This December, the Italian Book Club in Mumbai reads In an antique land, by Amitav Ghosh.
In this book of universal value, crossing the thin boundaries that separate the present from the past, with only the fragment of an old letter in his hand, Amitav Ghosh sets out in search of the Indian slave who is named there, a figure who appears to him like a key to understand and tell a history made up of many stories, diasporas and wars, traditions and encounters, ruptures and disappearances. The centre of the story are two Egyptian villages, places of an extraordinary linguistic and human apprenticeship, and starting points for a long investigation: for more than ten years Ghosh chases the mysterious slave, building a wonderful novel in which everything is rigorously true.
As a conscious shadow of the ancient slave, the modern researcher follows a double itinerary: that in the medieval universe, along the mercantile routes that from the Mediterranean Sea lead to India; and that in the contemporary universe, along the routes that have connected East and West for millennia – and lead from one religion to another, from one language to another.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied in Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned a doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel, which was published in 1986.
The Circle of Reason won the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of France’s top literary awards, and The Shadow Lines won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Hutch Crossword Book Prize in 2006. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.
Wednesday 18 dicembre 2024, ore 6:30 pm
Title Waves Bookstore, Bandra
The book may be read in the English original or in the Italian translation.
Join the Book Club with the one-year Membership Card: token fee 200 INR