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A review by moviebuffkt
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
3.0
Getting to this Booker Prize Winner a little late for May. So far I enjoy it; kind of funny to superimpose the seriousness of this book with the satire of The Siege of Krishnapur, they are interesting compliments so far...
"Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots...."
This sounds interesting enough... and when I'm finished reading it, there's a Merchant-Ivory film version as a reward! Although, The Guardian review claims this is the Coldplay of literature because it is too dull to loathe. Charmed, I'm sure.
"The Coldplay of literature." The "vanilla" of writing about the English in India.
This book was a relatively easy read. The themes were pretty much just under the surface. It wasn't a challenge. And it was another book where "nothing happened." I felt the same way about Holiday, but I LOVED Holiday. The "English-ness" of Holiday completely appealed to me. The "English-ness" of Heat and Dust was just... mildly offensive and Empirical.
I can't remember whether or not the narrator was ever named, but she was such a boring voice. I didn't think that the romance between Olivia and the Nawab was really all that interesting either. I could completely understand going back to the "scene" of this glorious, tragic, exciting scandalous romance, but that's not what this was. It was more along the lines of... my grandfather's first wife left him for a Prince. I decided to check it out. But no one had much to say about it. The End.
The parallels between the narrator and Olivia (expecting babies, acclimating to Indian culture) was interesting, but not told in a very precise way. The alignment of the story was just too lazy to make it have any affect on how I felt about either one of them. I just didn't quite care what happened to either of them.
But I didn't hate the book. It is not terrible, it's just not terribly exciting. It's.... Coldplay. :)
"Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots...."
This sounds interesting enough... and when I'm finished reading it, there's a Merchant-Ivory film version as a reward! Although, The Guardian review claims this is the Coldplay of literature because it is too dull to loathe. Charmed, I'm sure.
"The Coldplay of literature." The "vanilla" of writing about the English in India.
This book was a relatively easy read. The themes were pretty much just under the surface. It wasn't a challenge. And it was another book where "nothing happened." I felt the same way about Holiday, but I LOVED Holiday. The "English-ness" of Holiday completely appealed to me. The "English-ness" of Heat and Dust was just... mildly offensive and Empirical.
I can't remember whether or not the narrator was ever named, but she was such a boring voice. I didn't think that the romance between Olivia and the Nawab was really all that interesting either. I could completely understand going back to the "scene" of this glorious, tragic, exciting scandalous romance, but that's not what this was. It was more along the lines of... my grandfather's first wife left him for a Prince. I decided to check it out. But no one had much to say about it. The End.
The parallels between the narrator and Olivia (expecting babies, acclimating to Indian culture) was interesting, but not told in a very precise way. The alignment of the story was just too lazy to make it have any affect on how I felt about either one of them. I just didn't quite care what happened to either of them.
But I didn't hate the book. It is not terrible, it's just not terribly exciting. It's.... Coldplay. :)