Este site usa cookies para fornecer nossos serviços, melhorar o desempenho, para análises e (se não estiver conectado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing, você reconhece que leu e entendeu nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade . Seu uso do site e dos serviços está sujeito a essas políticas e termos.
Fiction.
Literature.
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai's brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.… (mais)
There were multiple copies of this Man Booker Prize (2006) winning book on our library shelves so it seemed like a good idea to read it. Strangely, it seemed to drag on and on and I was glad to finish it although 'glad' is not the emotion this depressing novel left me with. I wondered if the intriguing title would have an explicit reference but ultimately it summarised an utterly miserable story. For the characters it depicts, and for all their striving for something better, loss and failure become inherently predictable. Perhaps they are the substance of India itself.
The books had titles long faded into the buckled covers; some of them had not been touched in fifty years and they broke apart in one's hands, shedding glue like chitinous bits of insect. Their pages were stencilled with the shapes of long disintegrated fern collections and bored by termites into what looked like maps of plumbing. The yellowed paper imparted a faint acidic tingle and fell easily into mosaic pieces, barely perceptible between the fingers - moth wings at the brink of eternity and dust. (p.198)
Kiran Desai is a fine and insightful writer. Much of what was so destructive about British Colonial rule applies equally to Australia - not least the residual persistence of aesthetics. I would have given this book 5 stars had it elicited some prospect of joy. The book needed a glossary. I felt excluded from so many words and terms that I could not comprehend. ( )
I just couldn't get through this. Nothing compelled me to keep going! Even when the romance started between Sai and Gyan, which was maybe the most interesting part, I still couldn't make myself get interested. The judge's horribly lonely experience as an Indian college student in London was interesting, but it seemed like a short story disconnected from the rest of the novel. I guess it was similar in some ways to Biju's experience as an undocumented restaurant worker in NYC. Sigh. I think I made it about 60% of the way through, but life's too short to carry on with a book that doesn't grab you at all. I'm disappointed that I spent so much of my grown-up book time on this. Back to kid lit! ( )
I feel like this deserves a better review than I will give it, I struggled through to 300 pages but it was just too dense for me and I couldn’t get into it. ( )
Well, I never wrote any comment about this book and don't have a good memory of reading it. Best guess: it was quickly read on vacation (check timeline with other reads) ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
To my mother with so much love
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame - it was just fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.
Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn't believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring coziness of family as much as to abandon it forever.
...and he felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away. (Ch 39)
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.
Fiction.
Literature.
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai's brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
)
)
)
Google Books — Carregando...
(3.41)
1001 Group Read: January,2012--The Inheritance of Loss
6
The book needed a glossary. I felt excluded from so many words and terms that I could not comprehend.
(