LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is a novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s. It is laced with straightforward political and philosophical speculations. One feels the characters are only half drawn. This gives the work an odd tone of helpless existential detachment. Choices are shown to be irrevocable and […]

Things Fall Apart (1958) tells how Okonkwo, a great warrior of an Ibo village in Nigeria falls from grace in his tribal world. The conflict between the individual and society is no better or more wisely illustrated. A second story depicts the proselytizing European missionaries who threaten to destroy the existing indigenous culture. Writing from an insider vantage point

First published in 1847–48, Vanity Fair  satirizes society in early 19th-century Britain and in particular the attachment to material things. No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however,

Patrick Victor Martindale White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White) was an Australian author who was widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, White published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantagepoints and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the

In five linked episodes in A Hero of Our Time (1839), early Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lermontov) builds up the portrait of a Byronic hero officer, Grigory Pechorin, caught up in and expressing the sickness of his age. The sickness is a certain ennui, nihilism and indifference to the world. The setting is Russian military

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V.S. Naipaul’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul) unforgettable third novel. Born the ‘wrong way’ and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence

In A Farewell to Arms (1929) a young American volunteer goes to Italy during the First World War. This is a love story interwoven with a savage indictment of the brutalities of war. It is all the more remarkable given the coolness and impartiality of tone with which the author delivers the narrative. One may not warm

Seamus Deane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Deane) was brought up in Derry, Northern Ireland, as part of a Catholic Nationalist family. Reading in the Dark (1996) is his first novel. It won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature. This is a novel, well imbued with solid personal memories, which is delivered

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by Antonia Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the title ‘Possession’ refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artefacts, and to the possession that a biographer feels for