Tom Fleming
Bedtime Stories
The Alchemy of Desire
By Tarun J Tejpal
Picador 518pp £12.99
The narrator of The Alchemy of Desire is a part-time novelist and subeditor who sets about deconstructing the twin engines of his life, sex and storytelling. He is deeply in love with his beautiful wife Fizz, but somewhere the passion has faded; problems begin whenever he sits down to write, and culminate in his discovery of a chest full of cryptic diaries in the couple’s ramshackle new home in the foothills of the Himalayas. Written by an American lady, Catherine, who, three-quarters of a century earlier, became the frustrated companion of the brilliant but sadly (for her) homosexual son of the Nawab of Jagdevpur, the diaries detail her adventurous, sorrowful life in full: ultimately, her uncontainable desire for one of the palace cooks caused her life to implode. Our narrator becomes obsessed with her story, to the exclusion of his wife, who leaves him; but as Catherine’s monumental desire capitulates to bathos, he comes to the understanding that ‘the greatest glue between two people’ is love, not sex.
The narrator and his wife first meet in 1979, in Chandigarh, when they are both studying: it’s an ‘innocent time’, he says, both for them and for the nation, and much of the novel takes the form of an astonishingly randy Bildungsroman set against the increasing turbulence of an India
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors.
Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest uprising in Europe before the French Revolution.
Peter Marshall - Down with the Ox Tax!
Peter Marshall: Down with the Ox Tax! - Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, who died yesterday, reviewed many books on Russia & spying for our pages. As he lived under threat of assassination, books had to be sent to him under ever-changing pseudonyms. Here are a selection of his pieces:
Literary Review - For People Who Devour Books
Book reviews by Oleg Gordievsky
literaryreview.co.uk
The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened.
@StephenSmithWDS wonders how two East End gadflies infiltrated the Eastern Bloc.
Stephen Smith - From Russia with Lucre
Stephen Smith: From Russia with Lucre - Gilbert & George and the Communists by James Birch
literaryreview.co.uk