Sweet treats
To market for more beets, some candied walnut bits and a terrific chocolate chip oatmeal cookie which I shared when I got home.
Read a review of a book in the New York Review of Books which appealed to me. It's called Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, written by Pankaj Mishra, whose debut novel in 1999 was called The Romantics. He had an earlier work, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, published in 1995, an exploration of nineteen small Indian towns. The review describes his newest work:"This is a book written for the West, by a man with a stake in two worlds, who moves through languages - a skill of which Mishra makes little - and who travels uneasily, so that most of us can stay home. For the West it makes bitter reading. it explores a legacy of bungling and bad faith, of cultural incomprehension and pragmatic exploitation, and the export of two ideas - the idea of the nation-state and the idea of democracy - which have arrived in the East in a deteriorated and contaminating condition." This sounds most engaging, although perhaps like the scene of an enormous disaster.
Another quote from the reivew, which is by Hilary Mantel:
"One aspect of modernism he [Mishra] notices is the rapid rewriting of history, the formulation of a past which is useful to the power brokers of the present - a past which ratifies their sense of themselves, or can be marketed to tourists. A book like this can't be updated with every news item, but it can lay down markers, and it can take a stance: this is who I am, this is where I was, this is what I saw. Honest and thoughtful, it can claim the expertise of immediacy and the authority of the long view."
I am going to look for it, and give it a test read.
Read a review of a book in the New York Review of Books which appealed to me. It's called Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, written by Pankaj Mishra, whose debut novel in 1999 was called The Romantics. He had an earlier work, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, published in 1995, an exploration of nineteen small Indian towns. The review describes his newest work:"This is a book written for the West, by a man with a stake in two worlds, who moves through languages - a skill of which Mishra makes little - and who travels uneasily, so that most of us can stay home. For the West it makes bitter reading. it explores a legacy of bungling and bad faith, of cultural incomprehension and pragmatic exploitation, and the export of two ideas - the idea of the nation-state and the idea of democracy - which have arrived in the East in a deteriorated and contaminating condition." This sounds most engaging, although perhaps like the scene of an enormous disaster.
Another quote from the reivew, which is by Hilary Mantel:
"One aspect of modernism he [Mishra] notices is the rapid rewriting of history, the formulation of a past which is useful to the power brokers of the present - a past which ratifies their sense of themselves, or can be marketed to tourists. A book like this can't be updated with every news item, but it can lay down markers, and it can take a stance: this is who I am, this is where I was, this is what I saw. Honest and thoughtful, it can claim the expertise of immediacy and the authority of the long view."
I am going to look for it, and give it a test read.
posted by isabelita at 3:53 PM
3 Comments:
isbelita,
Your taste in books, and your attachment to their fundamental stories, are both infectious. I'll be looking for books by Pankaj Mishra.
Isa,
Sounds like this author is very smart and worth a read: "One aspect of modernism he [Mishra] notices is the rapid rewriting of history, the formulation of a past which is useful to the power brokers of the present..."
That about sums it up for the W, Rove and Co, no?
Mfm, every so often there'll be a stretch during which I happen upon fine writing, fiction and non-fiction. This is heartening to me after spells of not seeing anything worthwhile. Right now I seem to be on a course of finding out about huge parts of the world which have always been important, but which are taking on new weight lately.
'spike, good to see you. Your blog was cloaked or something lately, and I was starting to wonder if you were hiatusing...
Yes, Mishra's book sounds excellent, and so does another one reviewed in the same issue of TNYRB.
It's called The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk. The book is described as "a large-scale account of the struggle and its origins in the broader Middle East by a British journalist who has lived in the region for thirty years and has closely followed its wars, its violence, its intrigues, and its tangled relationships." And regarding the author, whom you may have heard of already, "For all his erudition and his passion for the subject, Fisk is primarliy a journalist, and his book, among many other things,is an important account of what a dedicated journalist actually does or tries to do, especially during wars."
Tempting, eh? At 1,107 pages it's a big one, but it sounds like an excellent way to get some sense of the Middle East.
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