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The Hindu
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
On definitive 20th century novels
Daily Quiz | On definitive 20th century novels Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit YOUR SCORE 0 /5 RETAKE THE QUIZ 1 / 5 | In this dystopian novel famous for its exploration of surveillance and totalitarianism — and which was published 35 years before the date in its title — what is the name of the omnipresent authoritarian leader symbolising oppressive control? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Big Brother SHOW ANSWER 2 / 5 | This novel has been celebrated for its critique of the 'American dream' during the Jazz Age. It was, however, a commercial failure when it was published in 1925. In its pages, name the mysterious millionaire known for lavish parties and his obsession with Daisy Buchanan. DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Jay Gatsby SHOW ANSWER 3 / 5 | First published in 1967, the book quickly came to be hailed as one of the greatest achievements of literature worldwide. A landmark of magical realism, the book chronicles the Buendía family saga in what fictional town that symbolises isolation and cyclical history? DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Macondo SHOW ANSWER 4 / 5 | Known for its satirical take on the absurdity of war, ________ is named for a paradoxical military rule in its plot that traps soldiers in a no-win situation. Fill in the blank with the book's name that has also entered regular use as a term of the English language. DID YOU KNOW THE ANSWER? YES NO Answer : Catch-22 SHOW ANSWER
Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
10 quirky literary masterpieces every student should read before college
Before academic syllabi teach you how to analyse literature, these ten quirky masterpieces teach you how to experience it. From absurdist novellas to comic sci-fi and meta-narratives, this curated list helps college-bound students reflect, laugh, and rethink what it means to read deeply. These are not books for grades — they're companions for growth, self-discovery, and unexpected joy. Before college teaches you how to dissect literature in a classroom, these books teach you how to live with literature. They are strange, layered, often hilarious, and quietly brilliant. books that do not just ask you to read but to reflect, pause, and sometimes, laugh at the absurdities of the world. Here's a reading list for students about to begin their college journeys curated not for completion but for contemplation. The Metamorphosis Author: Franz Kafka Genre: Absurdist fiction / Existential novella Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a bug. No explanation, no dramatics. His family reacts not with horror but inconvenience. Kafka does not offer comfort or clarity, and that's exactly the point. This slim novella challenges readers to grapple with alienation and identity in ways that feel eerily relevant to young adulthood. For students on the brink of entering a world that will repeatedly ask them to define their place, this is a haunting, essential first lesson. Catch-22 Author: Joseph Heller Genre: Satirical war novel This novel unfolds in the middle of a war, but the real battles are not just in the air, they're in the logic traps and contradictions of military life. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like You Can Make Massive Side Income By Learning Order Flow Analysis TradeWise Learn More Undo Every rule has a loophole, and every escape has a cost. The phrase Catch-22 has become a cultural shorthand for no-win situations, and Heller's work is its origin story. For students preparing to navigate university bureaucracy, this book is a clever and often dizzying primer on how systems break down and people cope within them. Slaughterhouse-Five Author: Kurt Vonnegut Genre: Science fiction / Metafiction Billy Pilgrim is 'unstuck in time.' He moves between his experiences as a soldier in World War II and moments with aliens on a distant planet. This sounds like science fiction, and it is, but it is also an anti-war novel, a meditation on grief, and a study of narrative form. Vonnegut's quiet refrain — 'so it goes', after every death teaches students a hard, necessary truth: life's chaos is often beyond understanding, and still, we must continue. Waiting for Godot Author: Samuel Beckett Genre: Absurdist drama / Existential play Two men wait on a road, Godot never comes. Not much happens, yet everything happens. Beckett's play is an academic favourite because it resists interpretation. For college-bound students, it offers early exposure to the complexities of meaning-making. What do we do while waiting for things we cannot control? Why do we keep going? These are questions that arrive early in college life. Beckett simply asks them sooner. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Author: Douglas Adams Genre: Comic science fiction Earth is destroyed in the first few pages and a man in a bathrobe is saved by a friend who turns out to be an alien. They travel across galaxies with nothing but a towel and dry wit. Douglas Adams's cult classic is wildly entertaining, but it is also sneakily philosophical. Beneath the absurdity is a gentle reminder that most of life's big questions do not have answers, and sometimes, the smartest thing to do is laugh while asking them anyway. