Beethoven Among the Cows

by Rukun Advani

One wintry day, in the year China invades India, a little before Prime Minister Nehru dies of a broken heart, a probably unholy cow comes calling on two brothers. Thirty years later, they embark on a passage through India to see the Taj Mahal, only to have their journey interrupted by another cow.
In between these two episodes the brothers, always uneasy with reality, seem to invent a country called India in their minds. This is an uncommon India, made up of the fantastic, the visionary and the historically true - of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru, Mikhail Gorbachev and Elizabeth Taylor, Mughal emperors and an Egyptian empress, Ludwig van Beethoven and Nostradamus, cricket and politics, floods and train journeys, peacocks and broken monuments.

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1994

Reviews

[Gabrielle Danoux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quelques mots pour Rukun Advani, qui publia ce livre estimé et remarqué par des universitaires de renom sur l'Inde post Nehru, au style anglo-saxon un peu superficiel mais profondément pessimiste. À mon sens, ce n'est pas Arundhati Roy, mais néanmoins une œuvre qui a fait date. Depuis, l'auteur travaille dans l'édition et son épouse écrit des romans.
Néanmoins, son œuvre n'a pas été traduite et il reste assez malheureusement méconnu.