Reviews and Comments

A beautiful little book, and shows Anita Desai's extraordinary grasp on the literary sentence! The description of post-Independence Indian households in which the second-person narrator's mother lived so evocative and delicately written. In way of shortcoming: the reader does not trust this interest in the 'stranger' and here the length works against the novel. More could have been said about what the draw of this stranger figure was! I won't spoil it but the ending was a little bit of a non-ending also

Early modernists are just built different, the sheer range and scope of the archival work. I understood less the emphasis on particular officials and the way those appeared as the dramatis personnae of the book, and also the overall argument was a little too nimble-footed, but overall this was a really top notch piece of scholarship

Finally found a copy! 🎉

The first novel in over twenty years from the now 87-year old Anita Desai!

That was a rousing read, of the best kind! It was especially astute on the paradox that the reasons writers and artists are able to speak back to power of this kind is because they are so precarious already that they have the least to lose. A passage begins referring to Anna Burns's Booker acceptance speech, in which she thanked her food bank. Passages critiquing American liberal intelligentsia and liberal journalism felt so important. This is a genuinely important book for the moment!

Adding this crucial reading to my shelf!

Re-read for my lecture on mid-Victorian representations of colonial India this past week, and let me tell you that The Moonstone is everything that your Victorianist friends have been talking about for ages. By the time you're through Gabriel Betteredge's narrative, you are hooked! There is no escaping. My favourite scene (obviously): Opium and the re-enactment! The novel is also the origin point for many of detective fiction's foundational tropes: bunging local policeman, prodigal brooding city cop, poor maid with the stained dress wrongly accused for the crime, digressive polyvocal narrative, the found document, and so on!

2024 was for me a year of brilliant memoirs—I'll keep going back to A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, and I also enjoyed reading Clair Wills's Missing Persons, Or my Grandmother's Secret—but right at the very end of the year I received this as a late birthday present and my god did it not blow my mind. One heck of an opening, and it only gets better; cerebral, jaw-clenching, full of long beautiful ruminating passages about the body and what is left of it if half your face is eaten up by a bear. Also found the book to be a really good peek into how anthropologists think (something that ethnographies don't do imo, seduced as they are a little by the ethnographer's abstracted historical voice)

On Kubra's recommendation, I started reading this long essay, and it is heartening so far—especially the way it reconciles with its own anger, shows that we are trapped in what is a historical process, and why the struggle—despite its everydayness—cannot be normalised!

for 'Critical Love Studies'

I must, I must

Very ideational. Could have been an essay, which is a funny thing to say about a book that is short anyway. I guess its a form thing; I expect, perhaps for my own prejudice, a certain form still from the novel. Chie's teardrop scene was beautiful, I could not stop thinking about it

Also: did anyone else feel that reading this book helped them sleep better at night? That cosy dormy spaceship feeling! 🤔

Not impressed! Short, profoundly sad, and unbearably slimy. It had however one very very hard-hitting moment!

What an incredible book! Completely stunned by the integrity and authenticity of voice, the credibility of characters, the piercing wit and sharpness. Were it not for the racism of the English canon, Small Island would be considered THE British novel