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Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.
Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.
Anonymous
Posted Thu Nov 28 00:00:00 EST 2002
All my attempts to classify this book proved futile. A scholarly view of scientific mode dissecting the anthropological evolution over nearly a millenium, or a novelist, rather a painter of words, discovering the microscopic fragments of history, weaving subtle bonds with the present. A literary work of a social antrhopologist, or a research work of a novelist, either way it is a unique moving book with universal appeal, revealing the common bond that unites mankind, over nearly a millenium and a few tens of thousands of miles, and succeeds in what it sets out to achieve, to show that uniformity and universality of humankind, something the author believes in himself. One word to describe it, BEAUTIFUL, that is what I felt after finishing it.
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Posted Mon Feb 12 00:00:00 EST 2007
It was really a splendid reading this book. This books brings the best litereature out. This is how i think the book has to be written. Mr. Amitav has a Class of his own. I advise to read this. Its worth reading.
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Overview
Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors.
Combining shrewd observations with ...