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 Print pick

Last Evenings on Earth

Roberto Bolano

Harvill Secker

10.25 pounds

If this were my last evening on earth, I think I would like to spend it reading Last Evenings on Earth (though I might have chosen Romantic Dogs, the collection of Bolano’s poems, had I been able to get hold of it). “Last Evenings on Eart h” is totally thrilling, filled with poets, writers and others who continually discuss poetry, novels, and writing as if life were crucially about stories and poems and the struggle to write these.

Bolano’s writing appears plain at first, with a narration that goes on in a literal sort of way, then suddenly the first epiphany sweeps you up, as a thrilling insight comes to a character, or a humbling line tells you how you have seen and yet been blind. Soon, you’re completely enthralled, in the grip of that rare kind of word- high, which spills over into what else you do when you are not reading.

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Cathi Unsworth

Serpent’s Tail

Rs. 392.45

Cathi Unsworth is a well-know writer of female noir; her books are dark and violent, her heroines as hard-boiled as any noir hero and her plots held together with gun shots, knife wounds and lots of blood and death. In “The Not Knowing, “ Unsworth’s heroine, Diana Kemp’s interests, like the author’s – music, journalism, crime novels, edgy films and hip London – provide an interesting background. The action rarely moves out of Camden Town, which comes alive with eerie detail — Cathi Unsworth, in real life, conducts a ‘Camden Crime Walk’. But when it does, it travels to the dark corners of one or the other character’s life and memories.

Terribly interesting reading; one of those books you will surely not want to have missed.

Roberto Bolano

Picador

5.15 pounds

The Daily Telegraph describes The Savage Detectives as “…part road-movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession. A Masterpiece.” It is all of those things and more, and as we know by now, Bolano is considered the most important/influent ial voice of post-Marquez Latin American writing.

This story of a bunch of writers who set out to detect a literary disappearance is, like all Bolano’s writing, filled with serious regard for poetry and stories, and they become characters in his tales. But the reading doesn’t become weighty, with all the serious discussions about writing, or about literary movements, and the reader is often just swept up in sudden word-flights or dazzling insights.

Great reading, shouldn’t miss this one.

Ashwin Sanghi

Westland

Rs. 250

I found The Rozabal Line quite gripping, not so much because it unfurls a possible life of Jesus the Christ in India, and traces this life all the way to twenty-first century descendants, or because it paints a terrifying picture of how all religions fall under the awful sweep of world politics, whose prime tool is terrorism. The really exciting part of this book, for me, was how it invokes an important remembrance that there was once a living trail of Gnostic knowledge all around the world, actively travelled by people in communion with truth.

“Rozabal Line” begins well and is quite exciting, with a plot that is as thrilling as the discoveries of the seekers in the book. But towards the end, the plot turns into an overdone kichdi, with far too many incidents and revelations and motives than the story can hold. But that’s only in the last quarter of the book, and even then, the thrill stays.

KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH

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