4/12/2023 0 Comments Ny times newslettersThe Great Read More fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end. The way Sharma described his characters made me wonder if they were veiled portraits of people in Sharma’s life. What made the sadness of the botch greater was that the characters couldn’t complain, they had no one to say on their behalf that they had not been given the opportunity they deserved to be themselves.” I was like an inexperienced surgeon who botched an operation. I did the best I could back then, but my best wasn’t good enough. And because I had betrayed them, I had committed a moral injury to myself. “Because I published the book when there were problems in it,” Sharma told me, “I had always felt that I had betrayed my characters. That daughter, Anita, now a young adult, has become a widow, and without any other options (her successful sister has fled India) she - along with her own 8-year-old daughter, Asha - moves into the father’s apartment. He is a pedophile, who brutally raped one of his two daughters when she was a child. The father, Ram Karan, a widower and a petty administrator whose job amounts to coercing bribes from petty officials, is also a fiend. It tries to integrate two first-person reports of family life, one by a father and another by his daughter, with a larger, social story about modern India, its political history and its fraught, failed attempts at change. In that little way, what he already knew to be true was borne out: Whatever the book did well, aesthetically, it had real things wrong with it, formal problems he hadn’t been able to name, much less fix. He’d had doubts, yes, but he had been arrogant enough, or insecure enough, or hopeful enough to want to be hailed as a genius, and when it was clear that, despite the praise the book received, “genius” was not a word being thrown around, Sharma’s sense of failure, of not living up to his hopes for the novel, was confirmed. Considerably shorter, with a very different ending but the same title, the novel was about to be published a second time - it reappears this month - more than 30 years after Sharma began it.Īside from those encouraging/discouraging realities, Sharma was secretly displeased with the novel when he published it. Sharma had done a weird thing, something white-rhino rare in the history of literature: He had revised and radically rewritten a novel, his first, “An Obedient Father,” one he published 22 years earlier. I realize the same assessment might be made of any number of contemporary writers, and while I stand by it and will try to qualify it, there is something undeniable about Sharma that can be said of very few novelists, and it was for this reason that I went to see him. What’s odd to me, retrospectively, about that moment in Sharma’s arms is how congruent the feeling of it was with the feeling of reading his work: to be brought suddenly, unexpectedly, un-self-consciously close to another human - a pressure that’s palpable on every page of his work. Times readers who are not yet subscribers can continue to enjoy dozens of free newsletters including The Morning, DealBook and Breaking News Alerts, by signing up to receive them on is unusual to hold a stranger in a loving way, and yet it didn’t feel strange. ![]() Together, this group of talented and thoughtful journalists will offer our subscribers the deep analysis and fresh perspectives only available with The Times. We’ve been tirelessly discerning in choosing these new writers to join our existing columnists, who are the leading voices in their coverage areas. ![]() Kathleen Kingsbury, editor, The New York Times Opinion, added: “Our suite of Opinion newsletters will explore complex issues that matter most to our readers across topics like race, economics, language, technology and more. ![]() The New York Times today announced the launch of subscriber-only newsletters, a curated collection of more than 15 new and existing News and Opinion newsletters available only to Times subscribers.Īlex Hardiman, chief product officer, The New York Times Company, said, “Now that The Times has passed 8 million subscriptions, our distinct and diverse newsletter portfolio represents the start of a larger investment in adding even more differential value to our subscriber experience.” The following excerpt announcement was sent out by The New York Times:
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