I recommended a book about Bombay to Anaamika in another thread, and instead of continuing the hijack, I decided to open this thread.
I can really recommend these novels/authors to anyone who wants to learn something about contemporary India:
Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things. Wonderfully poetical novel about a South Indian family. Booker Prize winner, too. Unfortunately I can’t recommend her later work, which is mostly anti-imperialism-holier-than-thou-non-fiction anyway.
Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey, the last one was a Booker Prize nominee. Both are (long) multi-generation tales about Indian families.
Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy and others.
Vikram Chandra: Red earth and pouring rain
Gita Mehta: Snakes and Ladders, A River Sutra, and Karma Cola. Essays and short stories about contemporary India.
Salman Rushdie: The Moor’s Last Sigh and Midnight’s Children. His other books are great, too, but these two - especially Midnight’s Children are just wonderful, magical tales of post-partition India.
Manil Suri: Vishnu’s Death. Sort of a fable about a dying man on a Bombay staircase.
All of the books above exemplify, in one way or another, what one could call the “New Indian Literature”. Most of them are lengthy, colorful stories about several families/generations, and each gives its own view on 20th century India. Many of them are inspired by myth and tradition, and employs a certain “magical realism” with a distinct Indian flavour. All well-written, touching and beautiful in their own way.
Amongst the more “traditional” novels set in India, a good selection could be:
Khushwant Singh: Train to Pakistan. A great (though short) novel about the post-partition holocaust in Punjab. He has written numerous other books; the one about New Delhi is pretty good.
R. K. Narayan: Anything “Malgudi”. He wrote a lot of shorter novels about the inhabitants of a fictional village called Malgudi. They bear titles as The Vendor of Sweets, The English Teacher, etc. An omnibus edition is probably available.
Rabindranath Tagore: Gora, The Post Office and many more. The greatest of the early Indian novelists. His books are interesting and well-written, but not as colourful as the above mentioned.
And some auto-biographical almost-non-fiction to end with:
Suketu Mehta: Maximum City - Bombay Lost and Found. Wonderful Bombay biography that really goes below the surface.
V. S. Naipaul: India - A Wounded Civilization and India - a Million Mutinies Now. Fairly cynical but very insightful travelogues by an author trying to understand the country of his parents. With almost 20 years apart (IIRC) they supplement each other very well.
This is just a quickly compiled list and it is by no means exhaustive. But the books mentioned here are a great place to start if you want to know something about India.
So: Have I left anything important out? And please recommend (native) novels that show another country from the “inside”.
I learned a lot about China from Red China Blues by Jan Wong.
“Red China Blues begins as Wong’s startling – and ironic – memoir of her rocky six-year romance with Maoism that began to sour as she became aware of the harsh realities of Chinese communism and led to her eventual repatriation to the West. Returning to China in the late eighties as a journalist, she covered both the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown and the tumultuous era of capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping.”
Though it’s dated, with the book having been completed shortly after the beginning of WWII, I think that Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the best tours of Serbia and much of the greater Balkans written. She takes the time to carefully detail so much of the history of the region while writing what is, at first blush, a simple travel book.
It’s because of that book I could get an inkling of how much history the Serbs were destroying in Bosnia-Herzogovina. I remember, particularly, the description of one mosque she wrote of in the book, and mentioned that it was considered to be one of the most beautiful in the world. I don’t think she had any photographs included in the book, but when the Serbs tore it down in the 90s, the news reports had plenty of before and after shots. Of course, the after shots were of a rubble strewn lot.
I would be most grateful if anyone can recommend me a readable English novel about the Netherlands, that isn’t set either in WW II or in Hollands Golden 16’th Century.
Maybe something by Cees Nooteboom? - I have only read Rituals myself, and it was definitely neither set in WW2 or the 16th century. I am not sure that it is the kind of book you are looking for, since it is very limited in geographical and historical scope and focuses on a single, estranged man and a tea ceremony (or something like that - I forget). It might be a place to start.
Some Danish web pages mention a writer called Thomas Rosenboom. His books look really interesting, and it seems like he is quite big in the Netherlands. Amazon doesn’t seem to have any of his books in English translation. Good luck!
Q: Kim by Rudyard Kipling. What do you think of it, and did it capture that slice of India and the Great Game?
And how about the novel Wild Swans, three generations of daughters in China?
IMHO, it captured western hearts, but was largely crap. To me, it was completely self serving, edited, and wishful recount of 3 generations during a pivotal time in China. Jung Chang completely backpedals how connected her family was and the special treatment that afforded her (even though yes they did suffer in the Cultural Revolution). Nothing about how those connections got her to the West. Nothing about why as a leading Red Guard tool, she was chewed up and spit out as a very minor pawn in the big game. She plays the innocent victim card and I worked hard and was rewarded, both of which are patently untrue.
Puh-leeze, no one mention Mao: the Untold Story by Jung and her husband. Mao was a thorough bastard through and through, but that book would make KMT propaganda artists blush for the hyperbole and exageration.
The Private Life of Chairman Mao is a good read. As is Life and Death in Shanghai. Red China Blues is good for that period of first opening to the west in China but is nothing like the China of today. I haven’t really read any good books on the China of today. River Town is decent for capturing one small slice of China through a westerner’s eyes.
Kim is an absolutely wonderful book, and I’ve read it several times. I think it captures the Great Game spirit very well. If you’re into that, I can recommend Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game. Just read it this summer, and it is really fascinating. It is a historical presentation of the Great Game from beginning to end (assuming it is over ), and it can be a bit dry at times. It does have some great passages about the individuals whose daring expeditions made the Great Game.
Apart from these books, I would love to find more novels on this. Any suggestions?
For getting insight into Japan, I recommend anything by Tanazaki. The two novels and one essay I have read are “Naomi,” “Kokoro,” and “In Praise of Shadows.” For a short yet amazing look into Japanese culture, I most recommend the latter.
Two other textbook like things I have are “In the Shadow of Fuji-San,” a work about Japan’s natural environment and “Unveiling Japan,” a look at Japanese aesthetics of the body.
Alas, I have many language books, but I’m short on books that deal with Japanese culture-at-large. I learned what I know through people, travel, the internet, and the books I described above. It was a fun but hardly efficient approach
), and it can be a bit dry at times. It does have some great passages about the individuals whose daring expeditions made the Great Game.