Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 12

Painted an Elephant Blue

    In my research I’ve come across many stories that have led me to wonder what really happened. This one is about the crew of a German steamer, Barenfels S.S. (which would  be torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine on April 14th, 1944, at Takseraag, Norway, thirty-eight years after the events described below). [...]

Correspondence with István Perczel on History, Hellenism and the idea of ‘Civilization’

    I’ve written about the work of Dr István Perczel, the Hungarian scholar several times on this blog. I posted this before I’d met István, and this shortly after I met him in Goa last year. István is Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest. He studies the Christian East [...]

My review of John Updike’s ‘Terrorist: A Novel’

  [This review was published in the The Washington Post on June 4, 2006]   John Updike: Terrorist: A Novel Alfred A. Knopf, June 2006, 310 pp., $25.00.   John Updike’s new novel is set in a New Jersey mill town that has fallen on hard times. Once home to energetic white immigrants from Eastern [...]

A Reader’s Circle in Venice

    I first visited Venice in the summer of 1981 (when I should have been working on my thesis).             One day I got lost in the city’s winding lanes and stumbed upon a ‘festa’ – in this instance it was an open-air party, in a quarter that was [...]

Thanks to everyone who signed Igiaba Scego’s petition!

    In my post of April 15 I wrote about the Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego:     ‘Like many in Italy Igiaba is deeply concerned about recent attempts to rehabilitate Fascism in public memory.’             I also posted the text of Igiaba’s recent petition to the President of the [...]

Evocations of connected histories – Kerala, Venice & Guangdong

  Sometimes we stumble upon objects and practices that are separated by immense distances and yet seem to bear a resemblance to each other.   For example, in August 2001, I was at this   boat race in Kerala.               It was the annual     Nehru Trophy Vallamkali, [...]

A Hazara Writer from Mazar-e-Sharif

    A little more than a year ago       I was writing blog posts from Kabul.                   One of the most moving experiences of my stay there was when     I visited the Kabul Public Library, which has somehow managed to keep going, [...]

A Somali-Italian Writer’s Campaign Against a Fascist Monument

  Igiaba Scego’s story Salsiccia (‘Sausage’) won Italy’s Eks&Tra prize in 2003 and her novel La mia casa è dove sono won the prestigious Mondello prize in 2011.           Igiaba’s novel La nomade che amava Hitchcock (‘The Nomad who Loved Hitchcock’) was published in 2003 – sadly none of her novels [...]

Venice – Crossroad of Books & Words

  This month I am participating in an event called Incroci di Civiltà in Venice, along with many other writers including Adonis, Bi Feiyu, Stephen Greenblatt, Gabriella Kuruvilla, Edmund de Waal, Yasemin Amdereli, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding.         Pia Masiero is the Director of the event, which is supported by Venice’s [...]

Venice – Crossroads of Books & Words

  This month I am participating in an event called Incroci di Civiltà in Venice, along with many other writers including Adonis, Bi Feiyu, Stephen Greenblatt, Gabriella Kuruvilla, Edmund de Waal, Yasemin Amdereli, Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding.         Pia Masiero is the Director of the event, which is supported by Venice’s [...]