India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul (07/09)

Dated, dated. Beautifully written, but dated. India’s problems are a product of primordial, stagnant ‘Hinduism’, which accommodates a millennium of invaders with quietism, passivity, and religious resignation. ‘Hindu culture’ is held to be a thing, a step or two above the African night, but well short of Western can-doism, the flux of modernity, of civilization, that Europe defines. I’m reading this beside Said’s Orientalism: how far we have come in only 30 years, perhaps because of Said’s seminal essay? See how scholarship matters.

But I picked up some history along the margins: the Emergency, of course, and the India-Pakistan and India-China wars, too.

This country is weirder than I could have expected. Where else do people threaten to immolate themselves in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant being held in Bangalore?

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (07/09)

My last Roth for a while. Time to move on to non-fiction. Remedy some of my ghastly ignorance.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (07/09)

So that's why Faulkner's famous.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (07/09)

Roth is not an economical writer. His paragraphs meander from association to association. He starts off discussing one character in the present and ends analyzing the death of another character's mother thirty years ago. Scenes are repeated throughout the book with slightly different emphasis. Time and perspective are in constant flux. This is especially true of later Roth, 1990s' Roth, which is when, in his 60s, he came into his own.

Also, you're never at a loss to identify the 'idea' of a later Roth novel. He repeats his thesis over and over, as he did in American Pastoral. The only unity in the life of Mickey Sabbath is incoherency. There are no explanations.