tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post5540906329440824323..comments2024-03-26T17:11:09.856+05:30Comments on The Middle Stage: On a new book of essays on Salman Rushdie, Midnight's DiasporaChandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-27128729463940404032011-04-17T19:44:51.496+05:302011-04-17T19:44:51.496+05:30Having just heard Salman Rushdie speak at Duke Uni...Having just heard Salman Rushdie speak at Duke University, and of course, having read his novels, I thank you much for exposing the narrowness of this book. Yet, even Rushdie would state that we need all perspectives from all viewpoints. I only hope that now, in counterpoint other critical books will be published offering less tunnel vision and more of Rushdie's free-wheeling style of interconnections and resonances.ggrayhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06794262315030983630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-72362451773682068492010-03-15T16:30:26.462+05:302010-03-15T16:30:26.462+05:30"Step Across this Line", if I remember t..."Step Across this Line", if I remember the title right. It comprises Rushdie's writings after 2000.Karthikanoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-53535264708714019142009-09-04T09:46:26.557+05:302009-09-04T09:46:26.557+05:30"Imaginary Homelands" is really worth re..."Imaginary Homelands" is really worth reading again and again. Do you know of any other book of essays by Rushdie? I vaguely recall seeing one in a bookshop once, but I've not been able to find it again. Unlike Arundhati Roy, whose non-fiction is so strident in its tone it puts you off, Rushdie is intelligent, insightful and most enjoyable.Varuna Mohitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02787489195261563051noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-76366591151401312102009-06-02T22:06:48.432+05:302009-06-02T22:06:48.432+05:30This is a lovely debate that I could've participat...This is a lovely debate that I could've participated in, if it weren't for Joyce.<br />Silence, exile, cunning.<br />Amen.Saikatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-32514315522267575812009-06-01T20:35:26.671+05:302009-06-01T20:35:26.671+05:30Good essay, Chandrahas. Unfortunately, what you ar...Good essay, Chandrahas. Unfortunately, what you are criticising seems to be common in academia today where books are used merely as springboards for critics to voice their other, mostly sociopolitical concerns. (Even this is often done crudely.) The connection between politics and fiction isn't an easy one to make but many academic critics today seem to make a very basic mistake -- that of reading a novel as some sort of a document, and on top of that, as a document that must conform to their standard of political correctness in whatever they specialise in; which is usually some sociological category like 'gay fiction' or 'Indian writing in English'. Such a phenomenon -- IWE -- is sociologically interesting and can be studied as such. But then its approach and concerns will have to be different. <br /><br />Being neither here nor there (unlike somebody like Walter Benjamin who is both here (literature) and there (society/politics)) seems to me to be rather easy -- you can pick up any random novel (by a well-known writer) and criticise it for all that you find wrong with it politically, citing a few philosophers to make your argument seem correct.<br /><br />And I've read that essay by Tharoor. Like most of his other essays, this one's terrible too. It might be more readable than the others in the book but the only way in which this will help the reader is to make its lack of depth and sophistication easily apparent.akhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15385267278249934192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-77997229300137104362009-05-31T15:33:22.909+05:302009-05-31T15:33:22.909+05:30Excellent post! I really enjoyed reading it. I wil...Excellent post! I really enjoyed reading it. I will be back for more!<br />Sincerely,<br />Ankita<br /><br />helpdebtconsolidation.blogspot.comAnkitahttp://helpdebtconsolidation.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-18286632428113050812009-05-31T12:20:28.463+05:302009-05-31T12:20:28.463+05:30Saikat - Much as I respect your judgment, I can ha...Saikat - Much as I respect your judgment, I can hardly agree with either of these quotes, especially the one by Roy, which sounds so churlish that I'm sure has a particular context and is not a universal demand made by her of literary critics. I myself have a book coming out in a week's time, and I hope never to say such a thing to anybody.<br /><br />I would prefer to debate <I>how</I> books are interpreted by literary critics - who are after all just another kind of reader - or other readers, rather than <I>whether</I> they should be interpreted by them, which I think is a non-issue since the act of interpretation is natural to every reader. I myself feel my education in novels has been formed partly by novels and partly by literary criticism. To take just the Indian novel, Meenakshi Mukherjee's <I>Realism and Reality</I>, a study of some of the earliest novels to be written in India and their artistic and rhetorical structures, is a remarkably illuminating book, and Rushdie's own essays in <I>Imaginary Homelands</I>, such as the spirited and polemical "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist", are brilliant flares of literary criticism. Chaturvedi Badrinath's <I>The Women of the Mahabharata</I>, which I've been reading recently, is not only a brilliant book of literary criticism, it is, I would argue, itself a work of literature, with the same beauty, gravity, and syntactic balance as the book that is its subject. And wasn't Nissim Ezekiel's essay on VS Naipaul in 1976, <A HREF="http://dsal.uchicago.edu/books/mahfil/pager.html?objectid=PK5461.A1M21_11_3-4_185.gif" REL="nofollow">"Naipaul's India And Mine"</A>, a really astute response to <I>An Area Of Darkness</I>?Chandrahashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-33494679567521427762009-05-31T00:21:45.925+05:302009-05-31T00:21:45.925+05:30I'm reminded of what two of my favorite writers sa...I'm reminded of what two of my favorite writers said about literary critics, and I must confess that I can't agree more.<br /><br />Arundhati Roy: Why don't you write the book instead?<br /><br />Philip Roth: The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot.Saikatnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-12760085582654762162009-05-30T18:36:33.073+05:302009-05-30T18:36:33.073+05:30This is an excellent essay. In defence of both Rus...This is an excellent essay. In defence of both Rushdie and novel writing. Particularly this lines are amazing:<br /><br />"The simple truth is that the novel is a flexible prose instrument that encodes through storytelling, at different levels and even there on multiple registers, ideas not just about character and causality but also history, politics, religion, ideology, class and gender relations. To force it into the narrower corridor of one’s preset categories is to un-novelize it. "<br /><br />" The incredible thing is that readers should be expected to pay good money to discover this congruence." LOLyoupratnoreply@blogger.com