Word: novels
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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...
...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...
...highly unlikely, Wagner and Sancho do raise the serious question of how much chance is acceptable when it comes to destroying the earth. At some point—not necessarily this point—experimenting with powerful force in biology or physics can become reckless. Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Cat’s Cradle, which is about the destruction of the Earth by a substance called ice-nine, asks, “What hope can there be for mankind when there are such men…to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children...