An early Oriya Novel, Translated

A former professor of mine from Cornell, Satya P. Mohanty, has a piece in the Hindu. It's a detailed description of an Oriya novel he helped translate, Six Acres and a Third, by Fakir Mohan Senapati.

It's an early Indian novel with an agricultural theme, so it's surprising that Mohanty reads it as self-reflexive and self-parodic:

Both the kind of naturalist realism that builds on the accumulation of details and the analytical realism I mentioned, which explains and delves into underlying causes, are achieved in Senapati's novel through a self-reflexive and even self-parodic narrative mode, one that reminds us more of the literary postmodernism of a Salman Rushdie than the naturalistic mode of a Mulk Raj Anand.

(Incidentally, thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.)