Word: past
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...individual members off against each other. "There is a complete absence of a strategic debate in Europe about China," says Daniel Korski, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Instead of tackling that failing - an obvious priority for this century - Europe has spent much of the past few months obsessing over how Washington views it. Obama has visited Europe six times since taking office, and made just one trip to China. But the U.S. President's decision to skip the Spain summit, and his failure to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall...
...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...
...from Kolkata - and desires above all to leave it (Mukherjee's loathing of his birthplace is on record). Thanks to an Oxford scholarship, our protagonist absconds to England - so far, so autobiographical - but, as in all good novels of identity and redemption, he is hotly pursued by his past, or what Mukherjee calls "the gratuitous tyranny of memory." In this case, it's more than a literary device. Flashbacks of Ritwik's dreadful childhood - hallucinations of his late abusive mother terrify him in his college room - animate the plot, driving Ritwik to seek a "snack of oblivion" in anonymous...
...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...
...even as she contemplates the future, seeking to leave behind the wreckage of recent events, she looks into the distance and sees "snow-scarred mountains" - a vision of turbulence and beauty, framed by the glass through which she views it. In bearing the marks of a tumultuous past, the human soul is a mirror, it would seem, of nature itself...