Fifty-Five Pillars, Red Walls, Usha Priyamvada’s debut novel, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, is a seminal work of feminist literature, and a cult classic among middle-class Hindi readers. Released in 1961, the book is one of the most well-known literary pieces set in Delhi, and one of the first translations to come from Indian Novels Collective.
Category Archive: Reviews
There exists a well known aphorism in Japan: “everything that has a shape, breaks.” Within the scope of traditional craftsmanship, it can be interpreted as an acknowledgement that all life, including that of objects, is rendered unique when exhibiting evidence of damage, wear, or rehabilitation. As a result, the concept of “repair” is often quite distinct from that of “restoration”. This approach is embodied in the art of kintsugi, literally translated to “gold joinery”, the technical and philosophical exercise of reassembling fractured ceramic vessels with burnished golden seams. These mends do not serve to obscure “scars” created by a break. Rather, they celebrate the object’s storied history, and encourage the holder to reflect on the transient nature of identity.
To appreciate Lucy Atkinson as the most intrepid of all Victorian women explorers one only has to read her discreet allusion to giving birth after 150 kms of horseback riding across a waterless steppe: “I was in expectation of a little stranger, whom I thought might arrive about the end of December or the beginning of January; expecting to return to civilisation, I had not thought of preparing anything for him, when, lo and behold, on the 4th November, at twenty minutes past four pm, he made his appearance.” No one ever maintained a stiffer upper lip.
Cantonese is only rarely included as part of broader discourses on language, but journalist James Griffiths (who lives in Hong Kong) has it as one of three languages considered in detail in his new book Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language.
With its opening scene of a hard-boiled interrogation of murder suspect Han Manu, Lemon seems to be setting the reader up for yet another rote exercise in crime fiction. And the reader follows the cues, according to convention: skeptically receiving the detective’s attributions of guilt to a clearly confused Manu, suspecting that the murder of the teenage girl that has taken place will prove to be anything but a clear-cut case—and, still, satiated with the requisite hunger to plunge onward, with the promise of more clues to be unveiled shortly in the course of what is, after all, a refreshingly thin novel.
This ambitious first poetry collection deals confessionally with the loss of scientist and poet Jenny Qi’s mother and her own childhood, loss of lovers and friends, ecology, racism and her mixed heritage. There is no fixed focal point linking poems sequentially; a narrative chronology threads the work instead.
Scattered throughout India one can find ancient synagogues, sometimes just remnants, that date back almost 3000 years. In Growing Up Jewish in India: Synagogues, Customs, and Communities from the Bene Israel to the Art of Siona Benjamin the diverse stories of Indian Jews is showcased through essays, photos, and a memoir of artist Siona Benjamin, perhaps the best known Jewish Indian in the United States.