The Fabulous Feminist

Reviews

The greater part of the collected work in this reader consists of these engaging and accessible fables, supplemented by poetry and extracts from longer fictional work. As such, it is an ideal volume for browsing and dipping into rather than for reading from cover to cover. It is not a comprehensive examination of Namjoshi’s feminist ideology, but it works well as a sampler of her ideas and insights.

Her work is imaginative and inspiring; most readers are likely to come across something that will resonate with them either through form, content, character or theme.

..Suniti Namjoshi is widely regarded as a major figure in transnational and post-colonial writing, and deserves to become better known in our country through this Australian imprint. Given the perception of her insights, and the power of her words, I don’t hesitate to recommend The Fabulous Feminist.

Read the full review here. 

—Jennifer Osborn, Transnational Literature Vol. 10 No. 2, May 2018

The fable may be a moral-centric form of storytelling, but in the fables that give the collection its name Namjoshi's morals are complex and biting.

—Aishwarya Subramanian, Hindustan Times

Shocking, comical and sobering, these stories straddle Alice’s wonderland and Kafka’s nightmare-land...Think of the vicious wit of Virginia Woolf, laced with the tender melancholia of Hélène Cixous, spiked with the subtle eroticism of Anaïs Nin.

—Somak Ghoshal, Live Mint

Namjoshi is an Indian writer in English, of a feminist bent. This collection is an introduction to her rich body of work. There are issues of gender, class and colonialism, but treated with imagination and wit. There is much to appeal here.

—Lucy Sussex, The Age

Not having read Namjoshi before, this collection has been a good introduction to her work, and I’ve particularly being enjoying the extracts from her 1981 book Feminist Fables and from Saint Suniti and the Dragon... Namjoshi compresses a lot of irony or sarcasm into a few pithy lines.

—Jai Arjun Singh, Jabberwock

The most intelligent and invigoratingly delightful of our contemporary poets!

—Travis Lane, Canada

I feel my education has been incomplete all these years, because I had never heard of Suniti Namjoshi. A feminist with Indian roots...The Fabulous Feminist presents excerpts from her many works... it succeeded in satisfying my palate and whetting my appetite at the same time, leaving me determined to seek out more complete versions of her work.

—Women's Web, Unmana Datta

Namjoshi is one of the many wonderful Indian authors who slipped into oblivion, and ... who, is rediscovered with grateful surprise by new generations... Namjoshi rewrites well-known stories from the Panchatantra and from Grimm’s fairy tales, and her own fables pack a punch.

—Nilanjana S Roy, Buisness Standard

Noted poet and writer Suniti Namjoshi’s latest book Blue And Other Stories is a literary treasure.

—Sravasti Datta, The Hindu

I recommend this book to all who love to play with words and ideas and to see the world around with fresh, feminist, perspectives.

—Me, you, and books

The poems and short prose excerpts in this selection... are fabulous..Blue donkeys, one-eyed monkeys, lesbian cows and a Saint Suniti are just some of the cast of other-worldly creatures portrayed to expose and convince by irresistible analogy.

—John Burke, Reader Review

Her work draws on the Indian tradition, on ancient Greek and Roman myth, western fairy tale and fable, as well as writers such as Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and Mary Shelley, and always a large dash of original invention; it is radical, wise, humorous and compassionate.

—Robyn Cadwallader, Verity La

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Feminist Fables 1
From the Panchatantra 4
Case History 5
Nymph 6
The Princess 7
The Ugly One 8
The Female Swan 9
A Moral Tale 10
The Monkey and the Crocodiles 11
The Giantess 12
The Snake and the Mongoose 14
The Secret Wisdom 15
The Debt 16
Broadcast Live 18
The Grace of the Goddess 19
The Hare and the Turtle 20
The Fox and the Stork 21
Of Cats and Bells 22
The Oyster Child 23
Further Adventures of the One-eyed Monkey 24
The Dower 25
Heart 27
The Mouse and the Lion 28
Svayamvara 29
The Doll 30
The Woman Who Lived on the Beach 31
The Saurian Chronicles 32
The Authentic Lie 33
From Discourse with the Dead 35
From Discourse with the Dead 36
Lady Flora 37
Minimal Murder 38
Glass Coffi ns 39
The Female Poet 40
From the Bedside Book of Nightmares 41
From Baby F With Much Love 43
Snow White and Rose Green 44
It was not Pygmalion 45
Biped 46
The Fur Seals as Shown on Television 47
From Caliban’s Notebook 49
Snapshots of Caliban 50
Prospero 51
The Conversations of Cow 52
I The Manifestation 54
The Jackass and the Lady 73
Homage to Circe 75
From the Travels of Gulliver 77
Lines Written in Dejection 79
Flesh and Paper 80
All the words 81
Lost species 82
The Blue Donkey Fables 83
The Blue Donkey 85
The One-eyed Monkey Goes into Print 87
Three Angel Poems 90
Dusty Distance 92
Poem Against Poets 94
The Jacana’s Tale 95
The Three Piglets 97
Turf 99
The Sinner 100
The Vulgar Streak 101
Cythera 103
If somehow I might... 104
The Bride 105
Look! Medusa! 106
Among Tigers 107
In the Garden 108
To Be a Poet 110
Stumbling Block 111
Transit Gloria 113
Nocturne 115
The Mothers of Maya Diip 116
Chapter 11: A Loyal Mayan 118
Chapter 12: Ashan babies 125
Chapter 13: Loathsome reptile 132
Saint Suniti and the Dragon 141
Section III: ‘Tis the eye of childhood…’ 143
Section IV: The Trials of the Saint 147
Pelican 150
Beauty Incarnate and the Supreme Singer
For Oscar Wilde 152
By the River 154
Blood and Water 155
Bluebeard’s Way 157
Building Babel 160
Chapter I Piece for Soloists: What the Sisters Said 162
Chapter VI Patched Piece 175
Goja: An Autobiographical Myth 184
Chapter 1Goja 186
Sycorax 203
Among Tulips 205
Deaf Eurydice For Suki d. 27 July 1997 206
Come Away 207
The Saint and the Tiger 208
For Anna Mani (1918–2001) 210
Mary’s Dream 211
Section 6: The Old Woman’s Secrets 212
The Dwarfs 214
Twelve Ways of Looking at a Giant 217
New Work 223
From Magpie 224
Meat Eater’s Poem 226
The Rhino and the Unicorn 227
Neither Mr. Darwin nor the Farmer 229
Animals 230
From The Glass Bird 231
Striped Peril 234
Perspective 236
Summer Days 237
For Kishore 238
The Wave 239
Time Trickles 240
A Cautionary Tale? 241
From A Tapestry 242