Inger Duberg Duberg itibaren अनला, ओड़िशा 759024, भारत
this is a strange book in the gunter grass canon. it's basically a structured and edited diary of the six months he and his wife lived in calcutta in '87-'88. the great thing about it is that it's a multidisciplinary reaction to his experience; the book is split into three parts, these being a prose journal, pen+ink drawings, and a long-form poem. pretty amazing. his writing about the state of affairs in india is very compelling. it's difficult to even describe what he has been able to accomplish. he writes about the conditions, the abject poverty in such a frank but careful manner that the pathos evoked is almost subliminal...that is, he does not write with pathos, nor with shock, but in a very even tone that, instead of imparting the sensation of drama or using any typical "you should be feeling this" language, the import of what he tells you comes from simply reacting as a human being. the details he includes, though, and the way he tells them, really maximize one's reactions and understanding. it's quite something. i have to include this particularly stunning passage from the prose journal segment: "As everywhere else in the city, the women and children here too follow in the wake of the cows, collect the dung, dump it into tubs, mix it with chopped rice straw and coal dust, make a paste, and from the paste make cakes that are pressed to dry on the walls. Each cake imprinted by fingers, the fingers of women and children. In every quarter of the city, even near Park Street, on the walls of the old English cemetary, on culverts tall as men, next to the subway construction sites, a gigantic ruin that feeds its contractors -- everywhere, but especially on fire walls or walls around villas, which are embedded with broken glass to prevent access and ward off the evil eye, those cakes are drying, and all of them, as though works of art, are signed with three fingerprints. "And so once more, beauty intrudes in some purely utilitarian, ad hoc item. All framed and pedestaled works of art should be forced to compete with such scenes from reality."