If by chance you are still looking for a summer reading list, Adam Kirsch’s brilliant, and short, inquiry, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, may provide one. Or, as Kirsch sums it up as he counts down the various charges levelled: “This is one of the commonest charges against world literature: By making foreignness into a literary commodity, it prevents the possibility of any true encounter with difference. The critiques are endless, and Kirsch takes them on in the only meaningful way — by reading these “global novels”. In their particularity, her novels speak to common human emotions, of course, but they also, Kirsch helps us understand, suggest we must “see fates in an international perspective”, just as the other books listed here do. His tour is an invitation to read some of these books, and work out our individual appraisals of the appeal, and importance, of the global novel.

Source: The Hindu July 01, 2017 16:18 UTC