Sunday, April 13, 2003		Books

Malraux and the romanticism of lonely struggles
Shelley Walia
Antimemoirs
by Andre Malraux. Rupa.
Pages 448. Rs 295.
THE Antimemoirs originated largely out of Malraux’s travels in India and China in 1965. It shows his obsession with the bleak destiny of Western man, here a repetition of the theme that he had taken up in his masterpiece Man’s Fate. The answers to this obsession he sought in art as well in his many experiences and discussions with statesmen and artists around the world.

Signs & signatures
Iqbal’s vision of Islam: A dream that turned sour
Darshan Singh Maini
GHALIB and Iqbal are considered two of the greatest poets in the Urdu language, and my aim is to show how in their idiom and vision the two remain divided, Ghalib moving more in the orbit of personal contingencies and circumstances, and Iqbal in that of wider, ideological considerations.

Living under the shadow of a curse
Aradhika Sekhon
Curses in Ivory
by Anjana Basu. Harper Collins. Pages 422. Rs 295.
ONE can actually identify the women in one’s own family with those portrayed by Anjana Basu’s family saga, Curses in Ivory. The story is a multi-layered, richly textured tale of three generations of women who live under the shadow of an ancestral curse. The curse was cast on Kamala and Upendra Kishore’s family because Kamala, blessed with the beauty of "the Mother Goddess in person`85unfortunately did not match him (Upendra Kishore) in modernity" and would not unveil her face to open scrutiny.

If Kipling’s ideology was easy to define…
Manisha Gangahar
Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse
Natraj Publishers, Dehra Dun. Pages 704. Rs 495.
THE ideology of Kipling, who went from being a Freemason to being an imperialist, has always been difficult to define. As a Freemason, the idea of a community undivided into classes or sects was the ideal social order that Kipling was attracted to. A secret bond that tied together ‘brothers’ following higher principles of existence and working for the common good fascinated Kipling.

Love, war and the hyphenated self
Arun Gaur
A Twisted Cue
by Rohit Handa. Ravi Dayal, Delhi. Pages 434. Rs 450.
HERE the problem for the novelist is to mingle love with war (perhaps like Hemingway). The incongruence of such a mingling within the structure that the present novel proffers is marked in the impossibly longish name of the main character—Lieutenant-Colonel Quintin Reginald ‘Mulkally’ Oxley-Protheroe.

Postcolonial theory widens scope
Tej N. Dhar
Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature.
edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. University of Mississippi Press, 2000. Price: $26 (paperback); $50 (hardcover). Pages xx+471. Indexes.
THOUGH post-colonial theory came into its own only during the past two decades, it has already made remarkable gains in its reach and influence. It started with providing a reading strategy for the literatures of the erstwhile colonies, which, in spite of differences in their provenance, bore common distinctive markers because of the shared experience of colonialism.

Write view
A skillfully narrated fable
Randeep Wadehra
The Silver Pilgrimage
by M. Anantanarayanan. Rupa, N. Delhi. Pages 156. Rs 150.
Jayasurya, heir-apparent to the throne of Lanka, is young, strong and handsome. But what worries his father, King Simha, is the youth’s lack of sensitivity. Jayasurya feels that his wives are there to please and serve him. Their agonies and deaths leave him cold. In fact, he considers them eminently replaceable.

The homogenous world of brand culture
D. R. Chaudhry
No Logo
by Naomi Klein. Flamingo, London.
`A38.99. Pages XXI+490.
GLOBALISATION is a buzzword these days. A lot many books have appeared on it and many more are in the pipeline. However, the book under review by a young Canadian journalist is an empirical work of a high order and it takes a reader on a harrowing jaunt of the world of international companies and lays bare with clinical precision their modus operandi that entails unimaginable profits for them and unspeakable misery for the workers in the Third World.