STUDENT'S EDITION OF A BRILLIANT CATALAN NOVEL

“A timeless classic about lost illusions, lost ideals, lost youth”

ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

“Joan Sales’ outstanding novel, Uncertain Glory, is fiction from the ranks of the defeated in the Spanish Civil War. Written in 1948, the book was first published in Barcelona in 1956 – but this was only a first version, written under Franco’s censorship. Sales continued to write and develop the novel till it was published in its present full form in 1971. The author had fought in Madrid and in Aragon. The novel grew out of his experiences in the war.
Sales’ loyalties are nowhere in doubt. But the novel contains no political message and yields no ground to glib partisan flag waving. It is in fact refreshingly free from the so-called glories of war. Sales provides a bare-knuckle account of physical and moral devastation: of ordinary individuals with all their loves, desires, and frailties trapped in some great game that fashions and refashions their destinies”
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

“Wonderfully readable, with the vivid images of the physical world and everyday life that give substance to fiction interspersed with sharp conversation, scatological philosophical rants and touches of (usually dark) humour, Uncertain Glory is a major novel that expresses the disillusion of a generation who fought a just war against fascism, but lost their idealism and youth”
MICHAEL EAUDE, LITERARY REVIEW

Cover: Illustration from a poster used during the Spanish Civil War,
“La garra del invasor italiano pretende esclavizarnos”, by Oliver, Union General de Trabajadores de España, Sindicato Professionales Bellas Artes.

PAPERBACK/ Rs 395/ 470 pp

hedgehog and fox series/ editor: rudrangshu mukherjee

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The Unfamiliarity of the Past

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Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly. REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...

UNSETTLING THE PAST: D.D. KOSAMBI AND ROMILA THAPAR

In the Permanent Black pipeline for next year (2013) are two wonderfully interesting books by two great historians of ancient India, D.D. Kosambi and Romila Thapar. Romila Thapar toasting Eric Hobsbawm at his 95th birthday celebration in London, July 2012 The book by Kosambi (actually, two parts of it are by him and one part is on him) is called UNSETTLING THE PAST. The book by Thapar is called THE PAST BEFORE US. UNSETTLING THE PAST Unknown Aspects and Scholarly Assessments of D.D. Kosambi The Kosambi book is a collection of obscure and pretty unknown writings by D.D. Kosambi alongside assessments of his contribution to various areas of scholarship -- ancient history, mathematics, Sanskrit literature, numismatics, and marxism as a method for understanding the past. An array of the great man's unpublished letters, unearthed from the Harvard and TIFR archives by his daughter Meera Kosambi, will comprise one section of the book. Kosambi's corresponden...

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