(by Arundhati Roy)<\/p>\n
The 9 chapters in this book are a mix of essays and lectures, and some of them can be repetitive: some lectures cover the same ground and discuss the same facts, sometimes using the same phrases. I thought chapters 6 and 7 (“Intimations of an Ending” and “The Graveyard Talks Back”) were the strongest pieces, and I almost would have preferred a much shorter book containing just those. Throughout, Roy writes about a) current affairs in India (circa 2018-2020, when these pieces were written) and b) her own writing—and particularly how her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness<\/em> uses fiction to say things about current affairs in India. As she notes in the introduction, “a novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants,” and as she says near the end of “The Graveyard Talks Back,” fiction can be a place “that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density<\/em> against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.”<\/p>\n (I did also like the first chapter, which is a lecture about language and literature and translation that Roy gave at the British Library in 2018, and which contains interesting stuff about India’s complicated linguistic history\/landscape.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (by Arundhati Roy) The 9 chapters in this book are a mix of essays and lectures, and some of them can be repetitive: some lectures cover the same ground and discuss the same facts, sometimes using the same phrases. I thought chapters 6 and 7 (“Intimations of an Ending” and “The Graveyard Talks Back”) were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14456"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14461,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions\/14461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}