Tag: Books

Recent logo of the Kolkata International Book Fair. Image for representative purpose only When the Book Fair burnt in January 1997, it did not smell of authentic Bengali cuisine. Or of any of the many subliminal ‘snake foods’ (purported snacks) that were being cooked inside the fairground, one of whose stalls had been that very Prometheus who handed over fire to an undiscerning congregation of millions. Inside a stall, around 5 in the evening, I was browsing through a book…

So much has already been said about The Namesake being about finding one’s home both within and without, that I saw it as incumbent upon me to go and see the film, more so since it was about my home and my city. The novel had not made my heart melt, but then I read it when I was not ‘outside’ my home. So I thought the film might provoke those emotions that the novel did not, especially after Mira Nair’s insistence…

Samuel in style Writing about Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright and novelist is an act of supreme dilemma. Because, here is a man who gambled with meaning-making, eschewed verbosity to manufacture silence and played upon language to extract its hidden humour and cruelty. When the war-weary mid-century Europe was looking for a structure of belief, a frame of reference, Beckett gave it none and instead recalled even the last strain of certainty that could hang on to literature’s hoary claims.