LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

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

The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) celebrates the romance of even the most ordinary lives in the course of tracing the passage of time over three generations. It tells the story of the two Baines sisters, placid stay-at-home Constance and rebellious Sophia, from their girlhood to their last days. They move from the family drapery shop

Mrs. Dalloway  (1925) follows a set of characters as they go about their lives on a normal day. The eponymous character, Clarissa Dalloway, does simple things: she buys some flowers, walks in a park, is visited by an old friend and throws a party. She speaks to a man who was once in love with

Maurice Bendrix’s love affair with his friend’s wife, Sarah, had begun in London during the Blitz. One day, inexplicably and without warning, Sarah had broken off the relationship. Two years later, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, Bendrix sends Parkis, a private detective, to follow Sarah. As the reader discovers, there had really been 3 persons in