Descripción
Libro Heat and Dust (libro en inglés). Sinopsis libro, reseña libro. A profound and powerful novel, winner of the Booker Prize
Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots. She is intrigued by the Nawab’s charm and aggressive courtship, and soon begins to spend most of her days in his company. But then she becomes pregnant, and unsure of the child’s paternity, she is faced with a wrenching dilemma. Her reaction to the crisis humiliates her husband and outrages the British community, breeding a scandal that lives in collective memory long after her death. Libro Heat and Dust (libro en inglés).
Annet –
Fascinating book about the contradictions between and at the same time love of Indian and English culture… The beautiful, spoiled and bored Olivia, married to a civil servant living in India, shocks society in the tiny, suffocating hot town of Satipur, by eloping with an Indian prince, the Nawab. Fifty years later, her step-grand daughter goes back to the heat, dust and the squalor of the bazaar to find out more of Olivia’s scandal and discover India for herself. So the story moves back and forth in time. Fascinating story, well told.
Here’s a piece of the book: ‘ I try to find an explanation for him. I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life. This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything – motor cars, refrigerators – come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more’……’Why shouldn’t I laugh, he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything – he himself often feels like ‘laughing’ when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds. Who would not laugh, he says, pointing out of the window where one of the town’s beggars happens to be passing, a teenage boy who cannot stand upright but drags the crippled underpart of his body behind him in the dust – who would not laugh, says Inder Lal, at a sight like that’ …………..
‘Heat and Dust’ was the Booker prize winner of 1975.
I read in a folder of the Booker Prize that authors were insulted that the judges found only two books worthy of shortlisting out of a total of 83 submissions. The other one was Thomas Keneally’s ‘Gossip from the Forest’.