New authors are a dime a dozen. Check out the 'Books' section in any newspaper and there, a whole crop of never-heard-of-before authors who have apparently come up with great works which will change the world. Browse through the "New Fiction" section in the library and half of the books there have the sentence "New York Times Bestseller" on their covers. And then you read the book, try very much to like it (after all, if the NYT says it's a best seller, then there's probably something to it), and then realize it's no use, it's complete crap and bunkum. No, new authors are really not that great to talk (or write a blog) about.
MY new author is a pretty old one- from the 1800's in fact. A FEMALE author. An INDIAN female author (whaaa?? Who the heck is this woman? How did she slip past my eagle eyed scrutiny for all these years?). Toru Dutt is she.
Toru Dutt would have probably become incredibly famous as a writer, poet and translator had she lived. She might have become the Indian Jane Austen. However, since she died when she was 22, she is relegated to the "might-have-beens" of truly tragic proportions. Think about this: she was fluent in English, Bengali, French (which she learned during the 6 months she spent in France) and was learning Sanskrit. Before she died, she had written 2 books in French, translated one more from French to English and written at least one really famous poem (called "Our Casuarina Tree"- which, I'll admit, I had never heard of, but then again, I cannot claim any familiarity with poetry. I know a total of 3 poems: Abu Ben Adam, by Leigh Hunt, which I had to learn in 1st standard, Kubla Khan by Samuel Coleridge, which I know because RK keeps quoting lines from it, and The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe).
Anyway, interesting tidbit of epidemiology: Toru Dutt and her siblings all died of consumption, one after another. Ah, if only people knew to wear masks then.
Got around to reading "Le Journal de Mademoiselle D'Arvers"- the English version, not the French. What are its good points? It's well imagined- it has a good number of characters with depth, it paints a nice picture of pre-Revolution rural France. The girl (Mademoiselle D'Arvers) makes a good heroine- she's beautiful and virtuous (what else?), kind, compassionate etc etc. Dutt has made her an independent thinker, who is given the freedom to make her own choices- which is a pretty radical thing when you consider that this book was written in the early 19th century by a sheltered girl from India.
Unfortunately, there is no suspense in the book. You know how it's going to end from the beginning.
Also annoying was (and this is not Dutt's fault) the translation. It was done by someone called N.Kamala, who slips once in a while into a form of colloquial English which is jarring and sudden and frankly painful. Mademoiselle asks, "How's it going?" on one page. On another, she asks "What's up?".
What's up?? Seriously? Couldn't you find a better way of expressing that, N.Kamala? Do you seriously think ANYone, French or English or American or Indian, from the 1800s would have gone around asking that question in that particular way?
All in all, an interesting read for a lazy afternoon.
