The Mumpsimus

Vikram Chandra's collection of interconnected stories, Love and Longing in Bombay , is a book I had thought of writing about in some detail, but I'm afraid time is not on my side with that, and a number of other writing projects need attention. One story I managed to make some notes on is "Artha", and here are those notes, in case some thoughts on the story are useful to someone else... In thinking about Love and Longing in Bombay, I’m going to start by grasping some tiny pieces within the wholes, and see what I can do with them. First, a single story, and a single page of that story, and not the words but the blank space. The story: “Artha”. The page: 165 of the 1998 Back Bay Books paperback edition. The two blank spaces between narrators and their narratives.

Continuing on from yesterday's post about Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address (a novella included in the collection Freedom Song ), here's a bit more academic writing about the book. This time, my goal is to undermine, or at least question, the common opposition of Chaudhuri's "realism" to Salman Rushdie's "magical realism". The two writers have frequently been set against each other as polar opposites, but my argument here is that they have far more in common than might be obvious at first. .. In his 2009 essay “Cosmopolitanism’s Alien Face”, Amit Chaudhuri tells of a conversation he had with the Bengali poet Utpal Kumar Basu: We were discussing, in passing, the nature of the achievement of Subimal Misra, one of the short-story writing avant-garde in 1960s Bengal. ‘He set aside the conventional Western short story with its idea of time; he was more true to our Indian sensibilities; he set aside narrative’, said Basu. ‘That’s...

Here are some thoughts after reading Amit Chaudhuri's first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which I read in the collection Freedom Song (which is what the page numbers below reference). I struggled with Chaudhuri — his goals for fiction are not mine. Nonetheless, I found it to be a productive struggle, and enjoyed writing about the book for a seminar on postcolonial fiction from Southeast Asia. Over the next few days, I'll be posting here some of the material I came up with during that seminar that I doubt I'm going to develop into something more polished, at least immediately, but which seems worth preserving, even if my ideas are based on false premises, misreadings, or other potential pitfalls of quick apprehension... ASSEMBLING THE INSTANT OF THE CITY  He did not know what to do with his unexpected knowledge. But he felt a slight, almost negligible, twinge of pleasure, as meaning took birth in his mind, and ...

Whenever I encounter a piece of writing that blows the top of my head off, I try to settle down and figure out how it works and what I so forcefully responded to within it. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes I can't. Sometimes the top of my head just won't go back on. So it is with "Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall, published in the latest issue of Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine . You might not have heard of Porcupine , but it's worth your attention; this issue in particular is rich with good poetry, prose, and pictures. But "Akhil and Judy" is the standout for me, and a standout among all the stories I have read this year, or, for that matter, any year. I have a few hypotheses for why I find this story so affecting, so impressive, but I don't have much in the way of solid reasoning, though I'm going to try here to make my hypotheses hold some water. I know the story's effect on me: during one of my three readings, it brought me t...