Word: davidar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar is the more straightforward of the two. Davidar's narrator Vijay, a journalist, recounts the story of the first few years of his career working for the Indian Secularist, a tiny journal in Mumbai. After the bloody anti-Muslim riots of 1992, Vijay is sent by his editor to a mountain tea town where a religious shrine threatens to become the rallying point for another bout of violence. The novel is both artful rhetoric and page-turning thriller. Davidar, the former head of publishing giant Penguin's India operations (and now Penguin...
...fundamentalism in India should appear at the same time is hardly surprising: dealing with sectarianism is among India's most pressing needs. With the country's politicians failing to drive the debate, who can fault Indian writers for taking on the challenge? Nor is it a shock that both Davidar and Vassanji live abroad - distance often allows writers to see their homes more clearly than those still living there. The real surprise is that there are still people who moan that books about India written by expatriates and émigrés are less important or less genuinely Indian. India...
...plan an Indian wedding without ever really caring much about the happy couple. This is one of those novels. The year is 1899, and progress has come to tiny Chevathar in the form of its first road. It proves to be a long one for the Dorai family, and Davidar follows them down it for three generations in a tale of grand scope but not much real depth...
...half-century from 1899 to 1947. Against the backdrop of the British Raj, two world wars and the struggle for independence, it chronicles three generations of a Tamil family?the Dorais?and through them depicts the caste tensions that simmer just below the surface in the Indian countryside. Davidar is at his best when he weaves the family's struggles with vibrant images of rural life...
...notion that the book is partially autobiographical, a suggestion fostered by his painstaking research and meticulous detail. But he does admit to an idyllic childhood in the south on his father's tea estate which gave him a love of his native soil. Even though the scope of Davidar's saga compares to Seth's novel, its capable prose lacks the magical turns of phrase found in A Suitable Boy. Davidar's is a deliberate, enduring tale and one that proves years of plowing through a slush pile?learning how not to write?can produce a master storyteller...