India's Struggle for Independence: 1857-1947 by Bipan Chandra, et al. (02/2010)

Something about nationalist historians interpreting--and justifying--everything in light of a final independence that was never a foregone conclusion, all events woven into the independence narrative, all acts exonerated on grounds of being anti-imperialist, etc., goes here.

I read most of this on a two-day train ride from Kannur, Kerala, to Delhi. It made a good pillow.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (02/10)

Look, I've joined the culture.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (02/10)

See, Natasha? A woman. With adjectives like "dustgreen" and "mossgreen." On the same page: page 1, in fact. Satisfied?

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (02/10)

What author works harder than a young Salman Rushdie? If classic Hollywood cinematography conceals the presence of the camera so that all we see is pure story, artifice folded in on itself like the best of dinner parties, Rushdie is the Soviet auteurs of the 1920s with their frantic montage, the experimenters of the French New Wave with cameras hanging from car windows and trains. (I choose the film metaphor in homage to Rushdie's own cinematic fascination.) Here the effort is so self-consciously obvious that I find it a little annoying, but Rushdie's willingness to spare himself nothing as a writer continues to win me over.

The book bulges gracelessly at the seams. It is several novels--a black satire, a family chronicle, an allegorical fable--smashed together, and some of the fragments fare better than others. The whole midnight children concept seemed underdeveloped, an afterthought--or perhaps Rushdie's first idea, out of which other, better ones grew, and he never brought himself to throw out the original stillborn fetus.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (01/10)

One of the more shallow ways to react to literature: prove yourself unable to get past some moral sticking point in the story, particularly when the author shows himself aware of the injustice.

Nonetheless:

Torn hymen=spoiled meat.

Weird synchronicities between this one and the subsequent Midnight's Children. Preoccupation with virginity, the preservation and loss thereof. Stained marital sheets displayed to an expectant public. Old, but perhaps not that old, moral codes that still stir up indignant rage in me.

By the way, do you know those successful neo-Victorian books by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls, etc.? They follow a simple prescription, namely resurrect a nostalgic Victorian weltanschauung of colonial explorers and Kipling-esque right-is-right, moral backbone, which we all thought rightly buried under the million hapless corpses of the Somme (but not, of course, in forgotten African mass graves). I was content to leave it there, but the present-day fathers of the UK and USA are nothing if not wistful for days when you could call Cecil Rhodes anything other than a bag of worthless horsefuck; when, in fact, one could crown him a Dangerous Hero among others in the Igguldens' obscene new book. Please let's not have a Victorian revival. So they were genteel. They also enslaved the entire fucking world.

Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism by Eric Hobsbawm (01/10)

Old socialist critiques American imperial project of the Bush years. Crisis of state legitimacy as global trends affect citizens in ways governments cannot ameliorate. Unstable, unprecedented balance of power. Exploitation of the terrorist non-threat. Differences between British (int'l trade, direct governorship of colonies, non-messianic) and American (home market, satellite states, universalist revolution) world empires. Effortless summations of things you knew but had never woven into a tight and cogent argument. Apparent command of all regional histories.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (01/10)

Note my commitment to gritty, earthy, manly. I dont use apostrophes or quotation marks. Not manly. Semicolons: super, super unmanly. Taut, lyrical descriptions of manly. Women and their adjectives. Manly.

Oh, look what I found:

The ashen prose covered everything. But then, in fits, the lyricism would appear like a blossom on a turd with the Germanic sprouting into Latinate. The reticulate sky would wrinkle its vermiculate back to expose a cloying sentimentality lacquered by logorrhea--a cheesy mysticism lurking behind the cracked, Naturalistic veneer. But here the sun never rose, for the old man and his scion, the bell tolled and all wrapped up in a startling deus ex via as the hooded, stoven-boned veteran hove into view and whisked our boy off to some humming deep-glen mystery older than man. (Link)