Graham Greene: THE HUMAN FACTOR (3/5)

Espionage raised to the level of literature: a genre invented by Graham Greene. The language of this novel is so exquisite. Some of the sentences will melt you with relish. The vulnerability of someone who is in love is a topic often revisited by Mr. Greene. More than the taut thrilling sequences, more than the page-turning plot, when reading Mr. Greene, we cannot help but be marooned in the cavernous beauty of the language.

Kiran Desai: THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS (5/5)

" Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself."

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDEE, 2006

This is the second novel of Kiran Desai, the daughter of another famous writer, Anita Desai. Issues of immigration, identity, colonialism are discussed in such fervor, often comical, sometimes tragic. It is about a group of people in a remote village in the northeastern part of Himalayas, at the bottom of Mt. Kanchenjunga, near the border of India and Nepal, who found caught amid the broiling conflict between the Ghorka National Liberation Front (GNLF), a Nepalese separatist group, and India.

This wonderful novel won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Booker Prize.

Philip Roth: THE BREAST (3/5)

The Breast is the first novel in Roth's Kepesh Trilogy. It is about a comparative literature professor, David Allan Kepesh, of Stony Brook who was transformed into a 155-pound breast. The novel alluded to characters Gregor Samsa of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Kovalyov of Nikolai Gogol's The Nose, and to the literary masterpiece of Swift, Gulliver's Travels. Part exploration of the professor's bodily desires and part delusion, the novel merges the illusion of carnal desires and the transformative imagery, sometimes satirical, of literature.

Toni Morrison: TAR BABY (3/5)

"If you know how to tread, bottomlessness need not concern you."

Tar baby is a doll made of tar and turpentine; it was used to entrap Bre'er Rabbit in an Uncle Remus story. The more the Rabbit fought the tar baby the more entangled he became. Tar baby also refers to a "sticky situation," where the only solution is separation.

The novel examines the complications of relationships: between whites and blacks, blacks and blacks; between gender and age; between ancient properties and contemporary mores. By interweaving contemporary scenes and myths, Toni Morrison raised the issue on the inability of blacks to unschackle themselves from the psychological echoes brought about by the past.

This might be one of the accessible novels of Toni Morrison, but definitely not very easy to interpret.