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Time Travelers |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 3/1/1994 |
| Size: 2,215 Words, 13,387 Characters |
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THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD
Bharati Mukherjee
New York: Knopf, 1993
304 pp., $22.00
When John Keats contemplated the designs and inscriptions on a certain Grecian urn, he celebrated all that he did not and could not know about their history. "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter," he wrote. And yet there was much he wanted to discover about those enticing, elusive men and women whose figures graced a work of art. What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Although he concluded that beauty is the only truth the urn ever would reveal centuries after its creation, he yearned to know other truths about the passions that thrilled the souls of these Greek forebears. His yearning, of course, is shared by all historians.
Bharati Mukherjee recalls Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in the epigraphs for The Holder of the World, her fascinating, brilliantly imagined new novel. A longing to resurrect the past is shared by its two central characters: Beigh Masters, a young woman trained as a historian who works as an "asset researcher" finding valuable objects for wealthy clients, and Venn Iyer, "father of fractals and designer of inner space," a computer scientist from India working at MIT on an unusu...
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... to emerge from the pages of contemporary literature. She has also managed to fulfill one of postmodernism's most cherished aims: writing fiction about the act of writing. But there is no self-consciousness in Mukherjee's prose or perspective. The Holder of the World is simply an intelligent, thoughtful, expansive, and elegant novel about beauty, truth, and our apprehension of the past. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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