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Chargement... Hot Death, Cold Soup: Twelve Short Storiespar Manjula Padmanabhan
Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  Stevil2001 | Jun 16, 2017 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
In her desire to embrace traditional Indian culture wholeheartedly Sally, an American, has decided to join her Indian husband on his funeral pyre - regardless of the fact that such an act is, in fact, illegal in India. In committing sati she enlists the help of Mrs. Sen, a journalist from Delhi, to record the momentous event for posterity. Dragged from the comforts of her city office to the wilds of Uttar Pradesh, with the promise of the story of the decade, Mrs. Sen is somewhat disturbed when Sally casually drops into after-dinner conversation that her husband is still alive . . . Manjula Padmanabhan's collection of darkly humorous tales from contemporary India introduces us to characters such as Rakesh, a disturbing young man who finds it hard to keep his hands to himself, particularly when travelling on public transport; Mr. Sukhatme, an old-fashioned calligrapher forced to demean his skill, who finds a way to turn the tables on his employer; and a young, mother-damaged engineer, whose devious plan to burn alive his sleeping wife and child - escaping to Delhi with his wife's suitcase of money - goes horribly wrong. High in narrative tension and laced with unexpected twists, Padmanabhan's twelve tales are an intriguing window on contemporary India. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813Literature English (North America) American fictionClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (2)
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Hot Death, Cold Soup collects, as the subtitle implies, twelve short stories, both previously published stories from 1984 to 1995, and a set of unpublished ones written over the same time period. The most famous of these is probably "A Government of India Undertaking," one of the science fiction ones: a desperate narrator discovers the government bureaucracy that controls reincarnation and tries to figure out who she needs to bribe to get out of her current life and into a much better one-- an amusing idea with a nice final scene.
I feel like much of Padmanabhan's non-sf is driven by an sfnal impulse, to take a single idea and follow its permutations and implications through to their ultimate conclusion, such as the title story, about a white American widow of an Indian man who's determined to commit sati, or "The Calligrapher's Tale" (probably my favorite in this book), about a wealthy young man who hires a highly skilled calligrapher to write out erotica for him, or "Teaser," about a sexual harasser who finally accomplishes his greatest goal.
Padmanabhan is skilled at capturing human pettiness and balancing it with the meaningful and the profound: I enjoyed, for example, "Mrs Ganapathy's Modest Triumph," about a woman trying to marry off her unconventional daughter, and "The Copper-tailed Skink," about a white English biology professor doing field work in India who's struggling with a different culture with different customs. One of my other favorites was "Stains," which concerns a black American woman engaged to an Indian man, and the cultural differences she considers irreconcilable-- the "stains" of the title are menstrual blood she leaves on the sheets, to which her future mother-in-law reacts quite strongly.
I guess as I write that I realize that a number of these stories deal with cultural clash, which Padmanabhan handles in an interesting and provocative way, as someone who's spent her own life passing between India and Britain. Like her other volumes, highly recommended.