Murder mysteries make natural period pieces, because passion, crime, investigation and come-uppance speak to material culture and social manners. Miss Marple evokes mid-20th century Britain, Inspector Montalbano—contemporary Sicily. Raza Mir’s Murder in the Mushaira brings to life mid-19th-century Shahjahan-abad (as Delhi was then known), its Ramazan celebrations, noble palaces, shrines, shops and slums. He lets us smell the boiled sweet meats, the ambergris-heavy perfumes and the odors of the outhouse. We hear Urdu poets declaim their ghazals to polite applause as part of the mushairas of the title. So depicted, Mir’s Shahjahan-abad becomes a familiar place, despite the barriers of time, culture and language that separate us from the characters of his new novel.
Category Archive: Reviews
For nearly seventy years, Kazuo Odachi, a respected police officer, insurance investigator, and Kendo-sensei in Japan, kept secret that during the last months of World War II he was a young kamikaze pilot who flew eight suicide missions but miraculously survived. Odachi’s memoir was published in Japanese in 2016, and has now been translated into English. It is a remarkable story of youth, comradeship, courage, honor, despair, recovery, introspection, and closure.
One of the most recognizable garments in Japanese fashion, kimonos were closet staples for people of all classes, ages, and genders. Literally translated as “a thing worn”, it is a term broadly used to describe a T-shaped costume with sleeves partially detached under the arm that can be wrapped around the body and secured with a belt. Over time, the simple yet iconic design in many ways became a canvas for imagery that communicated information about the wearer’s identity.
Mizumura Minae’s An I-Novel begins with a caveat: the author herself once suggested that translating the novel, originally published in Japan in 1995, into English was singularly impossible.
Endearingly referred to as “Mother Volga” in Russian, it is the longest river in Europe, flowing from forests to the steppes and marshlands of the Caspian Sea. In The Volga, Janet M Hartley pens a vivid, human-centered story of the great river standing at a crossroad of peoples and cultures. She explores and contextualizes its significance to the history of Russia.
Crystal Z Lee’s debut novel, Love and Other Moods, begins—as one does—with a lavish wedding à la Crazy Rich Asians. Chinese-American Joss Kong is marrying ultra-wealthy Tay Kai Tang at a swanky Shanghai hotel with an audience of friends and family that speak a variety of Chinese dialects and English with a variety of accents. There’s a Who’s Who of designer and luxury goods on everyone in the wedding party and on every guest.
Tom is a young boy who is “ordinary most of the time”—that is, unless he’s visiting his grandmother Bea, an archaeologist whose artifacts have the power to transport Tom back into time.
Laura Moretti’s Pleasure in Profit begins and ends with the image of a bookshop in 17th-century Kyoto:
Now step back in time, to seventeenth-century Japan. Imagine yourself on Teramachi Street, in the heart of Kyoto.
A novel set in capitalist Hong Kong in the 1960s and steeped in alcohol, prostitution and stream-of-consciousness narration might not suggest a controlled work of fiction. Yet Liu Yichang’s classic The Drunkard, in Charlotte Chun-lam Yiu’s new translation, is measured, uninhibited and very good.
Power corrupts is the message from author Megha Majumdar in her blistering debut novel of prejudice and injustice set in contemporary Kolkata.
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