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Author: Italo Calvino Genre: Postmodern fiction / Metafiction This book begins with you, the reader, trying to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Then the book changes. Again, and again. Calvino crafts a literary puzzle where each chapter becomes a new story and a new voice. For students about to spend years reading critically, this novel is a bold introduction to meta-fiction and narrative experimentation. It gently destabilises traditional ideas of plot, identity, and authorship and does so with quiet charm. The Importance of Being Earnest Author: Oscar Wilde Genre: Comedy of manners / Satirical play Before sarcasm had a name, Wilde mastered it. This Victorian comedy of manners takes on double lives, mistaken identities, and the absurdity of social conventions. Every line is sharp, deliberate, and quotable. At just over an hour to read, it is brief but brilliant. Students stepping into adulthood will appreciate how Wilde pokes fun at what society expects one to do. One Hundred Essays I Don't Have Time to Write Author: Sarah Ruhl Genre: Essay collection / Literary non-fiction Ruhl is a playwright but in this collection, she becomes a thinker on everyday life. Her essays are short, observational, and surprisingly profound. Topics range from parenthood to punctuation. For students with shrinking attention spans and expanding workloads, this book models how intellectual reflection can thrive in fragments. It is a reminder that writing and thinking need not be long to be meaningful. Me Talk Pretty One Day Author: David Sedaris Genre: Humorous autobiographical essays Sedaris's essays on trying to learn French in Paris, coping with a lisp, and navigating eccentric family dynamics are deeply funny but never cruel. His humour disarms without dismissing the awkwardness of becoming an adult. For students anxious about entering new environments, Sedaris offers proof that vulnerability and wit can coexist, and even flourish. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Author: Mark Haddon Genre: Mystery / Coming-of-age fiction Told from the perspective of a teenage boy on the autism spectrum, this novel is part mystery, part coming-of-age story. Christopher wants to solve the case of a dead dog, what unfolds is a tender and mathematical journey through grief, truth, and emotional discovery. It is a necessary read for young adults learning to value different ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Before you begin reading This list is not about reading the longest books or the most awarded ones. It is about encountering voices that defy easy categorisation, about spending time with ideas that do not resolve neatly. In college, you will be taught how to write papers about literature. Before that, let literature write something to you. Something odd, something essential and something that stays. Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: 'we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the modernism of the university – establishment modernism, so to speak.' He is addressing the novels of Hermann Broch, which, he argues, don't fit the standardised mould. 'This establishment modernism, for instance, insists on the destruction of the novel form. In Broch's perspective, the possibilities of the novel form are far from being exhausted. Establishment modernism would have the novel do away with the artifice of character, which it claims is finally nothing but a mask pointlessly hiding the author's face. In Broch's characters, the author's self is undetectable.' Several comfortable, undisputed, widely accepted ideas about modernism are contradicted by the practice of leading modernists. Kundera is also sceptical about modernism's alleged clean break with the literature of the past. He is right. T.S. Eliot, too, has a more complicated view of the modern writer's relationship to the past: 'what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.' What does this imply? You can only modify the literature of the past if you issue out of the literature of the past – if you develop an aspect latent in the literature of the past. Another instance: fragmentation of form. Joyce's Ulysses has an intricate plan of Homeric parallels. These are spelled out in the Linati schema – along with an organ, an art, a colour, a theme for each episode – released by Joyce to help his readers appreciate the novel's complex structure. The most fragmented section is Molly Bloom's (virtually) unpunctuated soliloquy, but its formlessness is dictated by a Homeric parallel – Penelope unravelling her tapestry every night, to postpone making a choice between her suitors, a decision to be taken once her tapestry is complete. The first world war is commonly assumed to be the midwife of modernism – a four-year cataclysm that is bound to have had a significant effect on literature. Malcolm Bradbury's introduction to Catch-22: 'War shattered older notions of art, of form and representation; it had transformed older notions of reality, the rules of perception, the structures of artistic expression. It fragmented, hardened, modernised the voice of modern fiction…' Funny how the hundred years' war, say, had so little effect on art. Bradbury, of course, can anticipate the obvious objection – inconvenient chronology – and he does so, raising his voice: 'It is true that the real avant-garde revolt of the modern had begun earlier in the century… Thus the avant-garde experiments of modern painting, writing, architecture and philosophy, and the powerful movements and campaigns that developed them (cubism, expressionism, futurism and so on), mostly came before the war. They upset the classic orders of the arts, broke the frame of realism, rendered art neo-mechanical, fragmentary and abstract. But it took the war itself to ensure the inevitability of their revolt (my italics).' Good to know the first world war was