Sunday, March 20, 2011

Jane-Mistry-3/20/11

"Finally flies and insects buzzed and hovered over the dregs, little pools of pulses and curries fermenting and frothing til the kuchrawalli came next morning and swept it all away" (Mistry, 237).

I find Mistry's writing style to be positively ingenious. His style seems to meld poetic flourishes with the matter-of-fact realism that we saw in Naipaul. This is a characteristic that seems to run through what we have read so far in this canon. The passage above to me what reminiscent of Midnights Children, particularly in terms of the voice Rushdie employs to narrate the story. Although this story is told from a 3rd person perspective, both narrators are omniscient in that they have total insight into all of the characters and their futures. There is also a sense of irony and satire that couples the image of something as grotesque as rotting garbage with such lyrical, lilting language. Perhaps it is not a kind of patriotic self-loathing that Naipaul has been accused of, but a way of projecting beauty on something that ordinarily wouldn't be thought of as such.

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