Skip to main content

Rain, reviews, restfulness

Soft, grey, rainy morning in the hills. My dog has decided there is no place more sensible than a duvet. Her nose emerges every now and then like a radar to figure out if her staff (ie us) is at hard work in the catering department. Then she buries herself again.

A review of Atlas, meanwhile, in a Cleveland paper:  "Roy's writing is nuanced and luminous, never hurried, leading the reader through the lush Bengali landscape and into the hidden terrain of desire and loss". Read the complete review here.

The Folded Earth was reviewed too, in Outlook. "Roy joins Allan Sealy, whose elegiac The Everest Hotel also asks: is the way of life in colonial hill stations falling apart as they grapple with inept modernity?... As with An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Roy unravels the small-town terrain with certitude. At one level, her prose is a dirge for the Kumaon hills. At another, a Pickwickian humour infuses it with robust charm."
What is on the work table right now though is book covers: I design book covers for our independent press, Permanent Black. Here is the latest, for a brilliant autobiography of a Buddhist scholar.

Popular posts from this blog

A Tagore in Nainital

Sudakshina, from Chitra Deb's 'Thakurbarir Andarmahal' Earlier this month, I went to Abbotsford , a historic estate in Nainital, for the Himalayan Echoes literary festival, run by Janhavi Prasada. The festival took place on the extensive lawns of the estate, which is now run as an elegant hotel, but originally it was a family home and the place had been acquired from its British owners by Janhavi’s great grandfather Jwala Prasada and his wife, Purnima Devi, in the late 19 th century. Janhavi’s new book, Nainital Through Stories, Memories, History mentions this in its first few pages: From Nainital Through Stories I was intrigued to learn that Purnima Devi was a niece of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born (according to Wikipedia) on 13 May 1884, at No. 6, Dwarkanath Tagore's Lane, Jorasanko, Calcutta, to Hemendranath Tagore (1844–1884) of Jorasanko. Hemendranath was the older brother of Rabindranath Tagore, and son of Debendranath Tagore, founder o...

Begum Anees Khan

  Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea.  Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter.  (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...