewed only on special occasions, and sacks of black-skinned Gobindovog rice, so named, it is said, because it’s fit for offering to the god Govinda. In went six kinds of dalmoot, a salty, crunchy snack mix bought from big glass jars in a tiny store at the corner of Vivekananda Road and Cornwallis Street. In, on occasion, went something fresh, and therefore flagrantly illegal: a bumpy, bright green bitter melon, or bay leaves from my uncle’s garden. My parents weren’t the only ones willing to flout the law. One year my grandmother secretly tucked parvals, a vaguely squash-like vegetable, into the Food Suitcase. My mother wept when she found them."