Author: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 277
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330392778
Description
Now available in paperback edition, a hugely popular novel.
Samar, the young narrator of The Romantics arrives at a boarding house in the holy city of Benares an ancient city trying to cope with modern India. There he hopes to lose himself in books and solitude but, far from offering him an undistracted existence, the city forces all his silent desires into the light.
The Romantics has a luminous intelligence about love, literature and politics in Benares that make the Indian Turgenev.
Continuously absorbing, beautifully modulated and shaded In novel the past and present states of many worlds, Indian and European seem to have come as if without effort to the surface. One hopes there will be many more novels to come from a writer who can do it as naturally as this, and with so much eclectic authority.