Word: lifeness
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...good life at home doesn't make Europe strong abroad. The E.U. may have all the soft-power credentials in the world, but on the grand stage it has lacked the weight and influence of others. At times, it simply seems unable to say what it thinks. Washington and Beijing may squabble from time to time, but the U.S. has a reasonably well-articulated China policy: engage economically, encourage democratically, and criticize on human rights when appropriate. What's the E.U.'s China policy in a few words? (Read: "Should Europe Lift Its Arms Embargo on China...
...past is not simply a dead history," George Eliot wrote in the sweeping novel Middlemarch. "It is a still quivering part of himself." As an executive summary of A Life Apart - the complex, occasionally overwrought but ultimately satisfying fiction debut of TIME contributor Neel Mukherjee - that pretty much fits the bill. The book was first published as Past Continuous in India, where, along with Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, it was joint winner of the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award, the country's most prominent prize for English-language writing. The newly entitled edition is slightly revised and tighter...
...snack of oblivion" in anonymous gay sex in public toilets. They also cause him to work through, on paper, his attitudes to his motherland, for interleaved with Ritwik's story is that of Miss Gilby, a peripheral character in Rabindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World, whose life Ritwik reimagines in a book he is writing. He uses the story of Gilby, a middle-aged English governess to the family of a progressive official in early 20th century India, to revisit his country through the detached perspective of a foreigner. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...prim, reserved and historic counterpoint to the youthful, debauched Ritwik, Gilby is not entirely a success. The drive of her narrative is weak in comparison to the drama, passion and unpredictability of Ritwik's existence, and for much of A Life Apart, the links between her story line and that of her maker are tenuous, leaving the reader at a loss as to how these two interrelate. Only in the book's second half, when Ritwik is living in London illegally, working part-time as a male prostitute and looking after the elderly, incontinent Anne Cameron in exchange for free...
...While A Life Apart revolves around the past, the past is not the same as nostalgia. There is little romance or Proustian yearning here (although a childhood storybook fills Ritwik with "a strange longing"). But if Mukherjee is scathing about Ritwik's history in a city "that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and transposed east," he also refuses to extol Oxford as the site of Ritwik's apparent freedom. Ritwik ignores the university town's prettiness, fixating instead on the "s___-brown door" of the toilet cubicle he favors for his risky liaisons. And London, while offering...