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Waiting for Shiva
April 2, 2007
It's the end of a ten day festival and the puja is running late. While waiting at Meenakshi Temple, home of the Golden Lotus Tank--a huge pool of water with a golden lotus in the center--we hear about how poets in the sixteenth century would write poems on banana leaves and throw them into the pool. Shiva would judge their worth, and the good poems would float, the bad ones sink. Finally, at midnight, Shiva arrives, and we are almost run over by the priests carrying Shiva's silver palanquin.
Too late tonight to start Catch-22, so I read the literary review section in The Hindu. It has a very interesting book section with a lot of poetry coverage and many reviews of books translated into English, most of them from Penguin Books. There's also an essay on fiction trends by Tabish Khair about how there is "too much storytelling, too little of anything else in the global book market... Where would that have left Proust, Joyce, or Camus?" Hmmm.... Khair's novel, Filming, comes out in July from Picador.
Durga Ghandi has finally found a copy of Kiran Desai at the hotel bookshop, which has paperbacks of, once again, Grisham and Archer, and also Danielle Steele and all of V. S. Naipul.
Posted by Louisa Ermelino on April 2, 2007 | Comments (0)
