Raj Saberwal

The clutch of the Veldtschoen.......

Revisado: 06-24-21

Many in India took grave offence when this book was first published more than 55 years ago and his reputation in India almost never recovered. Naipaul is remembered (in India at least) as a dark man mimicking the prejudices of the white imperialists. This view is not only superficial, it is wrong. Naipaul’s rage is not the result of being unable to feel the native’s plight; on the contrary, he is angry because he feels it so keenly.
Naipaul is himself determined to see, and what he sees is a decayed, self-deluded, caste-ridden civilization that deals in symbols and ignores realities, a system at the heart of which lies the degradation of the Sweepers, as those most despised of the Untouchables, the cleaners of latrines, are euphemistically known. His excremental vision is Swiftian in its ferocity, and like Swift, Naipaul is able to ascend from noisome particulars to startling and often brilliant cultural insights that may provoke argument but never simple dismissal.
Reading (listening!) this after almost 30 years, one realizes how much progress India has made since the dud 60's and 70's.

Simon Vance is at his usual best.

Looking forward to the other two books in this India trilogy. Glad that audible has made these available.

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Exceeds the hype!

Revisado: 02-14-21

Extraordinary novel and worth the hype. Equal part a fluky novel of ideas, grand guignol and a bildungsroman in the context of globalization. Narration is pitch perfect.

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The Dandy at Dusk

Revisado: 08-29-18

Excellent introduction to an obscure topic although the theory and practice of decadence as an aesthetic and social attitude had a major role to play in the moral condemnation of modernity in the mid nineteenth century.
90 years ago Edmund Wilson with great panache in Axels Castle, underscored the role of Symbolism as an underpinning for literary modernism. When I read Wilson's book 20 years back, Symbolism and Decadence were used interchangeably in the context of literary modernism. But are they interchangeably?

David Weir discusses Decadence in aesthetic, social and cultural contexts as well as how it played out in Paris, London, Vienna in the 19th century, was democratized in the Weimar Republic in the 1920's and briefly in the the non-European context. He begins by tracing the etiology of the term in the study of Classical Rome in the 18th century and the central role of Paris in the development of decadence as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude towards modernity [Just about every manifestation of decadence owes its origins, either directly or indirectly, to a loosely affiliated group of artists and writers who lived and worked in Paris around 1850's, especially the critic Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) who was the first to retrospectively describe the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) as decadent]

The narrator has done an excellent job.

Highly recommended. At least for me this book pushed me to dust off my Baudelaire!

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Accessible and Stimulating

Revisado: 06-01-14

This book covers in less than 5 hours almost all the interesting and important schools in Indian Ontology and Epistemology between the Vedic times and 11th Century.

Starting from the Vedic speculations and the place of sacrifice in maintaining the cosmos and the distillation of Vedic thought in the Monism of the Upanishads, the book guides a reader with little background in Indian tradition through the debates between the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school of transcendental realism as well as the Buddhist exegesis on the two levels of reality and a very easy to follow discussion of the Nagarjuna's concept of emptiness.
The book ends with a brief overview of Shankara's Advait Vedanta and Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita Vedanta.

Although Hamilton's point of view is what is considered relevant in Indian Philosophy from a Western point of view, she has accommodated the overreaching importance of Soteriology in all Indian philosophical positions discussed.

Strongly recommended for any one interested in the foundations of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. Sadly the Jain Metaphysics is neglected but that is understandable given that this is a Very Short Introduction.

The narrator (Neil Shah) has done an excellent job.

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An extraordinary work.......

Revisado: 05-29-14

Wonderful and lyrical. With a canvas as broad as Mishima's hero Thomas Mann and writing as lyrical as Rilke. Very impressive.

Mishima who performed the ritual Seppukku on the afternoon of Nov 25, 1970, sealed and posted to his publisher the manuscript of The Sea of Fertility, a tetralogy of novels over which he had labored for five years. Unfortunately his magnum opus has always been occluded by his suicide. The four books – Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel – are a saga of 20th-century Japan: a story of national decline that nonetheless proposes redemption through the endurance of a certain soul, forceful enough to be reborn ad-infinitum.

Spring Snow (volume 1 of this tetralogy) is set in 1912 and has shades of Lampedusa's-The Leopard). The main characters of this book are capricious Kiyoaki Matsugae, a baron's son of distant samurai descent, his friend Shigekuni Honda and Kiyoaki's love Satoko Ayakura.

The extraordinary beauty of this book lies in Mishima's intense portrayal of Kiyoaki as a dreamer, gripped by the sense that life's elusive fineness is slipping away by the second and longing to chase the impossible, to "bend the world" into the shape of his ideals. Of course tragedy is not far behind.

The narrator has done his job deftly.
I hope Audible will consider bringing out volumes 2, 3 and 4 of this transcendental work.

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Indispensable for any Bollywood Buff...........

Revisado: 01-19-14

A treat for any one with a serious interest in Bollywood movies. Some of the entries in this collection make astute cultural and social observations in connecting the changes in the structure of Bollywood movies over time to larger changes in the Indian society and politics.

Highly recommended!!

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Great history wonderfully narrated................

Revisado: 10-30-11

The book is excellent history. The narration is almost perfect with the right balance of pitch and sonority. As I grew up and lived in India for more then 30 years, cannot understand the quibbles of other reviewers regarding pronunciation.

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