Lines in Books

It is enough for a young woman like you to give birth to children. That is your poetry. Leave other poetry to us men. [....] And I'm not even wearing a saree I could weep into. The Binding Vine leaves me wondering if the purpose of literature is to beautify life's futility & drudgery. It deals with the loss of a child and marital rape (drawing chilling parallels between marital & non-marital rape); it is rather feminist though the author takes a dig at feminism. 

A tragicomedy where two committed American scholars go to Albania attempting to understand who Homer was after listening to a programme in which a classicist says that there still is, in the world, an area where epic poetry is still ‘being produced’. Not all went well once they reached — they got caught up in local politics, and became the subject of the fantasies of the local governor’s wife although their work was ultimately undone by a hermit (who upon the instigation of a Serb monk) destroyed their supposedly satanic tape recorder and their recordings of rhapsodes. Ironically, this act seemed to give Albanian epic poetry its last splutter of life, with a ballad being written about the two scholars. Apart from the rather interesting look at the work of the scholars in Albanian, and the entertaining descriptions of the government trying to spy on them to uncover the foreigners' ‘real’ mission (which they imagine is spying), the book contains a fascinating character sketch of...