If you think that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the sacred prostitutes, Indian minstrels, idol-makers, and the nightly possessed in William Dalrymple's new book, Nine People, are among the maddest. TLS critic, Wendy Doniger, hails the author of "extraordinary travel books" about India, who this time has written a "glorious mixture of journalism, anthropology, history and history of religions." It shows us, through its stories of the suffering and sacrifice that are still the daily reality of many on the subcontinent, "religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest."
There are those, perhaps especially in England, who are more exercised by the suffering of animals than that of their fellow humans. Andrew Linzey goes a bit further than some in his belief that "animals are protected by principles which have an absolute force"—but does not convince the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who lives on a farm and rides to hounds, and concludes that it is not just "the mouse in my kitchen and the rat in the barn" that need protecting from people, but people themselves: "not least from the prigs and puritans who dislike their way of life." Linzey, says Scruton, may be a humane observer of animals, but he is no student of literature. "Maybe he cannot bring himself to attend a meet of foxhounds; but he could at least have consulted the literature, from Plato and Xenophon to Turgenev, Sassoon, Masefield and Ortega y Gasset, devoted to the place of hunting in a virtuous life."
This month it is one of the TLS editor's happy tasks to hand over seven prizes for literary translation, the art or craft of which "is in good shape," according to our French and Italian editor, Adrian Tahourdin: "if as a nation of readers we in Britain remain insular or parochial, there is less excuse for that than ever." In a year dominated by prose and especially by fiction, one of the prizes goes to Margaret Jull Costa, for her version, made from the Spanish translation, of a novel originally written in Basque. Jonathan Keates also salutes this "inexhaustibly versatile" translator's work—this time, for her versions of novels by the great Portuguese writer José Maria Eça de Queiroz. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prizewinner and one-time contributor to the TLS, in his new novel (translated by Maureen Freely), reveals the "gilded life of Turkey's Westernized elite" and its segregation from "the impoverished and destitute majority"—those religion waits to embrace.
Plus: Check out Book Beast for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.
Peter Stothard is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war and On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy which will be published in January.
