Oh, the dreary architectonics of academic folly
That is precisely what the colonial cousins of Indian Writing in Hinglish were waiting for. Given their morbid tendency to support every literary corpus with a corpse, a "murder" of literary critics have assembled in this anthology to "crow" over their supposed recuperation of St Arundhati from the media. So here they are with their apologies, elegies, eulogies, expositions, hiccups, and bad puns on the title. All this is too much, too soon.
This book with 45 contributors and 422 pages is like a monumental tombstone. It even looks like one. The cover simply says Arundhati Roy-The Novelist Extraordinary; the only thing missing are her dates: 1997-1997 perhaps, if we take "the end of imagination" seriously. If Arundhati's book, in the words of the Booker citation, "keeps all the promises that it makes"; if it continues to haunt our imagination; and our bestiaries with Pappachi's Moth, Cochin Kangaroos, and the delicate water lilies that float on India ink, the book under review is an affront to a woman who describes herself as a flower child who wore shells round her ankles, and "rode to work on a bicycle singing Here Comes the Sun".