Customer Reviews

Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

coming from pamela constable, expectations always run high. and just a decent book won't do. as someone who has almost religiously followed her articles on south asia, one expects nothing below a 'fine' book. weighed down by the baggage of such high hopes, ms constable's book on south asia has come at a time when the bookworld is already cluttered with emotional outpourings (sometimes too sentimental for a coherent and sensible read) from western correspondents who sounds either too patronising or too much in awe of this part of this world with all its engrossing exotica of soulful sufidom, AK-57 style violence, religious fanaticism, pathetic poverty, terrible tragedies and so on. not surprisingly as i opened the book, i had already started feeling a partial sense of disappointment fearing that this well-intentioned book too will end up as a hugely inflated exercise in self-important all-knowing arrogance of one of those foreign correspondents.......

now the surprising part: all my fears were uncalled for. one of the best thing about pamela constable is obviously the fact that she is a great reporter and has a clever skill of unravelling the story behind the headlines in a very unobtrusive, unreporter-like manner.....that is in a very humane and sympathetic way..... but good correspondent she may be, she is even a better writer. a very good writer indeed! and 'Fragments of Grace' proves just that thing.

as a book-lover perennially struggling to somehow reconcile his books-buying sprees with his limited personal finances, i strongly insist that this book is worth it. if there's is one book you want to buy this year, then let it be this. it has to be part of one's private library! i assure you that there wont be regrets. in this book, we see south asia through ms constable's eyes and it looks fascinating. most of the books, especially by correspondents reporting from hotspots of the world, tend to be of current-affair variety (think all those books about iraq, Afghanistan currently clogging the bookshelves) which usually manage to sustain interest till the time their biggie-big newspapers shift to some other headlines and some other editorials. such books are engrossing to read, indeed riveting and at times enjoyable, but they are then placed back on the shelves never to be taken out. 'Fragments of Grace' tends to be different. it is a book that may be contemporary but happily it also has a eternal quality about it. something that will linger on in the heart and mind long after one has finished reading it. even for those much-informed folks who think that srilanka is in south america and nepal lies on north of Botswana. even they will love this book. yeah!

anyway im planning to read it yet again......read it!

I read most of this book on a long flight from Delhi to Los Angeles. I was inspired to buy the book by a favorable review in an Indian newspaper... For me, the greatest value of the book is the personal story of what it takes to bring us "the story" from conflict-ridden parts of the world, particularly Afghanistan in this case, but also Pakistan and to a lesser extent, Sri Lanka. Anyone aspiring to be a foreign correspondent should read this book... However, it must be admitted that Ms. Constable does not have a real sense of history. Her history on Kashmir and even the lead-up to the Taliban regime is full of gaps, as is the history of the Sri Lanka conflict. Noone should read this book alone and think they understand why Kashmir is what it is, who the Taliban were and how they came to power, and what is the diversity of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka or the long history of that conflict since colonization. Ms. Constable should not be faulted for this, she admits herself that this is more a personal document than history... As a personal document, and as a person, Fragments of Grace and Ms. Constable are worthy of admiration. What courage, what honesty, what compassion, what literature - her book was written not for personal profit, only somewhat for public enlightenment, it was written most of all out of a personal search for meaning, and on these terms it excels. One can only admire what it takes for journalists to give us the story we read with our daily cup of coffee, far far away from the conflicts we follow and can hardly fathom.

it is a good book. and this good book has a good title - The Fragments of Grace. i live in new delhi and commute everyday to a 9-6 office. in the morning rush hour, as my bus crosses over the yamuna river, we always get stuck in a traffic jam....the buses in which I travel are always clogged tight with sweating commuters and it feels like hell......in such a distressing situation im always reminded of nazi cattle cars used for transportation of jews......at times while trapped inside these baked tin drums, i happen to look out from a side window and see the calm, dream-like, majestic dome of emperor humayun's tomb standing just across the road.......somehow someway it always make me feel beautiful about myself. while being crushed, pulled, pushed and mauled by surrounding commuters, I always try to frame a phrase that would exactly describe that nice feeling on seeing that beautiful monument. but the quest for that perfect articulation always eluded me.......thankfully, pamela constable's book-title did that job for me......humayun's tomb stands out like a 'fragment of grace' even as all sort of maddening chaos continue to fret and fume round it........

