Fiction. If you go strictly by star ratings, I ended up with nine absolute five-star books, and three that hovered right on the edge. The year began with McCarthy, and what a beginning that was. From there, I moved on to Proust, though the entire series yielded just one full five-star read for me. Two […]
I just finished reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Earlier, when I read and reviewed her novel Utmost (I’d once seen a humbug mock it), I had noted that her writing spilled over with anger and intensity. Now, in this memoir, she lists the reasons for that anger. She shows that her
Arundhati Roy’s clarity is impossible to deny. I have disagreed — and at times still disagree — with some of her ideas, especially her positions on Kerala politics. My sense has been that some of those views were shaped under the influence of certain Islamic fundamentalist groups here. Another disagreement, years ago, came from my