The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Rohit Handa's 1977 novel, Comrade Sahib.
I picked this up because ... well, when you stumble across a book like this, which you know you're unlikely ever to stumble across again you snap it up. But I'm an easy mark for this kind of thing anyway, and it's great to find some obscurer pre-Rushdie English-language Indian fiction too (i.e. beyond Narayan, Desai, Markandaya. Raja Rao, etc.) The handy pocket-sized format of the Genesis Publishing reprint edition also helped. (It happened to be signed, too, and only set me back a dollar, so that didn't hurt either.)
And I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised -- it was considerably more fun (in a gently subversive way, no less) than I thought it would be, and it's actually a solid piece of writing
I picked this up because ... well, when you stumble across a book like this, which you know you're unlikely ever to stumble across again you snap it up. But I'm an easy mark for this kind of thing anyway, and it's great to find some obscurer pre-Rushdie English-language Indian fiction too (i.e. beyond Narayan, Desai, Markandaya. Raja Rao, etc.) The handy pocket-sized format of the Genesis Publishing reprint edition also helped. (It happened to be signed, too, and only set me back a dollar, so that didn't hurt either.)
And I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised -- it was considerably more fun (in a gently subversive way, no less) than I thought it would be, and it's actually a solid piece of writing