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The book of blam

The book of blam

₹700

The Balkans: a seething cauldron of centuries-old racial hatreds and periodic massacres perpetrated by one ethnic group upon another. The newspapers fill with one atrocity after another, and eventually the mind and heart numbs to the sufferings of whichever unlucky group is being victimized this time. Perhaps the only way to truly appreciate the horror of the tragedy is to scale it down from the general to the specific, from the anguish of the many to the agony of one. This is the approach Aleksandar Tísma takes in The Book of Blam, originally published in 1972. Set in post-World War II Yugoslavia, in the city of Novi Sad, the novel chronicles the despair of Miroslav Blam, the only member of his family to survive an infamous Hungarian slaughter of Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube in 1942. Blam survived the roundup only because a traitorous journalist who was once his mother's lover vouched for him with the Hungarians. Now it is after the war, and though Novi Sad has seemingly returned to normal, Blam is beset by the ghosts of those he has outlived. As he walks the streets of his city and goes through the motions of his life, he remembers the woman he loved, the friends he lost, and his own failure to "face the rifle barrels like his father and mother, the search patrols like his sister, Estera; he has failed to go down to the Danube like Slobodan Krkljus and bend over an old man on the ground, deaf to all warning and moved only by the thought of the moment, the thought of assistance. He had seen nothing, learned nothing." Tísma offers neither consolation nor redemption for his protagonist. Instead, Blam is left only with the hollow expectation of a future war in which he will, at last, be able to make the supreme sacrifice, thus "committing an act of the most profound truth," while the reader is left with the uncomfortable realization that in a world riven by sectarian violence, Blam's tragedy is not unique. --Alix Wilber

1 month ago
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Dead souls by Nikolai gogol

Dead souls by Nikolai gogol

₹750

An NYRB Classics OriginalThe first of the great Russian novels and one of the indisputable masterpieces of world literature, Dead Souls is the tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con man who causes consternation in a small Russian town when he shows up out of nowhere proposing to buy title to serfs who, though dead as doornails, are still property on paper. What can he have up his sleeve, the local landowners wonder, even as some rush to unload what isn’t of any use to them anyway, while others seek to negotiate the best deal possible, and others yet hold on to their dead for dear life, since if somebody wants what you have then no matter what don’t give it away. Chichikov’s scheme soon encounters obstacles, but he is never without resource, and as he stumbles forward as best he can, Gogol paints a wonderfully comic picture of Russian life that also serves as a biting satire of a society as corrupt as it is cynical and silly. At once a wild phantasmagoria and a work of exacting realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art that spills over with humor and passion and absurdity.Donald Rayfield’s vigorous new translation corrects the mistakes and omissions of earlier versions while capturing the vivid speech rhythms of the original. It also offers a fuller text of the unfinished second part of the book by combining material from Gogol’s two surviving drafts into a single compelling narrative. This is a tour de force of art and scholarship—and the most authoritative, accurate, and readable edition of Dead Souls available in English.

1 month ago
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Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie

Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie

₹800

Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie -- less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 -- the moment at which India became an independent nation -- are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view -- and certainly his sense of the fantastical -- has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart -- literally: I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug -- that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration. In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hu

1 month ago
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