Reviews

• 異文化の狭間での苦悩

  彼女の小説は非常に限られた人にしか理解されないのかもしれない。数々の賞を取ったにもかかわらず、おそらくインドにおける彼女の立場も微妙なものとも思われる。彼女の描くインド人はおそらく彼女の本を読むことができるインド人には共感を持っては理解されないだろうし、彼女が描くイギリス人も必ずしもインドに駐在したアングロ・インディアンズからみて心のそこからの共感を誘うものでもないものと思われる。もっともこの読者層も今ではDYING SPECIESなわけだけど。しかしなぜ私はこんなに彼女の小説に惹かれるのでしょうか。わかり易く気取ったところの無いきれいな英語もその一つでしょう。彼女が小説を書き始めたあの激動の1960年代のニューデリーに自分もたまたまいたからでしょうか。彼女の特徴は、もう二度と再起し得ないその瞬間の描写に対してのこまやかな観察力。それも部外者であって部外者ではない立場だからこそできる観察力。これはもともとの彼女の独特の生い立ちが可能ならしめるのでしょうか。そして強烈な魅力を放つ対象、つまりインドの現実からの、適度な距離の取り方。今回の舞台は1920年代の植民地下のインドです。プロットとしてはE.M. FORSTERのPASSAGE TO INDIAに似ています。話は現在のイギリス女性が自分の祖先のインドでの軌跡（ＩＣＳ官僚）を再確認するためにインドを訪れる話です。はたして彼女は、インドのマハラジャと駆け落ちして二度とイギリスに戻ることが無かったイギリス女性の真理に近づくことができるのか。

• An escapist novel you'll end up wanting to escape from

  Amazon was the only place I could acquire a copy of this book. My "used" edition lacks its dust jacket but is otherwise in excellent condition. It took me a few days, after reading Heat and Dust to formulate my thoughts. Haunting, enigmatic, spellbinding, are adjectives critics use when they don't understand what's in front of them, and they don't apply here. I admit to not having heard of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala until the summer of 2019 when I embarked on buying and reading all the Booker Prize winnners. Heat and Dust was one of a mere two books shortlisted for the prize in 1975; although just one year earlier, judges had been spoilt for choice and shared out the prize for the first time. Scouring shops for a second-hand copy of Heat and Dust, I spotted a few Ruth Prawer Jhabvala titles, but my first sample of her work was watching Merchant Ivory Productions' Remains of the Day for which she wrote the screenplay (after it too had won the Booker Prize). Yet the novelist with whom she is perhaps most closely associated is E. M. Forster, having adapted several of his books for the silver screen; and like him she takes foreigners adrift as a theme in this novel. Most of the English characters in Heat and Dust are on journeys of self-discovery. All of their quests, however, appear to have seized up in the heat and dust of the title. Chid is a Hindu convert whose experiences in India lead him back to Western values and a retreat to England. Harry, likewise, is physically ruined by India and is drawn home. Two female characters ultimately stay on the subcontinent but voyage north, high into the Himalayas – an ascension from the world below, particularly the heat and dust. The novel consists of two interrelated plots, which are easily followable, the narrative being split between 1923 (principally concerning Olivia) and the present-day, presumably the 1970s (involving the unnamed female narrator). I heard echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, with its unchristened narrator who is intrigued – not to say haunted – by the memory of the dead first wife of her English (and here the parallel comes to an abrupt end) grandfather, her name being not Rebecca but Olivia. There are many points of similarity in Olivia's and the later female narrator's journeys. The way each chooses to handle the contrasting circumstances of the India in which she finds herself (pre- and post-independence), and the way the author subtly points up these parallels simply by juxtaposing them, strengthens the novel. Disturbing relationships arise throughout both time frames: between the Nawab – a minor prince – and his homosexual house "guest" of three years, Harry; between the Nawab and Olivia; between the present-day narrator and her married Indian host, Inder Lal, and also with her extraordinarily endowed roommate, Chid: "[Chid] also needs sex very badly and seems to take it for granted that I will give it to him the same way I give him my food. I have never had such a feeling of being used. Every now and then he gets those monstrous erections of his and I have to fight him off (quite apart from anything else it's just too hot)." Such scenes of casual – verging on abusive – sex with Chid were, as I understand it, excised from the author's own screenplay to the 1983 adaptation (another Merchant Ivory Production). Her filmic counterpart is thus saved the ignominy of conducting affairs with two men interchangeably, sometimes in the same room: "After Chid moved back in again, Inder Lal at first felt shy about his nightly visits. But I have assured him that it is all right because Chid is mostly sleeping. He just lies there and groans and it is difficult to believe that it is the same person who performed all those tremendous feats on me." Here and elsewhere the narrator's privacy (and morality) apparently deteriorate to nothing – this is a world where onlookers and midwives know the inner workings of a woman's body before she knows herself. Is the ending, then, an attempt to reestablish privacy? Escaping from the heat and dust, Olivia and the narrator are similarly - and, certainly in the latter case, willingly - exiled to the mountains. But when does privacy become imprisonment and defeat? The final pages were strongly reminiscent of the alpine climax in D H Lawrence's Women In Love, with the prospect of death unspoken but inescapable. In the end, India cast its spell over Olivia and her proselyte, in a way that it didn't quite for Chid or Harry or this reader.

• Nice to read but why booker prize?

  We (our reading club) thought it a nice book to read, interesting, you get a nice idea of India, and the switching back and forth between 1920 and 1970 is nicely done. We thought that there were many characters which were touched upon but who you did not really got to know. We get the feeling that a lot of the work got into plotting the book. drafting parallels between then and now, to show similarities and changes. None of the characters are really touching you. Having said that, we all enjoyed reading the book.

• Compelling read

  “ Heat and dust,” centers around two women several generations apart. The narrator travels to India to investigate the scandalous past of her step grandmother Olivia who came to India during the time of the time of the British Raj. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala does an excellent job with the storytelling- the book won the Booker prize. We get to know the main characters really well. The pace of the book is slow and even though much of it deals with the day to day and the mundane,it held my interest.

• Ein interessanter Rückblick in Zeiten der Kolonialherrschaft

  Das Buch ist leicht zu lesen, für die Oberstufe empfehlenswert. Interessant ist der Rückblick in die Zeiten der Kolonien. Da es sich um eine Liebesgeschichte handelt, wie sie auch heute noch ähnlich in Mittelasien ablaufen könnte, ist die Lektüre eher für die Damenwelt lesenswert. Nicht berücksichtigt wird das Leben der einheimischen Bevölkerung unter der Herrschaft der Briten, aber dieses Thema gehört auch nicht in den Bereich der Erzählung.

• Typo illisible dans le format papier acheté

  Il est dommage de ne pas être averti quand une typo est en dessous de 10 car pour certains lecteurs le mal de tête arrive après cinq minutes. D'autant plus dommage que j'aurais du le commander sur mon Kindle sur lequel je peux aisément adapter la typo. Peut être que vous pourriez me l'envoyer sur kindle car je n'ai lu que deux pages. Je suis prêt à vous le renvoyer. Ce que j'ai fait en l'achetant sur Kindle ce qui bien entendu a résolu le problème

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