multitasking – not just killing millions and redrawing the borders of Europe, but making a contribution to the arts in its spare time. Two points. Picasso's 'Les demoiselles d'Avignon' was painted in 1907. This is Ezra Pound writing to Harriet Monroe about Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock': 'He has actually trained himself and modernised himself on his own… It is such a comfort to meet a man and not to have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet, and remember the date (1914) on the calendar.' The war, then, is definitively late to the party. About 'Prufrock', E.M. Forster had this to say in 1928: 'Here was a protest, and a feeble one, and the more congenial for being feeble. For what, in that world of gigantic horror, was tolerable except for the slighter gestures of dissent? He who measured himself against the war, who drew himself to his full height, as it were, and said to Armadillo-Armageddon 'Avaunt!' collapsed at once into a pinch of dust. But he who could turn aside to complain of ladies and drawing rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage.' The first world war comprehensively snubbed. Academics, from George Steiner to Helen Gardner, have a weakness for the ramped rhetoric of thought, for bigging things up. Gardner's reading of Prufrock's 'overwhelming question': 'The question that Mr Prufrock dare not ask is only superficially the kind of question which one 'pops'. There is another question all the time, which every other question depends on.' Which is? She doesn't tell us: 'we are aware of the 'sense of the abyss'. There is an 'overwhelming question', which is not being asked; which one dare not ask, for perhaps there is no answer or only such an answer as it would be better not to know…' A question so polyamorphous that, as Eric Morecambe used to say, 'There's no answer to that.'
Time of India
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Words against war: Capturing the horrors of conflict
A still from the 1930 film, All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the novel by German writer Erich Maria Remarque. From Ernest Hemingway to Saadat Hasan Manto, writers have talked of the dehumanising impact war has on those fighting it, the trauma it fuels, and the absurdity that underlies it all A Bertolt Brecht verse published in 1939 captures the role of anti-war literature: 'In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times. ' It seems frail compared to weapons and realpolitik. But to give voice to the case for peace, when govts and populism try to silence it, is a very courageous act. Very resiliently humanist. Instead of death, it embraces the power of life. Notes on the killing In giving voice to the despair, dislocation and trauma that is minimised in war-makers' calculations, anti-war literature has an ageless, universal quality. Saadat Hasan Manto's short story Toba Tek Singh calls out the lunacy of neighbours killing neighbours. Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front underlines how primeval ideas of valour first seduce young men, then betray them with brutal mutilations ('They stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole'), and finally shrink them into emotionally empty shells. Today's wars are newer. But Slaughterhouse-Five to Catch-22 , A Farewell to Arms , The Tin Drum and Train to Pakistan , the classics haven't grown old. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Gentle Japanese hair growth method for men and women's scalp Hair's Rich Learn More Undo Connecting millions Many anti-war books have autobiographical underpinnings. Some disguise this more, like Bertha von Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling and some disclose it more, like Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July . But by far, it is Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl that is the modern world's most influential first-person anti-war book, even if this was not something it set out to do. In a hidden nest of rooms she quarrels with family, crushes on a boy, does schoolwork… and worries about the Gestapo knocking on the door. Why did she write it? What if she hadn't? The horrors of war cannot be captured in statistics alone. For countless readers, it is one account, one life, which connects them to the suffering of millions. Verses against tyrannies From Sahir Ludhianvi's Parchaaiyaan to Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach and Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est , poetry can carry its messages more elliptically. Or not. How straight is Siegfried Sassoon being in Does It Matter?, 'You can drink and forget and be glad, and people won't say that you're mad; For they know that you've fought for your country, and no one will worry a bit.' Or Faiz, resisting the tyrannies that torment the politics of protest, here: 'If a seal were put upon my tongue, what does it matter? For I have put tongues into the links of my chains. ' And here: 'There where you were crucified, so far away from my words, you still were beautiful.' In 2023, a few weeks after Gazan poet Refaat Alareer shared this 2011 poem, 'If I must die/you must live/to tell my story,' he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. To sabre-rattlers and philistines, that would convey the powerlessness of literature. But what they are deaf to, the rest of us hear loud and clear. Also read PART 3: Silent victims: Poisoned land, decimated ecosystems Also read PART 5: If you take a gun to culture, you kill the human spirit
NDTV
12-06-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Is This How India Will 'Dehyphenate' Itself From Pakistan?
