 |
| Good taste becomes him |
Yale has an entire course this semester dedicated to South Asian lit. And we didn’t even have to donate a million bucks for a South Asia chair destined for a non-South Asian 
Not even As-Am torchbearer Berkeley had one of these back in the day:
FALL 2005: ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
William Deresiewicz…Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent… Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Average reading load: 250 pages/week. [Link]
Sure, it’s 250 pages/week — if you leave out A Suitable Boy Why is the prof fascinated with these themes?
William Deresiewicz is the author of Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets… [Link]
 |
| The redcoats are coming |
Ah yes, soap operas with Victorian morés, a perfect match. It’s that blasted Pride and Prejudice again. After jonesing for Bridget (twice) and Bride of Gurinderstein, the new Keira Knightley version seems superfluous. The horse has not only been beaten, it’s died and been reincarnated as a hack. Ennis has been pitching me the book, but I’m in sucrose overdose.
Deresiewicz talks smack about Jhumpa Lahiri’s work:
Interpreter of Maladies… exhibit[s] a high degree of competence, but it’s the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programsIt’s the kind of competence that makes you want to abolish writing programs… The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted—no, machine-tooled—to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices—the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany—arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class. [Link]
About Zadie Smith’s latest:
… [Smith’s] ascent was part of the late-’90s fad for beautiful young women novelists with Commonwealth roots (itself a subset of the post-cold war globalization frenzy). Smith made a third with Arundhati Roy, whose God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year…The narrative voice is… flatter, less exuberant and inventive. And while On Beauty is as long as White Teeth, it has neither the earlier novel’s scope nor its ambition. [Link]
All of this is so obviously a Rushdie ripoff, it’s excruciatingAnd about Smith’s first novel, White Teeth:
The postcolonial thematics—history, memory, identity, hybridity—which could have seemed fresh only to someone who’d been living in a cave for twenty years, are served up with the baldness of an undergraduate essay. And all of this, along with the novel’s postmodern coin tricks, is so obviously a Rushdie rip-off it’s excruciating. But White Teeth exhibits two great strengths, neither of them the kind one expects from so young a writer: the acuteness of its social satire and the brilliance with which it inhabits perspectives utterly different from its author’s. Smith gives us aging Indian waiters, bookish teenagers, high-handed liberal moms… [Link]
While I don’t entirely agree with W.D.’s 40s, his course does take the school back to its origins as the spawn of Madras governor Elihu Yale and the British East India Company.
