NYRB Classics: The Root and the Flower

This week, NYRB Classics will celebrate the publication of its 150th title, J.G. Farrell's The Singapore Grip. John Banville, who supplied an introduction to the NYRB edition of Farrell's Troubles, will come to New York to read from Farrell's work at two separate events: a big blowout at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Thursday, May 19, where he'll share the podium with Deborah Eisenberg and Jonathan Lethem (reading from Dorothy Baker and Malcolm Braly, respectively), followed by a more intimate event at Three Lives on Friday where Banville will read solo. I've been a big fan of this series for years, and credit editor Edwin Frank with putting a lot of great writers on my radar screen. So I've invited him to present five of his favorites from the NYRB backlist which you might possibily enjoy as well. Here's the first:

"One of the things that NYRB Classics series sets out to do is to introduce readers to really good books that that aren't as well known as they should be, and one of the pleasures of working on it is that I also get a chance to find out about books I’ve never heard of before. One book I discovered through the series that I especially is LP Myers's The Root and the Flower, which was introduced to me by the wonderful essayist Eliot Weinberger. The story is set in India during the Mughal Empire, which might suggest it's a historical novel. But it isn't really. The book's concerns--sex, terror, religious uncertainty--are as contemporary as they are perennial, and the historical setting is really a way of putting them in perspective, of suggesting the strangeness of the way we live now.

"Set in a time of political, moral, and spiritual upheaval, the book has for its two main characters a father and his young son, each of whom is struggling to come to terms not only with the murder and mayhem that surround them but also with a host of internal demons. The book carries a psychological charge that reminds me of Dostoyevsky, contains brilliant satirical scenes of society that recall Proust, and displays gifts for describing nature and landscape and for dramatic action that are all Myers's own. A great adventure story that is also a journey through the darker regions of the soul, by a man who was, interestingly, close to George Orwell, though I'm not sure that The Root and the Flower, which even includes a war in Afghanistan, isn't in fact more timely now than 1984."

(By the way, if you can think of a book NYRB hasn't brought back into print yet but should, you can tell them about it.)