Hiking The Himalayas With A Suitable Boy
I've been away for awhile, immersed in the vivid details of India. The Indian Himalayan mountain ranges are the loftiest in the world and though I've never witnessed them in person, I feel like I have an idea of what it might be like to scale them. At 1474 pages, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, is one of the longest novels of the last century and the longest one -volume offering in the English language. It tops War and Peace and Ulysses in length and in the intimidating heft of the tome, which is saying a lot. A Suitable Boy is exhaustive in its scope of 50s era Indian life, examining everything from politics and castes, to religion and food. I feel like I've spent weeks in India, observing ceremonies, talking with families and learning it's complex history and I'm both enlightened and tired from the experience. Set in the early 1950s, shortly after the Partition of India and Pakistan and during the first elections after independence, the novel offers insig...