A much-needed addition to the city, the Kitabkhana bookshop is a marvellous space to browse, have a quiet coffee or meal and sink into a book ...
Sometimes you really can’t have too much of a good thing. Amrita and Samir Somaiya have done the city an enormous service with their new bookshop, Kitabkhana. Of all the bookshops in the city, it’s this one that has the most marvellous space—high ceilings in an old building, lovingly restored, the wrought-iron work retained and the woodwork polished and gleaming. It reminds you of the great bookshops in university towns like Harvard, and that shouldn’t be surprising since Samir Somaiya is an alumnus of both Cornell (where he will be teaching this summer) and Harvard. » more
film review:
path to war
directed by
john frankenheimer
The peculiar thing about John Frankenheimer’s work is that it is consistently good. That’s not something one can say about most directors working today. I hope this isn’t a completely odious comparison, but take John Woo. He made the astonishing The Killer in 1989 in Hong Kong, his last before he migrated to what is now Schwarzennegeria where he made what is possibly the only watchable Van Damme movie*, Hard Target and then the breathtakingly conceived and brilliantly executed Face Off. Pretty much everything else in between and after has been disappointing, including Broken Arrow and the heavily flawed Windtalkers, though Mission Impossible: II was superbly staged. » more
book review:
the best awful: a novel
by
carrie fisher
Carrie Fisher’s The Best Awful is an elliptical work. That’s not a compliment. I mean it literally. She uses ellipses with something bordering on a pathological condition … and it does … nothing … for an already doomed book. That’s not as bad as her use of the em dash. Now that’s really something. Everywhere you go, the em dash lurks, ready to — pounce. » more
book review:
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
by
mark haddon
Jay McInerney wrote a ravereview in the New York Times of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. Haddon’s book is nowhere as great as McInerney makes out. He reads far too much into a book so slight. Is it politically incorrect to dislike a book with an autistic child at its centre? » more
book review:
eats, shoots & leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation
by
lynne truss
Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” turned out to be an utterly delightful discovery. It was a journey into a land I love — punctuation. The lady is endearingly nutty: she once picketed the movie Two Weeks Notice with an apostrophe on a stick, wanting to bring the apostrophe back into the title, after Weeks. But it is full of deep insights and Truss moves with unerring instinct through treacherous territory. Her comments on why we need punctuation at all; how the Internet has damaged language (“it’s not writing, or even typing; it’s just sending”) and how punctuation is actually critical not just to reading and writing but to basic communication, are sharp and accurate. She takes a good, hard swipe at the modern trend of self-publishing, so easy with the Internet (bloggers, beware!) and she’s right. Some of the comments and customer reviews at Amazon, for instance, are truly hideous, full of typos, badly punctuated and not proofed at all. » more
film review:
the life of david gale (widescreen edition)
directed by
Alan Parker’s “The Life of David Gale” is a really, really stupid film about a really, really vital subject. Is the Death Penalty justifiable, defensible? When? How does it square with fundamental human rights? » more
book review:
the blind man of seville
by
robert wilson
I so thoroughly enjoyed Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers that I couldn’t wait to get into this one. To call it a disppointment is not just putting it mildly, it’s giving the book far more credit than it possibly deserves. This is a mean-spirited, small-hearted, oppressive book from start to finish. » more
book review:
the king in the tree : three novellas
by
steven millhauser
Stephen Millhauser’s The King In the Tree is, without question, a tour-de-force. These are three novellas and each one is blindingly brilliant, dazzling. Millhauser writes like an angel: the language is taut, superbly controlled. There is nothing of the bludgeon in this writing — Millhauser is like a surgeon at the peak of his profession and he wields the scalpel of his writing with breathtaking virtuosity and skill as he dissects that most basic — and, in his conceptualisation, the most base — of all human emotions: love. » more
After a gap of 41 years, two friends meet. One, a retired General, Henrik, lives alone, a widower, in a Hungarian castle with only his faithful retainers. There’s a history in the walls of the place. And, tonight, after a 41 years, there is a guest to dinner. Everything is arranged just as it once was, so many years ago. » more
book review:
the real trial of oscar wilde
by
merlin holland
Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and, with John Mortimer, in this astonishing book he shows us the enfant terrible (or perhaps by then the eminence grise) of London’s literary circle battling, albeit unwittingly, for his very life. The book contains the entire, unexpurgated tanscript — previous versions were heavily censored. » more
book review:
gods, mongrels, and demons : 101 brief but essential lives
by
angus calder
Angus Calder’s thesis, summarized on the dust jacket flap, is that the weird deserve centre-stage because these creatures are the zeitgeist of our world and, quite independently, are inherently interesting. He argues that they may even be more telling than better-known entities. » more
film review:
kill bill - volume one
directed by
quentin tarantino
Evidently there are degrees of violence. There is the sleep-wrecking, mind-numbing, stomach-churning, vomit-inducing violence of In Hell (Van Damme and other specimens) or Con Air. And there is the Tarantino brand of violence. Tarantino does extreme violence, but he does it with unparalleled élan and a singularity of beyond-the-box-office purpose. The result is magnificent: at one level, a beast under the hood with enormous raw power and wildly exaggerated style — a Bugatti. But there’s a whole lot more if you only care to look. The CCs (“carping critics”) who find the film ‘hollow’ and ‘shallow’ have of course totally missed the point. They also say much the same about Robert Rodriguez, and they’re wrong there too. » more
book review:
coming through slaughter
by
michael ondaatje
Geoff Dyer, in his astonishing “But Beautiful” says that Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter” is arguably the greatest novel about jazz ever written. Dyer’s book is itself a masterful exposition of the nature and essence of jazz, played through the saxophone of literary fiction and it’s quickly clear that Dyer’s reference to Ondaatje’s novel is itself a reflection of another jazz tradition: acknowledging the influences that shape the present artist’s work. » more
Peter Godwin has carved out a niche as a skillful chronicler of politics and war in his native Zimbabwe. His 1996 memoir, “Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa,” was an affecting account of his coming-of-age in white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, where his father managed a factory and his mother, a physician, operated a rural health clinic. The story climaxed with the outbreak of the civil war that would bring the guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe to power — and with the accidental killing of Godwin’s elder sister by Rhodesian troops at a roadblock. “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa,” published in 2007, picked up the narrative with Mugabe’s evolution into a brutal dictator who stomped on the opposition, evicted thousands of white farmers in a violent land reform program and plunged his country into ruin. Now Godwin has written the third installment of what might be called his Zimbabwe trilogy. In “The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe,” he documents the 2008 presidential election and its aftermath, when Mugabe unleashed ruling-party militias in a savage campaign to keep his hold on power. » more
Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them. » more
Chapter 33 of Neil MacGregor’s marvellous book-of-the-radio-series is about the Rosetta stone. This lump of granite from Egypt, “about the size of one of those large suitcases you see people trundling around on wheels at airports”, is, as he frankly admits, “decidedly dull to look at”. It earns its place in A History of the World in 100 Objects because in the 19th century the equally dull text - on tax breaks for priests, inscribed upon it, in three different languages (Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphs) - became the key to decoding the hieroglyphic script of the ancient pharaohs. » more
