Her family enjoyed lavish wealth - her father commissioned a French architect to build him a pink Versailles - and considerable power Amrit Kaur’s daughter told Sambuy they printed their own money and “could hang anyone.” At the same time, the royals were, like the rest of the subcontinent, under control of the British Raj. Plunging into the glittery world of Indian royalty under British rule, she chases down every lead, racking up story after story, while the central one she set out to tell remains out of reach.Īmrit Kaur was born in 1904, the fifth child of the maharajah of Kapurthala, a state in Punjab. “In Search of Amrit Kaur” chronicles Sambuy’s resulting yearslong quest to discover the truth behind that museum caption. Alongside a 1924 photograph of an Indian princess - “tall, dark-skinned, her hair tied up,” wearing “a translucent sari, its edges embroidered with gold or silver thread” - there was a caption that identified her as “Her Royal Highness Rani Shri Amrit Kaur Sahib.” It noted that she had been arrested by the Gestapo during World War II in occupied Paris, charged with selling her jewelry to help Jews leave the country, and had died while imprisoned. In 2007, the Italian journalist Livia Manera Sambuy stumbled across a nonfiction writer’s dream in a Mumbai museum: a tantalizing true story, unknown to the world. Delivery charges may apply.IN SEARCH OF AMRIT KAUR: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World, by Livia Manera Sambuy. To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at. The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermott, is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). Every wasted moment in this book feels precious. This knowledge of mortality makes his continual terror that time is slipping through his fingers yet more poignant. The Luminous Novel was originally published in Spanish in 2005, a year after the author’s death. But it’s hard to see such longueurs as faults, when they also help to complete this portrait of flawed and failing humanity – and when we know, ultimately, where all this is heading. There are also plenty of absurd theories and questionable opinions. There are a certain number of recollections of dreams to endure. You may not think you’re interested in the purchase of a new armchair, but it’s described here with such surprising humour and drama that its significance begins to feel cosmic. Levrero makes the quotidian seem extraordinary. With witty and thoughtful argumentation accompanying every such statement in the book, this is procrastination as high art. “Writing every day about events that have just taken place is a mistake,” he informs us, a mere 300 pages in. His gradual alienation from romantic involvement is as moving and engrossing as any story of a more fervent, younger lover. He makes small comforts, like the presence of homemade stew in his fridge, feel hugely significant. “I fixed word 2000!!!!” he declares, in one of the most unusual punch-the-air moments in literature. His battles with Microsoft software take on titanic urgency. There is a decaying pigeon corpse outside his window around which he weaves absurdly engrossing narratives. The entries, translated into delightfully clear and readable English by Annie McDermott, show the sixtysomething Levrero variously indulging and regretting his computer addiction (“I was playing FreeCell and now it’s six in the morning”) trying and failing to install an effective air-conditioning system ( “it certainly pains me to spend Mr Guggenheim’s money on home comforts”) not really trying to quit cigarettes (“ninety minutes without smoking: not bad”). Instead, he dedicated most of his effort to recording his lack of progress in an autofictional diary covering the 12 months before August 2001.Ī few completed chapters of the original novel are included towards the end of this wonderful book, but it’s the diary and its strange blend of fancy, fiction and daily reality that forms the bulk of its 500-plus pages. He then set about assiduously not writing them. I n the year 2000, the Uruguayan author Mario Levrero won a Guggenheim grant to write the final chapters of an ambitious novel he had been unable to complete for the past 16 years.
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