The Root and the Flower

by L.H. Myers

Other authorsPenelope Fitzgerald (Introduction)
Paperback, 2001

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Collection

Publication

NYRB Classics (2001), Paperback, 640 pages

Description

A tale of India which includes "Hari, a reckless and passionate warrior; Sita, in love with both Hari and her husband Amar, a prince who wishes to forsake the world but is increasingly drawn into a bloody political struggle; and Sita and Amar's son Jali, whose precocious encounters with sex and violence threaten him with madness."--Cover.

Media reviews

The plan Myers adopted of framing a discussion of 20th-century people and their problems in Akbar’s India is vindicated by the freshness the novel has in this reissue fifty years after it was written. Finished when Myers was in his early fifties, it presents a mature and civilised man’s
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experience of picking his way among the decent and the detestable people of a sophisticated civilisation. Features of the background – the dictator state, the secret intelligence service and its ubiquitous agents, an underground movement, rival religions associated with political factions, mass executions, unexplained murders, prostitutes accidentally involved in high politics – such things have certainly not grown more remote from us since the late 1920s when the first novel of the trilogy appeared. Nor has the difficulty diminished of isolating personal moral convictions from practical politics.

The great variety of the praise the book evoked when it first appeared reflects the fact that Myers was civilised enough to suppose that an author must make his offering as attractive as conversation, not buttonholing his readers as if they had an obligation to listen to his troubles and convictions, but giving them inducements to go on reading. [...]
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Awards

James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Winner — Fiction — 1935)

Language

Original publication date

1935

Physical description

640 p.; 8.18 inches

ISBN

0940322609 / 9780940322608

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