Tomb of Sand - Geetanjali Shree
Author: Geetanjali Shree
Translator: Daisy RockwellGenre: Indian Literary Fiction
Rating: 1.5 stars
Oh well! It went exactly as I had expected. ☹
A long time back, I learnt that Booker winners aren’t my cup of tea. The only exception to all my Booker disappointments has been “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. As a result, when the Booker Prize is announced, most readers run in the direction of that book but I gallop in the opposite direction. So why did I pick this book up?
If you like beautiful writing, poetic phrases, lyrical cadences, and/or onomatopoeic rhythms in language, this book is going to be a treat.
I like the above. But I also want my books to have a semblance of a plot. This book has one but it is visible in bits and pieces.
What you find instead of a plot is a meandering ramble. Tons of it. And then some more. The chapters jump from topic to topic like nobody’s business. There was no dominant ‘voice’ absorbing me into the narrative. With such haphazardly structured content and a strong disconnect with the characters, I was struggling to make sense where the writer was going with the whole thing. Only at the end do some parts tie themselves together. For a 600+ page book, that’s a looooonnnnnggggg wait. The wait was somewhat worth it but didn’t justify the efforts of slogging through the rest.
I did try to skip-read through the digressions, but realised that doing this was resulting in me prancing through page after page without taking anything in. The content is highly stream of-consciousness in its approach, a style that hardly ever clicks with me. The omniscient narration without any reasoning to explain it didn’t help matters.
Basically, the book feels like random articles and thoughts on various topics thrown together. There’s a line in the content that goes, "A tale has no need for a single stream. It is free to run, flow into rivers and lakes, into fresh new waters." This describes the tome perfectly. The tale here is so freeflowing that one feels swept away in the tsunami of words with no sense of where we are going. (There was one para towards the 25% mark with 1000+ words!)
The translation seems good. Daisy Rockwell has a knack of tying words together in such a way that they retain their beat despite being originally processed in a different language. However, I haven’t read the original, so I have no idea how faithful her work is to the Hindi version. But I enjoyed the nuances of her translation and I am sure the Hindi version will be a treat at least to the ears, considering the focus on the ‘dhwani’ of the language.
Only those who enjoy a book purely for its lyrical quality will appreciate this book. It was not my cup of tea. I love prose but mere prose with barely any plot never works for me. I read it, but nothing penetrated my heart. The ending just brought relief that I was finally done with it.
1.5 stars, mostly for the way the words were strung together. I would have rated it a 1 star were it not for the final section. Rounding up because phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.
Salaam, Namaste, Booker winners! Never again!
BTW, how come a 366 page book in Hindi translates to a 616 page tome in English? How much did you increase the font size and line spacing, oh international publishers?
- This book is the first ever Hindi-English translation to win the International Booker. Ergo, my duty to my country!
- This book is the Hindi BOTM in the Facebook group I moderate. Ergo, my duty to my FB group!
If you like beautiful writing, poetic phrases, lyrical cadences, and/or onomatopoeic rhythms in language, this book is going to be a treat.
I like the above. But I also want my books to have a semblance of a plot. This book has one but it is visible in bits and pieces.
What you find instead of a plot is a meandering ramble. Tons of it. And then some more. The chapters jump from topic to topic like nobody’s business. There was no dominant ‘voice’ absorbing me into the narrative. With such haphazardly structured content and a strong disconnect with the characters, I was struggling to make sense where the writer was going with the whole thing. Only at the end do some parts tie themselves together. For a 600+ page book, that’s a looooonnnnnggggg wait. The wait was somewhat worth it but didn’t justify the efforts of slogging through the rest.
I did try to skip-read through the digressions, but realised that doing this was resulting in me prancing through page after page without taking anything in. The content is highly stream of-consciousness in its approach, a style that hardly ever clicks with me. The omniscient narration without any reasoning to explain it didn’t help matters.
Basically, the book feels like random articles and thoughts on various topics thrown together. There’s a line in the content that goes, "A tale has no need for a single stream. It is free to run, flow into rivers and lakes, into fresh new waters." This describes the tome perfectly. The tale here is so freeflowing that one feels swept away in the tsunami of words with no sense of where we are going. (There was one para towards the 25% mark with 1000+ words!)
The translation seems good. Daisy Rockwell has a knack of tying words together in such a way that they retain their beat despite being originally processed in a different language. However, I haven’t read the original, so I have no idea how faithful her work is to the Hindi version. But I enjoyed the nuances of her translation and I am sure the Hindi version will be a treat at least to the ears, considering the focus on the ‘dhwani’ of the language.
Only those who enjoy a book purely for its lyrical quality will appreciate this book. It was not my cup of tea. I love prose but mere prose with barely any plot never works for me. I read it, but nothing penetrated my heart. The ending just brought relief that I was finally done with it.
1.5 stars, mostly for the way the words were strung together. I would have rated it a 1 star were it not for the final section. Rounding up because phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.
Salaam, Namaste, Booker winners! Never again!
BTW, how come a 366 page book in Hindi translates to a 616 page tome in English? How much did you increase the font size and line spacing, oh international publishers?
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