http://www.blogbharti.com/madhat/cinema/the-namesake/ Voices from the Indian Blogosphere Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:24:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 http://www.blogbharti.com/madhat/cinema/the-namesake/comment-page-1/#comment-9476 gaddeswarup Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:50:23 +0000 http://www.blogbharti.com/?p=3376#comment-9476 For me what remained about the book and film is this comment by Pankaj Mishra at the end of his review in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16837 "This is the melancholy awareness that suffuses Lahiri's catalogs of desirable things and people. And so while such obvious underdogs as Nazneen and Chanu arouse pity and indignation, an overprivileged immigrant like Ni-khil leaves one with more disturbing feelings: an intimation, such as the one his father once had, of "all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world"; a suspicion that "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself." For me what remained about the book and film is this comment by Pankaj Mishra at the end of his review in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16837
“This is the melancholy awareness that suffuses Lahiri’s catalogs of desirable things and people. And so while such obvious underdogs as Nazneen and Chanu arouse pity and indignation, an overprivileged immigrant like Ni-khil leaves one with more disturbing feelings: an intimation, such as the one his father once had, of “all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world”; a suspicion that “all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs.” It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about “The Overcoat,” called “flaws in the texture of life itself.”

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