The Mahabharata
The Sanskrit epic, eight times the length of the Bible, in John D. Smith’s translated and abridged Penguin edition. Two branches of a royal family move toward a war that will destroy them both, and the poem keeps stopping to argue with itself about duty, in the Bhagavad Gita and elsewhere. Nobody in it is wholly good or wholly bad, which is a large part of why it holds.
Recommended by 1 Person
William Dalrymple
It’s eight times the length of the Bible, one of the great works of literature of mankind. I came to it via the Peter Brook film, and read the script subsequently, and it is every bit as good as it’s made out to be. A very rare thing. It has a sort of Shakespearian ambiguity; you feel as much for the baddies as for the goodies. No one is pure. The bad guys aren’t entirely bad, the good guys aren’t entirely good.
Interview · November 2009
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