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Title: Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (New York Review of Books Classics) by J. R. Ackerley, Eliot Weinberger ISBN: 0-940322-25-0 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Sly and Witty
Comment: This is one of those books that I will always keep by my bed as a reminder not to take myself too seriously in any capacity. I found this a terribly funny book, mostly becuase it rang so true. Ackerley is fabulous company, shockingly observant and brutally honest, even when it plunges him into bad light. We tip-toe so carefully around so many of the subjects he faces head on - racism, homosexuality, class and privilege. He doesn't flinch.
Rating: 2
Summary: A failure of any empathy for someone similarly thwarted
Comment: Mostly bereft of scenery or any notice of local lifeways, hardly a travel book at all, Hindoo Holiday strikes me as being a vicious portrait of his host and benefactor, a maharajah who, like Ackerley, was on the self-defeating quest for the devotion of an Ideal Friend, and, like Ackerley, looking in all the wrong places for love. Ackerley's book is condescending to Indians in the colonial British manner that was abhorrent to Foster both in his time in India and in his masterpiece A Passage to India, Hindoo Holiday is notable for a lack of empathy on Ackerley's part, but, then, in his entire oeuvre, it is only the irritations and heartbreaks of his surrogates that matter. Ackerley was far too solipsistic to be a novelist.
Rating: 3
Summary: An odd mix
Comment: E. M. Forster, whom Ackerley emulated in going to India in the 20s to work as private secretary for a maharajah, has a character in A PASSAGE TO INDIA named Miss Derek, who is private secretary to a rani and who "regarded the entire peninsula as if it were a comic opera." That basically describes the attitude Ackerley adopts in HINDOO HOLIDAY, which treats an indian princely styate as if it were wildly wacky. No doubt that might have been true to Ackerley when he visited in the 20s, but this book's humor has worn somewhat over the years and seems at times a bit condescending. What has remained interesting and vital are Ackerley's observations about Indian (particularly Hindu) customs and manners, and his deft sensitivity and understatement in his portrayal of the maharajah's (and his own) homoerotic desires: Ackerley's keen observational intelligence, fortunately, outweighs the dated cross-cultural comic aspects of the narrative. While this isn;t nearly at the level of one of his later works like MY FATHER AND MYSELF, it's an intriguing read for anyone interested in India during the raj or early 20th-century homosexuality.
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Title: My Dog Tulip (New York Review of Books Classics) by J. R. Ackerley, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ISBN: 0940322110 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: We Think the World of You (New York Review Books Classics) by J. R. Ackerley, P. N. Furbank ISBN: 0940322269 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: My Father and Myself (New York Review Books Classics) by J. R. Ackerley, W. H. Auden ISBN: 0940322129 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Way of Life, Like Any Other (New York Review Books Classics) by Darcy O'Brien, Seamus Heaney ISBN: 094032279X Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 09 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Pushkin's Button by Serena Vitale, John Rothschild, Ann Goldstein ISBN: 0374239355 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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