there are many decent writers around but a good writer is one which helps to articulate the reader's own feelings and perceptions even if that was not the intention in the first place.....so i was very moved and almost screamed out saying 'hey, this is me' when constable talked about her parents: 'even when we are in the same room, we remain worlds apart".......or when she confessed "seeing friends and mates they were never able to accept"......such paragraphs in this intensely personal memoir made me pause and think about my own parents and about my own life.......and ms constable was bang on target when she said that her parents still try to "improve the way i look and dress'......how does she know so much about me and my parents? how come she took my innermost perceptions and family secrets out of ME and translated them into words for HER book?

Each chapter in the book deals with her sojourn in some south asian country and ends with a deeply intimate interlude. reading the latter made me slightly uncomfortable, hesitant and anxious. it was like as if i had secretly tip-toed into somebody's attic one sleepy afternoon and was going through personal correspondence with half my alertness distracted towards the door from where that 'somebody' can enter anytime and catch me redhanded........at one point when constable wrote about a sudden in-your-face meeting with a long-lost journalist friend, once very intimate, in a crowded press conference, i felt embarrassed as if i was intruding into her privacy. indeed it makes for a very brave and kind person to write so gracefully about events so personal. thankyou pamela.

i may be sounding melodramatic but i loved the ending of this book. it was a gradual close. it was like a fading piano tune echoing from the stone walls long after the concert has ended and the audience has returned home....

finally if pamela constable happens to read this review, i want to tell her that many a times i have passed over that yamuna bridge on the banks of which lies a shanty where the elephants live. everytime i pass over that part of the city, i always instinctively look down under to wonder about those sad-looking elephants. i even made a guess after looking at some hoardings that it must be a muslim settlement. now after reading this book , whenever i will pass over that bridge again, i will know that delhi's total of 23 elephants camp there and that i know the name of at least one mahout who resides there - ghayar ali. constable should know that I too have noticed that place, that tiny fragment of grace.

really it is a book not to be borrowed and read but to be bought and read and re-read....

The value of this book is the simple albeit not so scholarly observations of the author. Reading it one feels like someone encountering with both curiosity and a bit of fear, new territory. Sure the historical or even common sense elements may be missing here and there, but it's the westerner sharing from western eyes, two world views that proves invaluable. Few authors who serve in third world areas like Pakistan and Afghanistan, ever write about the dizziness of returning to the United States where even the poor live in splendor compared to third world people. And I appreciate the authors reminder to me a woman from the United States, that I am spoiled and really have no idea what true oppression is all about. And as a side note I appreciate the authors love of animals in need.

This is an extremely important piece of literature. It is relevant and a must-read for any American who values her/his freedom.

Pamela Constable is an honest, articulate and engaging writer. I couldn't put her book down. I feel far more informed about South Asia and the strife we can only begin to TRY to imagine here in the U.S.

M.A.Bashaw

Phoenix, AZ

Anyone who reads this book seeking solely to understand the complexity of South Asian politics, Islam, or the Taliban misses the point altogether. Ms. Constable represents the very best in all of us, setting as she does an example for how to live, love and understand people regardless of religious affiliation, political persuasion, or ethnic background. She has transcended most of what exists in political writing today to convey to all of us the inherent complexity of international understanding and healing that is so needed in the world today. Ms. Constable is to be congratulated for putting herself on the line and sharing, intimately so, the impressions and experiences she has amassed through her career. Bravo!

Read it. Fall in love with the author because of her objective appraisal of herself; her resilience, adaptablity and wits to survive in the trenches of alien cultures; her universal compassion for the ordinary people and the animals alike; and because of her stirring, evocative and almost poetic writing style.
Ignore a few inconsequential errors of historical facts.

Asif A. Shah
Washington, D. C. 20001

I read this book in one day, just could not put it down. Pamela Constable has led what by any measure is an extraordinary life, full of courage and compassion. Her descriptions of the places and people she encounters in her work are lucid and lyrical, and brought to me an level of understanding I have not previously been able to manage for myself.