A Suitable Boy
Worth, Robert
INDIA-ALL OF IT A SUITABLE BOY nonetheless contains one of the first Indian Vikram Seth executives (a...
...the way that life and love ISRAEL'S PRAISE to be riding a wave of expectation for some- will go on no matter what history may be Doxology against Idolatry thing like a Great Indian Novel...
...It owns almost 2 million of utmost historical importance, most of would appear to mock that possibility in books, 75,000 manuscripts-the oldest striking visual beauty...
...Anthony spect all the parties involved...
...But the critics a superb application of ancient ScripKhans, belong to the zaminulari aristoc- raved: Gore Vidal promptly dubbed it ture to present ministry,'-Currutrs 128pp...
...10-95 paper make his magnum opus...
...Midnight's Robert L. Spaeth the most advanced facilities in Europe for Children shuttles wildly back and forth in scholarly work...
...El tions...
...a heartbroken young man con- FINALLY COMES THE POET (espoused by Tom Wolfe, among others) siders suicide, but ends up spending a Daring Speech for Proclamation --has the potential to transform preachtoward lengthy and ambitious "social" month in the country instead...
...mercy...
...To some extent these failings are the result of Seth's desire to be fair, to offer a ROME REBORN from the second century A.D.-prints, balanced portrait of the nation that will re- The Vatican Library and Renaissance maps, engravings, coins, etc., etc...
...he in- to the Library of Congress for a public exnarration represents a desperate effort to tended the library "for the common con- hibition...
...An adulterous af- cosmic hurt and personal possibilitycreasingly visible young Indian writers, fair threatens chaos, but then fizzles out 3a4pp...
...will be believing...
...Far more limited in scope than In Israel's Imagination and Memory has the warmth and strength of a novel without offending anybody...
...INTERPRETATION AND OBEDIENCE publishers have trumpeted comparisons There are crises, for the four families of From Faithful Reading with Dickens, George Eliot, and Tolstoy...
...Moderaof almost every issue that might conceiv- ics of most "postmodern" fiction...
...Another family, the even the most fragmentary conversations, '~ o , Brahmin Chatterjis, contains the first and to range in tone from charming dogIndian High Court justice...
...He Sixtus IV (1471-84...
...who is also a member of the national In A Suitable Boy Seth appears to have Nc~6~20`~ O~5 4 x Qa~ s6°` Legislative Assembly...
...The book makes no effort, and many more manuscripts...
...Seth's grand (perhaps too grand) twenty-something characters in San DAVID'S TRUTH ambition has been to fit all of India into Francisco...
...He could not Culture Grafton, a Princeton University historian, be more different, in this respect, from Edited by Anthony Grafton says it "remains the richest collection of Salman Rushdie, whose 1980 novel Mid- Library of Congress and Yale University Western manuscripts and printed books in night's Children also takes postindepen- Press, $55, 323 pp...
...Earlier this year, the Vatican Library, is cursed, wounded, and finally castrated Nicholas had the idea of a public library in gratitude to its American benefactors, by the forces that were set in motion at in the Vatican and contributed some one sent a sample of its valuable manuscripts his birth, and the magical realism of his thousand Greek and Latin codices...
...is after different quarry...
...A former doctoral There, from the inside cover of a Latin student in economics who abandoned de- codex, is a fifthteenth-century portrait of mography for literature, Seth treats his the Duke of Urbino holding a book-percharacters with a gentle concern, and is haps by the Roman historian Livy-and unwilling to sacrifice them (or their future) conversing with the artist, Christoforo to blazing language or dramatic conclu- Landino...
...Nor will this novel provoke any fat- described the joys and sorrows of three t6opp...
...Seth NEGOTIATION The Bible and grounds his fiction, in other words, in Postmodern V Robert Worth some of the most important political and Imagination social issues of the day...
...the world...
...The fourth fami- bitten off more than he can chew...
...And already "in its High dence India as its subject...
...the library afforded family life as its vehicle...
...And there is It aims instead at a vast, comprehensive a map of China drawn by the seventeenthunity...
...Pope like...
...OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY hero in recent months, Nonetheless, Seth's novel is far less con- Essays on Structure...
...Seth's verswept away by land reforms at the time bal gift was supple enough to capture Postage and handling of the novel's setting...
...It is impossible to a country so torn by extremism and ha- mention more than a few here: it would tred...
...All the tion and fairness are necessary virtues in ably have a bearing on that event: religion, same, it's hard to get through A Suitable India's current crisis...
...His first novel, The Golden Gate, care in modern situations of exile...
...INDIA-ALL OF IT A SUITABLE BOY nonetheless contains one of the first Indian Vikram Seth executives (a "brown Sahib") in a high- TEXTS UNDER HarpetCollins, $30, 1,376 pp...
...That effort venience of the learned...
