Pankaj Mishra

I have read very little of Pankaj Mishra but the little I read stayed with me. The first is this last paragraph from his review Of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake”
“This is the melancholy awareness that suffuses Lahiri's catalogs of desirable things and people. And so while such obvious underdogs as Nazneen and Chanu arouse pity and indignation, an overprivileged immigrant like Ni-khil leaves one with more disturbing feelings: an intimation, such as the one his father once had, of "all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world"; a suspicion that "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself."
in http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16837
The second is his story “Edmund wilson in Benares” again from The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/887
which reminded me very much of my own growing up in villages, small towns in A.P. and then the exposure to the world of books and ideas in Madras.
Since then I have read a few articles but none of his books. A friend from UK forwarded a review of his latest book:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1793848,00.html
May be I will read this book.
Jo's response (13/6/06): Some writers are most impressive without making you wish you could interact directly and personally with them. Mishra is attractive on both counts.