Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Young lovebirds can be ingenious, particularly those for whom privacy is in short supply. No big shock to readers of Manil Suri's new novel The Age of Shiva, then, to find hormonal Delhiites Meera Sawhney, 17, and hunky songster Dev Arora, not much older, on the floor of a Sufi mystic's decaying tomb in flagrante delicto. The only surprise comes for the two paramours, whose rendezvous has been espied by a nearby stationmaster's son. Word quickly reaches both their homes, which shudder with the news. "You may not realize this now," Meera's father scolds...
...Teenage entanglement was a feature of Suri's 2001 debut novel The Death of Vishnu, a tale of Muslim-Hindu elopement and mob violence that garnered much critical acclaim for the Bombay-born writer (who also happens to be a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland). This time there's no bloodletting, partly because Meera and Dev are both Hindu, meaning that a hasty marriage can be arranged. It's India, 1955, after all - still an ultraconservative country. Even Meera's bullying dad Rajinder, a hard-line atheist and ostensibly a progressive who quotes John Stuart Mill and owns...
...Bombay and buy a flat for them as a reward, Meera, already four months along, aborts. Suri's description of the procedure, in a scuzzy room above a bathroom-fixtures shop, is macabre and grating, but typical of his hyper-realistic prose, which animates the best parts of the novel with its frankness. "Scabs of green paint were peeling off the wall and ceiling," and a "strong meaty odor, like that from a fatty cut of mutton boiled in a curry, emanated from the door...
...German film Cloud 9, otherwise known as the naked-old-people-making-love movie. Then I thought, why spend 90 mins. watching something I can get at home? And I was off to a Cannes Classic screening of David Lean's 1949 The Passionate Friends, from an H.G. Wells novel about a woman (Lean's then-wife Ann Todd) who'd had an affair with someone her age (Trevor Howard) but married a wealthy, older man (Claude Rains). It's not one of the great director's masterpieces, but it had an emotional gravity that locates the difference between love...
...Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez addressed a regional “madness” afflicting the continent, perhaps at the core of what he famously described as “one hundred years of solitude” in his most celebrated novel. Although García Márquez may be correct about Latin America as a whole, the Bolivian navy does not fit his regional argument. This is not just because other landlocked countries, like Rwanda and Serbia, also have navies. Rather, it is because irrational behavior has always been...