...the third is fa- gerel at the outset to redemptive tragedy thered by a powerful minister of revenue in the novel's final pages...
...ly...
...Pope Sixtus treasures are simply stunning...
...Rushdie leaves us, in the end, with seem a reviewer's main task is to urge readnothing more than a painfully vivid im- ers to look at the book itself since seeing pression...
...Here is a richly illustrated page sions...
...A Suitable Boy, it was nevertheless an am- human reality along with the challenge On the surface, A Suitable Bo v de- bitious hook: the prospect...
...In that sense Seth Vatican Library manuscripts cover the seems to have moved self-consciously spectrum from archaeology, Egyptology, 26: 21 Mar 1993 Commonweal...
...A Suitable Bo r makes no effort to from a sixteenth-century codex of Francoshock its readers, or even to dazzle them...
...Even the drudgeries of life in a remote northern village are given their fullest possible expression...
...But the farther Seth roams from his central, high-caste char- HOTBED OF SECULAR HUMANISM acters, the more his prose tends to sound like a museum-tour: dry, passionless, and analytical...
...His plot, ly, lacking such obvious distinctions, weaving back and forth toward India's first -E°° Commonweal 21 May 1993: 25 general election, insists on taking a glimpse beyond the jarring, fragmentary aesthet- faster pace, and a stronger story...
...The all sorts of things in this world:' papers have touted the trillion-pound ad- story is set, after all, not during the strug- -PATRICK D M11.LtaZ vance he received for his monumental 336pp...
...14-95 paper and his aspirations match the recent trend peacefully...
...profile British management firm...
...which describes This emphasis on the redeeming aspects HOPEFUL IMAGINATION remarkably similar episodes in the years of private life is in keeping with Seth's prior Prophetic Voices in Exile How to use the Scriptures in pastoral just after independence, all the more time- work...
...Seth appears ing into speech which calls a new world novels in the model of the nineteenth-cen- to be bent on showing us the interstices into being:'-Homiletics t84pp- $9-95 paper tury masters...
...peace- and violence in India over the last few months find a suitable boy to marry...
...time, presenting a feverish, supernatural Since the 1920s, the Vatican Library has vision of Indian life and society...
...A Suitable Boy, but none of them ex- to Faithful Living Draws on specific texts that speak of Seth is one of several brilliant and in- plodes into melodrama...
...righteousness...
...sic-9s paper was...
...life that hold society together rather than As arranged in this large volume, the those that tear it apart...
...Its very form called fabulous...
...Theme, and Text both in his native India cerned with political struggles than with The Old Testament is seen w be something that has significant connections to and in England...
...The nar- redit for founding the cultivated a productive relationship with rator, who was born at the very second of Vatican Library belongs to the Library of Congress, the latter proindependence, literally becomes the voice two Renaissance popes, viding badly needed technical assistance of modern India: he has none of the calm Nicholas V (1447-55) and for cataloguing, classification, and the detachment that marks Seth's novel...
...tsspp- 59.95 paper Arailuh!L' May J-9-9-3), something of a literary Assembly are quoted verbatim...
...Seth appears, in other words, of social change...
...ends, with the novel, in a terrifying vision added space, embellishments, organization, Rome Reborn presents 216 photographic of apocalypse...
...208 pp...
...It is hardly surprising when Lata, and Ideology newed outbreaks of religious and ethnic the novel's central character, does indeed The psalms speak of a world marked by justice...
...but they are not of law, business, changing cultural tradi- Bar without wishing for more action, a much value in a novel...
...plates of Vatican Library items, breathin other words, to build bridges or to pre- Today the Vatican Library can only be taking in their scope of subject matter, all sent a "balanced" view...
...58.95 paper scribes the lives of four large, extended of a novel composed of sequential sonnets THE PROPHETIC Indian families linked by marriage and was enough to send both editors and IMAGINATION friendship...
...S:6-ys paper gle for independence but afterwards, durnovel, set in early 1950s' India, and his ing a period of relative peace and stability...
...If A Suitable Bo v fails to achieve such Here is a page from a ninth-century vividness, that is probably because Seth parchment of Euclid's Elements in Greek...
...Nehru himself be- Envisions how central biblical themes can be imagined creatively in our ''postcomes a character (albeit a minor one) and modern'' world and how this is realized V ikram Seth has become lengthy speeches from the Legislative in the context of liturgy and proclamation...
...The re- up to...
...One of those families, the friends away in disgust...
...Flemish polyphonic music...
...Seth tells us, of a brilliant and 'inspired' storyteller.-77ii bibic itxlay- t28pp...
...These intellectual and artistic make sense of those forces...
...and it focuses on those aspects of century Polish missionary Michael Boym...
...News- the smaller dramas of everyday life...
...and Indian Renaissance heyday...
...compassion...
...8.95 paper racy, whose feudal privileges were being "the great Californian novel...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 10
