Thursday, March 1, 2007

Idlers in print

Following Josh's posts about idler and slacker movies, I thought I'd add a note about a thoroughly enjoyable idler novel: Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August: An Indian Story." From the inspired jacket copy:

[Agastya Sen's] friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job.

The job takes him to Madna, "the hottest town in India," deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, timewasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk bureaucrats, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling.

Whether this is a slacker or an idler novel is open to debate, since Agastya is after all employed in a good job, and does undergo a kind of transformation. But it isn't the neat, pro-society transformation you might expect. Indeed, as Amit Chaudhuri has said, the novel is "at war with 'importance,' and is one of the few Indian English novels in the last two decades genuinely, and wonderfully, impelled by irreverence and aimlessness."

Any other nominees for Idler Art, Literary Division?

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:33 AM

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