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Story of a city
A daring novel about present-day Bombay and the individual lives that spark the city’s consciousness. Fast-paced and innovative, No God in Sight captures the seething multiplicity of Bombay through first-person accounts of an abortionist, a convert, a pregnant refugee, a gangster in hiding, a butcher, and an apathetic CEO, among others.
As the reader is hurtled from monologue to short story to anecdote, disparate lives collide in tantalizing ways. A family flees religious persecution in their village to take refuge in an urban slum; women walk the tightrope of free will and dormant violence; a father and son grant each other the relief of estrangement; and young men and women struggle to comprehend the consequences of sexual attraction. At the heart of the action is the city itself..
Insightful, ironic, and scathingly honest, No God in Sight is a brilliant debut by a talented young writer.
No God in Sight Altaf Tyrewala Penguin, Rs. 195
Rewriting rules
Guru Dutt is probably the only Indian film-maker who, within the parameters of the box office, made a personal statement with his cinema. His films stand testimony not only to his own genius but also to the creativity of his team, comprising stalwarts like cameraman V.K. Murthy, music director S.D. Burman, and writer Abrar Alvi, among others. In Ten Years with Guru Dutt: Abrar Alvi’s Journey, Sathya Saran looks at the tumultuous yet incredibly fecund relationship between the mercurial director and his equally talented albeit unsung writer, a partnership that evolved over a decade till Guru Dutt’s tragic death in 1964.
Starting his career as a driver and chaperone to Guru Dutt’s producer on the sets of Baaz, Abrar soon caught the attention of the director with his sharp ear for and understanding of film dialogue. With Aar Paar in 1954, Abrar rewrote the rules of dialogue writing in Hindi cinema, till then marked by theatricality and artificiality. He followed it up with Mr and Mrs ’55, Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool before donning the director’s mantle with great success in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam.
Ten Years with Guru Dutt Sathya Saran Viking, Rs. 499
Engaging Freud
When Hitler invaded Vienna in the winter of 1938, Sigmund Freud, old and desperately ill, was among the citys 175,000 Jews dreading Nazi occupation. Mark Edmundson traces Hitler and Freud’s oddly converging lives, then zeroes in on the last two years of Freud’s life. Edmundson probes Freud’s ideas about secular death, and also about the rise of fascism and fundamentalism, and finally grapples with the demise of psychoanalysis after Freud’s death, when religious fundamentalism is once again shaping world events.
The Death of Sigmund Freud Mark Edmundson Penguin, Rs. 475
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