Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review, Feb. 24, 2012 Pythagoras said the world was made of numbers; Democritus insisted upon atoms; Empedocles, four primordial elements — fire, air, water, earth. But Plato loved triangles. In his schema, matter was made up of triangles in kaleidoscopic configurations, triangles themselves divisible into tinier triangles. Triangles begatContinue reading “By Blood”
Author Archives: parulsehgal
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
By Jeanette Winterson Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Magazine, February 2012 Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—andContinue reading “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”
Salvage the Bones
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Dec. 30 2011 “Salvage the Bones,” the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, is a taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale. Think of Noah or Gilgamesh or any soggy group of humans andContinue reading “Salvage the Bones”
A Year in Reading: Parul Sehgal
Parul Sehgal, The Millions, December 16, 2011 There were many books I admired this year, books I read and reread and recommended. Salvage the Bones is every bit as good as they say it is. And there were groundbreaking narrative nonfiction books about India: Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades, andContinue reading “A Year in Reading: Parul Sehgal”
Into the Woods: PW Talks with Arundhati Roy
By Parul Sehgal, Publishers Weekly Sept. 30, 2011 In Walking with the Comrades, novelist and activist Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) travels into the forest with India’s Maoist indigenous communities at war with the government. How did you earn the guerrillas’ trust? When the Indian government declared war against the Maoists, Indian liberals, for theContinue reading “Into the Woods: PW Talks with Arundhati Roy”
Hemingway’s Boat
Parul Sehgal, The Plain Dealer, September 18, 2011 He’s been labeled a brute, a bully and a bore. A heartless seducer of women and a closeted homosexual. An absurd cartoon of hypermasculinity and a transvestite. His critics and rivals, his children and grandchildren have had their say in memoirs. His fiction has been combedContinue reading “Hemingway’s Boat”
Noon
Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 16, 2011 Rehan Tabassum is in a bad way. Although, strictly speaking, the trouble isn’t of his making. He’s just got that kind of family — prone to falling in love with the servants, scheming against one another, messing with the wrong fundamentalist and leaving sensitiveContinue reading “Noon”
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Sept/Oct/Nov 2011 India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tellsContinue reading “The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India”
Beautiful Monsters: A review of The Art of Cruelty
Bookforum, Summer 2o11 Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.” Too much? Take a city sidewalk. Take a bucket of “blood.” Splatter. Hide. Look at people looking at the “blood.” How much is too much?Continue reading “Beautiful Monsters: A review of The Art of Cruelty”
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
by Janet Malcolm (Yale Univ.) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Apr. 12, 2011 Janet Malcolm is to malice what Wordsworth was to daffodils. In nine previous books, she’s so thoroughly, so indelibly investigated a certain breed of malice—the kind that festers in the writer-subject relationship—that it ought to bear her name. Malice is journalism’s “animating impulse,” sheContinue reading “Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial”
Parul Sehgal 