Random House Publications

I first read about A Bend in the River from an interview of the former American President Obama . In that interview he talks about all the books he has read during his term as President and the ones he would recommend. He spoke of this as an important book . Also, the author VS Naipaul, a Nobel Laureate, has the reputation of being " the greatest living writer "(paraphrased from NYTimes). The other occasion that I had heard about this author was when his comments about female writers being inferior to male writers made front page news in The Hindu . His comments were made with pointed reference to Jane Austen, of whom I am a huge fan. Nevertheless I wanted to see for myself what the greatest living author wrote like.  The short version of my verdict on  Bend in the River is : it is quite brilliant. There is no long winded prose, no descriptions of the sights and scenes that make you want to stop reading to take a yawn break. The narrative is so simple and neat that it c...

For  these past few months , in the evenings after work and on major parts of the weekends, i have been traveling   to 19th century England , to the provincial town of Middlemarch , by the enchanting words of George Eliot. I severely miss these trips now that i have finished reading this book . I wish i could say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from the very  beginning. Far from it. The narrative was at first so ridiculously hard to follow, with sentences beginning at the top of a kindle page and seeming to end only at the corner of the next. The characters seemed ordinary and boring or "provincial", to borrow the more sophisticated word from the subtitle of the book - a study of provincial life. Romance as always has the quality to propel the most ordinary of stories forward.  And in this epic we read about as many as three of them. The many small stories in this book are set in the times of the rich landed gentry who seemed to do absolutely no work other ...