An English MP of the last century is once supposed to have sneered at ‘the noble Lord opposite, who has spent his life in writing books about books’, while he himself, hav¬ing been a district officer in India, had ‘played upon that harp whose strings are the hearts of men’. What would our MP have said about those of us who have added one more link to the chain, and are occupied in writing articles about books about books. He would hardly have admitted that the task, however appa¬rently unnecessary, does re¬quire a peculiar kind of exer¬tion—the exertion of keeping your own opinions about the books under discussion sepa-rate from the opinions of the critic under discussion. It is like sorting out the reflections in a corridor lined with mirrors. Gooneratne is a Sri Lankan student of English literature with a doctorate from Cam¬bridge, and is at present Asso¬ciate Professor of English at Macquarie University, in Australia. We are told in the blurb that she offers ‘the most well-rounded assessment’ of Jhabvala’s art—having been helped to do so by her wide reading of Indo-Anglian fiction and her first-hand knowledge of India. The for¬mer part of this claim is sup¬ported by the several pages of bibliography and notes and by the serious academic style of the book, with its almost line-by-line descriptions, analyses and cross-references. Of the latter part, the reader may feel that the case has, perhaps, been overstated. For what is often a stock situation or char¬acter for us Indians is plainly not so for Gooneratne.
Sept-Oct 1983, volume 8, No 2