Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Off the Shelf

With the Tiger

Inez Baranay

Harper Collins

Price: 295

Pages: 305

One who grew up with classics storytellers like Somerset Maugham, this impressive volume leads you on a trip down nostalgia lanes. For, With the Tiger is a graceful retelling of Maugham’s classic The Razor’s Edge. Where Baranay succeeds is the way she intersperses Maugham’s characters in Indian context with such brave and unwavering way, without losing the girth and grip of the narrative, cogitative most of the times. Baranay, as she admits, has followed Maugham’s structure exactly and named her characters for his. Brief: The charming young Larry (along with a host of other characters) returns as Australians; his life-altering occurrence is not as an underage enlistee in WWI, but during a teenage backpacking trip to India, where he converts himself into a mysterious hermit. A racy read, this is a worthy addition to your literary vocabulary.

— Sunil K Poolani

Guardian of the Dawn

Richard Zimler

Penguin Books

Price: 350

Pages: 358

Unlike any other year, the last two years have seen a gamut of historical novels set in India. After Rimi B Chatterjee’s The City of Love, here comes Zimler’s Guardian of the Dawn, equally rich in talking about the atrocities and vengeance of colonial India. Zimler, nevertheless, takes a daring turn: he vivifies the Catholic Inquisition in Goa (we Indians, fearfully, never discussed this before, to remain politically correct), and how Hindus or immigrant Jews were strangled by executioners or burnt alive in public. Zimler presents a wide canvass of devotion and discrimination, peppered with lots of historical research and passion. A veritable treat (the beginning may put many readers off, but as the novel progresses it becomes unputdownable), this novel is an enchanting and authoritative retelling of Othello. Zimler, an internationally-acclaimed author, has absolute command over the language which drags the readers into the realms of a barbaric system that we conveniently try to forget. Impressive.

— Sunil K Poolani

-- Sahara Time

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