Some Authors And Their Works
Paramendra Bhagat
July 3, 2002

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I was mesmerized when I read his One Hundred Years Of Solitude when I was at BNKS. Since I have read some of his other books. Of Love And Other Demonds. Parts of other books, like The Autumn Of The Patriarch. Having been fed an education replete with British writers, Marquez was a breath of fresh air. His magical realism tickles imagination like nothing in English I had read before him. He takes the form of novel to heights I had not seen before him. A great way to introduce oneself to that continent. His narratives are sensory attacks, these deluges of details that compose the whole, and keep the prose tight. In The Autumn Of The Patriarch, each chapter is a paragraph. Some experiment, that is. I highly recommend this author.

V.S. Naipaul: The guy won the Nobel Prize. Recently. He is ethnic Indian, from Trinidad. Some have gone so far as to say his last name has something to do with the country Nepal. He delineates his ancestry from the Gangetic plains anyway. His A House For Mr Biswas is a classic. A lot of scenes familiar to us gets depicted there. He feels like one of us. Otherwise one tires of western caricatures of Global South poverty. He portrays the humanity amidst the material deprivation, the social vibrancy that engulfs the world of the have-nots.

Katharine Graham: Her Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography is quite a treat. I have not read it to the end yet, but delved into it while I was house-sitting near American University for a Fellow from Lara's work (www.rff.org). The antique pre-World War II period is portrayed with relish. And it is something to read a human history of The Washington Post.