C O N D I T I O N : Near Fine. N O T E S: Paperback. C O N T E N T S : Beginning in 1885, with the British invasion of Mandalay and the capture of the Burmese king and queen, and encompassing over 100 years to modern-day India and Burma (Myanmar), Amitav Ghosh has created in The Glass Palace a monument to life in colonial central and Southeast Asia. The story follows three generations from three families, spreading its wings across the world, from Malaya to New York. Yet despite the epic scale, the gentle and intimate detail of the characters and their interwoven relationships removes any need for an understanding of this area of the world in geographical or historical terms. The map at the back of the book is useful for following the characters' travels as their fortunes and rulers (British, Japanese, military government) change, but it is the atmosphere and feel of the era and location that Ghosh captures astutely. Each city or border is not a mark on a map with political significance but a home, a memory and a reality.With each generation the characters' lives and personalities contrast and intertwine according to the rise and fall of the countries'--and the world's--politics. Rajkumar, the Indian peasant who makes a fortune through teak and his wife Dolly, the breathtakingly beautiful maid of the Burmese royal family, contrast to Uma the Indian widow who becomes a champion for Indian independence after her liberating time in the USA and the Americanised Matthew who makes a life in his half-native Malaya as a rubber plantation owner, while Uma's Bengali nieces and nephew contrast to Rajkumar and Dolly's newly wealthy sons. Yet they all suffer in the Second World War, whether as a soldier, refugee or evacuee discriminated against because of their skin colour. Ghosh's focus on the war in Burma, from the viewpoint of Indian officers in the British army, who have been imbued through their regimental history to believe in their allegiance to their country (i.e. Britain and not India), reveals a side of both world wars that is rarely told. The struggle these British subjects experience, as to whether colonial or fascist masters are better, is not something that shaped the general European knowledge of the Second World War, where good and evil seemed much clearer. (Originally £7.99) 560pp. ||| || |

Brochura. 575pp. 14 X 21 cm. Excelente estado. Tradução de José Rubens Siqueira O livro novo estava custando 69 pratas em 13/2/2008. Comprando na Gracilianos você economiza 30 reais. Capa de Victor Burton. cod: 937861.Literatura Indiana

Ficção Científica

semi-novo

Tradução de José Rubens Siqueira. Livro impecável. Novo.

Contents: 1. Prologue. 2. Lataifa. 3. Nashawy. 4. Mangalore. 5. Going back.6. Epilogue. Notes. "In an Antique Land is subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. Packed with anecdote and exuberant detail, it provides magical and intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm. It also offers vivid glimpses of the many small, indistinguishable and intertwining histories of India and Egypt, Muslims and Hindus and Jews. "This is another of Amitav Ghosh's books that, characteristically, makes us rethink the political boundaries that divide up the world, and the generic boundaries that divide up narrative styles. With its deft and irreverent use of the devices of fiction, history, travel-writing and anthropology to create a single seamless work of the imagination, this book confirms that Amitav Ghosh is in a league of his own as an Indian writer of English prose."

This novel is set in India and Africa in a time not unlike the present, and tells the story of three irrepressible people trying to find order in an anarchic world. The story centres on Alu, an orphan enlisted by his foster father as a soldier in his crusade against the forces of myth and unreason. When a terrorist bomb blast ravages their village, Alu flees, pursued by a misguided police officer through Calcutta to Goa and on to a trawler that runs illegal aliens to Africa. "The Circle of Reason follows the form of the raga in Indian classical music: the first part spans several decades, the second unfolds over three weeks, and the third is like a scherzo with a hectic pace spanning less than a day. "This is the amazing first novel by India's most accomplished living writer of English fiction.

It starts with the boy's perceptive and eccentric cousin Tridib, who gives the boy worlds to travel in and eyes to see them with long before he ever leaves Calcutta. Certainly his beautiful cousin Ila, who would always break his heart, has been all round the world and has seen nothing; while in his imagination he touches the Great Pyramid, she remembers the inconvenient location of the ladies at Cairo airport. But this is part of her irresistible charm. "As the boy grows he finds himself sucked into history: his old grandmother stuck in an age-old family feud; the relationship with England that took Tridib and his parents to London in 1939; their English friends the prices, whose daughter Mat's love for Tridib can only end in tragedy. And all the while private turmoil is mirrored by public turmoil-the Blitz in war-time London, civil strife in post- partition Dhaka, a riot in Calcutta. "Out of a miraculously intricate web of memories, relationships and images Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. Its focus is the meaning of political freedom in the modern world and the force of nationalism, the Shadow Line we draw between people and nations, which is both an absurd illusion and a source of terrifying violence, one of the great themes of our times. Amitav Ghosh's vision is broad, his voice compelling, and his achievement in this sweeping and ambitious novel quite remarkable." (jacket)

Contents: 1. The Imam and the Indian. 2. Tibetan dinner. 3. Four corners. 4. An Egyptian in Baghdad. 5. The ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi. 6. The human comedy in Cairo. 7. Petrofiction: the oil encounter and the novel. 8. Empire and soul: a review of The Baburnama. 9. The relations of envy in an Egyptian village. 10. Categories of labour and the orientation of the Fellah economy. 11. The slave of MS. H.6. 12. The diaspora in Indian culture. 13. The global reservation: notes toward an ethnography of international peacekeeping. 14. The fundamentalist challenge. 15. The march of the novel through history: the testimony of my grandfather's bookcase. 16. The greatest sorrow: times of Joy recalled in wretchedness. 17. The hunger of stones. 18. 'The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn. "Over the past two decades or so, Amitav Ghosh has enthralled readers with novels and travelogues that have acquired the status of modern classics: The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, The Circle of Reason, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace. "Much less known is the fact that, simultaneously, over all these years, Amitav Ghosh has been writing non-fictional prose-reflective essays, activist pieces, political commentary, book reviews, autobiographical articles, academic expositions, translations from Bengali, and literary anthropology. "Here, for the first time, is as complete a collection as can be made of the prose which reveals that relatively unknown Amitav Ghosh: the novelist as thinker, the man of ideas as a writer of luminous, illuminating non-