Books by Subhash Jaireth

'When I listen to Bach, I seem to turn into a fish'. "Bach (Pau) in Love." 'We forget because we want to live. We forget because we live in hope for a better life. It's this wretched hope that demands that we forget the unforgettable'. "The Last Smile of Graf Tolstoy." These stories explore the nature of love, loss and memory: central to them is the uneasiness the narrators feel about their place in the world. A critical moment in the life of each narrator illuminates these themes in remarkable ways. For instance, in the story "Walter Benjamin's Pipe" the narrator wants to comprehend that critical moment when Walter Benjamin, the famous Jewish-German philosopher and literary critic, decided to end his life. In the story "Bach (Pau) in Love," the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Cassals imagines the situation which would have inspired Bach to compose his six suites for cello. In the story "Anna and Fyodor in Basel," Anna, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's wife waits for that moment whtn Holbein's famous painting about the dead Christ makes its appearance in the novel 'The Idiot'. In "The Quartz Hill," a Cantonese photographer looks at the prints of Paddy Bedford's paintings about the Bedford Downs massacre and decides to visit Halls Creek in search for her Gija grandmother's roots.

Between 1969 and 1980 Edvard Radzinskii wrote three historico-political plays which were later published as a trilogy entitled Theatre of the Times.... The book attempts to unravel the nature of time and space in the trilogy by invoking Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope in literary narratives. Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope affords a suitable strategy for examining a trilogy that aims to re-present real time and place. The concept also provides a vantage point from where the trilogy can be read both from within the time-space of its main protagonists and from that of its author, readers, performers and spectators.