Neel Mukherjee » Links

Live like a flame

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:01:12 +0000

She is a book historian by profession but I know her as a novelist. Rimi B. Chatterjee is a magician-juggler of genres: her first novel, Signal Red, was a bleak thriller about bioterrorism (prescient, that), the first of its kind in India; her second novel, City of Love, set in sixteenth-century India, brings to mind Umberto Eco and I. Allan Sealy, and is a crisscrossing narrative of several journeys. It is a thickly-peopled book, but also teeming with ideas, history, details, riffs, a veritable cornucopia of knowledge and stories. It is a hoary old cliché to say that fiction makes us enter a different world but in the case of City of Love it is both accurate and true. And what worlds those are: of a Castilian trader, of a Moorish pirate, of a Shaiva-Tantric devotee, of a simple tribal girl. As their worlds and trajectories collide, an unforgettable story takes shape. Her next novel, Flip!, promises to be a space opera set in the far future. Her blogspot is called ‘Live Like a Flame’. Follow her, she’s taking Indian writing in English on a great adventure.

The Boat to Redemption by Su Tong Su Tong, a bestselling author in his native China, found...
The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin Valerie Martin is an impressively dextrous writer: from Mary Reilly,...
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Reading The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since...

A historian knits

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:00:45 +0000

This is my friend Prachi Deshpande’s blog. Prachi is a historian but her blog is mostly about knitting. Yes, you read that right. Knitting. Did you know that knitting is the new string theory, the new Zadie Smith, the new Harry Potter, the new Spielberg film, the new ‘El Bulli’, the new Grand Unified Theory, all rolled and purled into one? (I’m sure Prachi is going to take exception to the word ‘new’). In other words, knitting is big, very, very, very big indeed. I didn’t know this. It took me Prachi and her blog to open up this whole new world to me. It gives me the same shiver that people get when they discover the existence of something utterly unknown, like life in a different galaxy, or the solution to the Poincarré conjecture. Knitting! I can’t get over it. I peek at it every now and then to remind my insular self about the multiplicity of worlds. Then I feel like Giordano Bruno. And she has food porn there, too. Don’t forget: Jason negotiated his way out of the minotaur’s maze with the help of Ariadne’s ball of thread. Sorry, wool.

Reviews ‘The writing … has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless....
The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin Valerie Martin is an impressively dextrous writer: from Mary Reilly,...
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant Here is a passage from the most cryptic story, ‘Malcolm...

An artist like no other

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:00:09 +0000

There are artists whose works open up something inside you and nest there in a space you didn’t think existed. When I first encountered Sarah Sze’s work, I was baffled. That bafflement still continues but not a single day passes when I don’t think about her works. They are pieces of vertiginous beauty (I suspect ’beauty’ is a word she won’t like), at once immense and fragile, bearing both the exquisite, painstaking workmanship of micro-objects such as the machine of precision watches and the grand architecture of immense installations. The two apparently paradoxical elements sing in perfect contrapuntal harmony. Or so it appears to my untrained eye. But take a look; I promise you it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Reading The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since...
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant Here is a passage from the most cryptic story, ‘Malcolm...
The year’s best graphic novels, 2009 Of the five Books of the Year, two (Stitches by...

The best food and cooking site. Ever.

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:59:41 +0000

If you think, like I do, that California is the food paradise on earth, then Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbooks is a site that will give you as much pleasure as the food you can get there. Forget ‘Chocolate and Zucchini’, forget ‘Les Recettes des Orangettes’. Beautifully written; gorgeously illustrated with photos but never edging towards the kind of food porn that we saw in, say, Jill Dupleix’s New Food; unpretentious recipes; clean, uncluttered thinking about food, ingredients, seasonality; a true globalised, democratic attitude towards eating that is light years away from both the provincialism haunting so much of cookery writing today and the willy-measuring curls-and-foams-and-froth-and-essence school of cooking; encapsulating an earthy, no-nonsense poetry … what more could a boy want? Look, and be conquered.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer Jonathan Safran Foer has built a precociously dazzling literary career...
Solar by Ian McEwan Of all the fallible heroes in fiction, Michael Beard, the...
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis Here it is then, at last, the book that was...

Seizure

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:58:54 +0000

Read her sentences four times each: first, in the most basic way, as the building blocks of narrative, ie, in their unfolding of a story; secondly, for instruction — this is a masterclass on how sentences can be put together with such beauty; thirdly, for the pure pleasure they offer as aesthetic objects; and finally, to repeat all those things in one harmonious commingling. Intense, rapturous, structured like exquisite jewellery, Erica Wagner’s first novel, Seizure, is a dark, hypnotising book. And her website is a treasure trove, a bottomless trunk of delights.

The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant Here is a passage from the most cryptic story, ‘Malcolm...
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis Here it is then, at last, the book that was...
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill For a book that publishers refused to touch, Netherland, Joseph...

A magical discovery

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:58:12 +0000

For this, I am indebted to my friend, Marie Rutkoski, forever. It all started when she pressed a copy of Peter Cameron’s latest book, Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful To You , a young adult novel, into my hands last October in New York and said, ‘Read this’, much in the way a sailor throwing a line of rope to a man overboard shouts, ‘Grab this’. And grab I did; the consequent saving followed as the night the day. There was only one thing to do: search out everything he’s ever written. So far, I’ve read an early novel, effortless, glitchless and pellucid, hiding vast emotional terrains under its unruffled, luminous prose, called The Weekend. And The City of Your Final Destination is waiting on my bedside table. I shall post a longer appreciation in my Notebooks section soon.

The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin Valerie Martin is an impressively dextrous writer: from Mary Reilly,...
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories by Mavis Gallant Here is a passage from the most cryptic story, ‘Malcolm...
Reviews ‘The writing … has a sculptured clarity. Assured and fearless....