The most impactful reading of the week was Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands. The sheer fact that British India once spanned from Lebanon to Burma is staggering. What’s even more mind-blowing is the idea that it was the narrow-mindedness of Indian leaders, who envisioned a future India aligned with their religious ideologies, that ultimately shaped the fragmented subcontinent we know today. I found it especially compelling how Gandhi’s soft Hindu/spiritual approach inadvertently pushed Jinnah, originally a staunch liberal, toward more hardline religious factions. This is a refreshing take on history, one that reads through the lens of a new generation — a generation no longer burdened by the sentimentality or nostalgia of the past. I’ll definitely be writing more on this soon.
Writers and Lovers, by contrast, landed a bit softly for me — I ended up giving it 3.5 stars. One moment that stood out was the protagonist’s assertion that Bernard is a better writer than McCarthy, whom she (and likely the author as well) brushes off as a mix of Hemingway and Faulkner, so entangled in style that the story gets lost in the text. I don’t share that view, but I find value in hearing it — perspectives like that are part of why I read in the first place.
I’ve written about Ronan Hession before. I never got around to finishing his second novel, Panenka, but I’ve just started his latest — I believe it came out last year — Ghost Mountain. What a fun novel so far. Hession has an uncanny knack for finding joy in the mundane, and I adore the compassion that runs through his writing. More thoughts on this soon.
I also re-started The Truth and Other Stories by Stanislaw Lem, a collection I had set aside earlier this year. It’s one of the most imaginative and intellectually playful sci-fi collections I’ve encountered. Will share more once I finish it.
On the shorter side, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Jubilee” in The New Yorker, a piece that perhaps reflects her own early life between the US and the UK, and how her parents navigated that cultural space. It was a solid read. I followed that with Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Comedian”, a story about a comedian’s daughter who secretly watches her father perform. She has a sharper sense of humor than he does, and a blind mother. The story had layers, and worked better for me than My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which was the only other piece of hers I had read.
Otherwise, Proust is moving along — slowly and steadily.