Books

Love, Stars is about the experiences of a desi grad student studying anthropology at UC Berkeley. I loved, cherished and totally connected with this book. When the white South Asian professor hits on Geeta, I hear my female friends telling me the same stories. When Feroze talks about how tense desi women are with him, his irrational guilt, and his retreat into detailed, impersonal political theory, I can relate 100%. Narayan lampoons the South Asian Studies establishment; it's accurate and hilarious. She portrays a South Asian scholar who uses neocolonialism and deconstructionism as warmups. I've met her. I've known her. Only the names are different. And Narayan's tale of love among political South Asian Americans rings both hopeful and true. It strokes my romantic side, it plays to my fatalism. I am in love with the possibilities -- and with this book.

What Love, Stars does for the heart, Karma Cola does for the mind. Mehta's training is as an essayist and a journalist, and it shows. She applies her scalpel-like pen and her acid wit to one of the least-understood exploitations of the century: the way the West buys and sells Indian culture. The '60s-era infatuation with India, the abuses by Indian holy men, the sex, drugs and promise of moksha -- it's all there. I have never run across an author as incisive, nor as deliciously funny. Unfortunately, Mehta had a huge palette of absurdity to choose from.

The word for today is fabulist. I picked that up, along with many other tart academic phraseology, on the SASIALIT mailing list. It's a word Vikram Chandra knows well. He spins a tale within a tale within a tale of reincarnated monkeys,deities, explorers, colonialists, printing presses, a divine troika, brotherhood, foreshadowing, aftershadowing, bloodlust, fleshlust, maces, fortresses, disguise, elephants, affairs, and lord knows what else after I put the book down, head pounding and the blood rushing through my ears. There are fifty-five lakh mother-stories in the recesses of our land, and this tale was suckled on every single one. Exotified? Of course. Orientalist? Sure. But Red Earth is fierce, it has soul, and I selfishly forgive it the little things.

(ISBN 0-934971-2 (hardcover) $16.95; ISBN 0-934971-23-4 (paperback) $8.95)
A collection of wonderfully evocative and haunting poems.

--Sonya Pelia

ISBN 0-385-47558-6 ($19.95) The book is a collection of short stories featuring Indian-born women. Like Chitra Divakaruni's poetry, the stories are very delicate, evocative, haunting, and moving. I like the way Chitra Divakaruni manages to suggest the depths of tragedy and grief in the women she writes about without agressively and abrasively pushing it in your face. In fact, what was left unsaid but merely suggested is what I felt deeply about and I was left imagining and thinking about the characters for a long time afterwards.

--Sonya Pelia

ISBN 0-917658-28-0
A mixture of short prose pieces and poetry.

--Sonya Pelia

"How do your parents feel about you writing the book?" is the most frequently asked question, Ginu Kamani says. Her parents are very supportive of her writing this collection of juicy short stories about Indian women of all castes and classes. Junglee Girl is an unabashed expression of Indian women's sexuality.

--Anonymous

Before the hoopla of Satanic Verses, there was the brilliance of Midnight's Children. The novel's name is derived from the idea that the children born at the stroke of midnight on India's Independence Day (August 15, 1947) are blessed with a special interconnectiveness, an intutive power to communicate. The characters converge inside the mind of narrator Saleem Sinai. With characteristic Rushdie humor and cyncism, the "unreliable" narrator Sinai recounts the adventures of his life and the tale of post-Independence India in the new emerging world. This book captured my imagination and forced to examine the whole idea of "Indian-ness" and the paradoxes it involves. It made me fall in love with the teeming complexities of India that aren't easily explainable or solvable.

Rushdie's style of writing is complex and unpredictable at times. It is a style that either inspires almost religious-like devotion or severe hatred. The power of Rushdie's imagination dominates and abounds throughout the novel -- even if one only understands a little, it makes the mind think in terms of interconnectiveness. We learn as much about Sinai as we do about Rushdie; we also wonder who we can trust at the end of the journey. But what a journey it is!

--Jenny Mangaly