{"id":37381,"date":"2015-06-01T12:22:10","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T16:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/?p=37381"},"modified":"2015-08-17T09:52:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:52:55","slug":"the-way-things-were-by-aatish-taseer-in-library-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-way-things-were-by-aatish-taseer-in-library-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer [in Library Journal]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Way<\/a>Aatish Taseer’s latest opens with a mother’s call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father’s body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, “Toby” G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu \u2013 half-actually Scottish, half-Indian \u2013 was more a foreign “novelty” in his ancestral homeland. A Sanskrit scholar with an “exaggerated reverence for the Indian past,” he bequeathed his linguistic obsessions to his “collector of cognates”-son, Skanda.<\/p>\n

Chapters alternate between Toby’s abandoned India of decades past and the present, in which Skanda returns to India and unexpectedly remains. Amid a country in flux, Toby’s gift of language offers Skanda the possibility of understanding “the way things were.”<\/p>\n

Verdict<\/strong>: Taseer, the son of an assassinated Muslim Pakistani politician and a Sikh Indian journalist, is undoubtedly a formidable storyteller (Temple-Goers<\/em>; Noon<\/em>), yet his constant, digressive displays of erudition \u2013 from Marcel Proust’s Swann and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, to neglected vocabulary such as fissiparous and pleonastically \u2013 prove more distracting than enhancing. The result is an unnecessarily sprawling, nearly 600-page epic that should have been stunning. For more satisfying examples of what Things<\/em> could have been, try Amitav Ghosh’s “Ibis Trilogy<\/a>,” Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance<\/a><\/em>, and M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Review<\/strong>: “Fiction,” Library Journal<\/em>, June 1, 2015<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aatish Taseer’s latest opens with a mother’s call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father’s body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, “Toby” G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu \u2013 half-actually Scottish, half-Indian \u2013 was more a foreign “novelty” in his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,52,53,6535,17,18],"tags":[6328,83,6608,59,10,189,51,25,70,13,145,39,6327],"class_list":["post-37381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-fiction","category-indian","category-indian-american","category-repost","category-south-asian","category-south-asian-american","tag-aatish-taseer","tag-assimilation","tag-bookdragon","tag-cultural-exploration","tag-family","tag-father-son-relationship","tag-identity","tag-immigration","tag-library-journal","tag-love","tag-mixed-race-issues","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-way-things-were"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer [in Library Journal] - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/the-way-things-were-by-aatish-taseer-in-library-journal\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer [in Library Journal] - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Aatish Taseer’s latest opens with a mother’s call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father’s body from Geneva back to Delhi. 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