"The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on," said Yossarian, the 'hero' of Joseph Heller's 1961 cult classic Catch-22. This absurdly dark and hilarious novel, set during the Second World War, contains some of the most astute observations on war and peace, a theme for our times. Or all times. Apart from one's own commanders, like Colonel Cathcart of Catch-22, the enemy could also be suboptimal actions driven by fallacious estimations of self. While our armed forces, as commanded, demonstrated their professionalism and precision, the same has been seen as lacking from other quarters in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor. Despite India's consistent attempts at keeping the Kashmir issue out of the arena of international interference, Pakistan has doubled down on its efforts to the contrary and achieved at least some degree of success. India, regrettably, has also got 're-hyphenated' with Pakistan despite our government's forceful iterations that the victims and perpetrators of terrorism cannot be treated at par by the international community. Pak Is No Match The irony of the current situation is that India may have played some part in bringing this rehyphenation upon itself. Rather than setting the paradigm, India is seen as playing catch-up in its diplomatic oeuvre. Immediately after the high offices of the Pakistani government, including Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, embarked on their international mission to convince the world about India's alleged aggression, seven all-party committees were dispatched by India to different parts of the world. We are yet to see what such delegations have achieved for the long run, apart from generating newsy moments. As the world's fourth-largest economy, India has a stature that Pakistan can only aspire to achieve. Sharif's statement about India being more wary of the cost of war than Pakistan because the latter is still in a struggling phase is darkly humorous and unintentionally ingenious. It doesn't behove a superpower like India to be following Pakistan's diplomatic footsteps. The soon-to-retire chief of the Florida-based United States Central Command, General Michael E. Kurilla, has recently called Pakistan a "phenomenal partner" whose value "will only increase as the Taliban continues to face security challenges within its borders". President Donald Trump, too, has been underscoring how the US values its "beautiful" relationship with both India and Pakistan, which have "great" leaders. Rather than dismissing this 'both-siding' as classic Trump balderdash, India should devise a robust plan to offset Pakistan's geopolitical arm-twisting of the West. Pak's Sneaky Ways The Afghanistan-Pakistan hyphenation is what has been driving the West's response to Islamabad's backing of the terror outfits in Kashmir and other parts of India. Pakistan has managed to convince the West, especially the US, of its indispensable status in eliminating actors that pose a direct threat to people and property in the Global North. India's renewed engagement with the Taliban, short of recognising them, has only limited potential to counter Pakistan's perceived value as a partner of the West to counter terrorist threats originating from Central and South Asia. The spectre of ISIS-K looms large on any Western attempt at holding Pakistan responsible for terror activities in India. Pakistan has utilised multilateral platforms, such as the UN, to its utmost benefit. Currently, as a non-permanent member of the UNSC, Pakistan serves as the Chair of the 1988 Taliban Sanctions Committee, Vice Chair of the 1373 Counter-Terrorism Committee, and Co-Chair of two informal working groups. It is also set to become the rotational president of the UNSC in July. While these positions do not hold any substantive powers, Pakistan can be expected to initiate meetings and debates to internationalise the Kashmir issue. The Kashmir Question India may have brushed these concerns away in the past, upholding its policy of keeping Kashmir as an internal matter, but it will appear a little hypocritical now. Once you reach out to the world with an aim to share your side of the story, you cannot accuse the other party of doing the same. There has been a spirit of tentativeness with which multilateral platforms have treated India-Pakistan tensions. A large number of nations are not even aware of Kashmir and the eight-decade-long dispute over it. All they have perhaps seen is a half-hearted inscription on UN maps showing the border between the two countries. More importantly, India can no longer claim that it does not care for the "opinion" of the international community, particularly the US, when it was a foreign commander in chief of the armed forces who "announced" - however unwarrantedly - the ceasefire or the "pause" during Operation Sindoor. Classical Greek playwright and master of comedies Aristophanes said, "Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties". While it may be important to learn from Pakistan the art of conning everyone all the time, India must continue to act like the regional power and global arbiter that it posits itself as.
