The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that in Chinese landscape painting, the aim is not to reproduce the appearance of things, but to convey the rhythm and spirit of nature. Among genres of traditional Chinese art, landscape painting is widely regarded as a central tradition and admired for its qualities beyond the aesthetics, with the capacity for conveying lofty ideas and cultural meanings. To many artists, Chinese landscape painting is not merely a literal depiction of a specific place but represents an idealized vision of their environments shaped by their imagination and individualized understanding of nature. Chinese landscape paintings thus bear meanings beyond the physical realm, elevating the viewer towards spiritual and intellectual awakenings.
Category Archive: Reviews
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a slim novel that gut-punches weirdness.
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex, spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action. It is a serious, carefully constructed novel, yet also, at times, a genuinely exhausting one.
The lives of those impacted by the British Empire were complex, deeply intertwined, and, as Julia Stephens describes, transcend boundaries. The lives of the generations that follow the initial immigrants are varied and pluralistic, so they can no longer fit the identities their forefathers held.
Those who know other volumes in the “History in Objects” series from Thames & Hudson and the British Museum will find much that is familiar in this latest one on Japan: a wide and often eclectic collection of objects well-displayed on pages balanced with bite-sized yet informative blocks of text.
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the politically charged early 1990s, the novel traces how personal journeys and national history travel along the same lines.
More than technology or trade, even more than defense, all societies need food, and agriculture is thus a vital hinge of power. Such is the focus of Nahoko Uehashi’s three-volume fantasy novel Kokun: The Girl from the West, the first volume of which has recently appeared in an English translation by Cathy Hirano.
The story of Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, contains all the irresistibly exotic ingredients of a compelling story: Thor Heyerdahl’s daring voyages, mystical origin myths, Spanish conquistadores, scholarly rivalries, rumours of ritualised sexuality, and the brooding presence of monumental stone statues. For two centuries these ingredients have fed an extraordinary range of theories, speculations, and fantasies about one of the world’s most isolated islands.
Diplomats, soldiers, and spies tend to take centre stage in stories of war, as author and former journalist Evelyn Iritani writes in her history of the United States and Japan in the Second World War. In this book, the author tells a tale of civilians, rather than one of military men, a tale of victims, rather than one of perpetrators.
It seems that the Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz was “obsessed with the idea of the Other as not an external entity but a tree within”. Borrowing the phrase for the title of his new book, Indranil Chakravarty generously explores and develops this point, presenting his readers with different trees in different spaces, including Paz’s own neem tree in the inner garden of his home during his sojourn in India in the 1960s.
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