Category: Book Review Fiction

Kunal Basu’s latest novel Kalkatta is unlike his earlier four. It is not historical in scope and neither does it contain the soaring drama that distant time lends to his period narratives. Like its predecessors, however, Kalkatta lets an iconic novel or two hang like a noose around its neck. If Racists replayed the primary tension of Lord of the Flies and The Miniaturist that of My Name is Red, Kalkatta unfailingly reminds one of Émile Zola’s The Belly of…

In this book that he has, curiously, curated, graphic storyteller Vishwajyoti Ghosh has attempted to ‘redraw’ the map of Partition. The hyperbolism of the statement can be tempered if we take the literal meaning of the word re-draw, which is to illustrate once again the fault-lines of Partition. This collection of collaborative graphic texts is no less than that. It returns to the event of the biggest forced migration of humanity’s recorded history and tries to re-imagine it through a…

Sarnath Banerjee, who pioneered the graphic novel form in India did commit one mistake. If not in his debut work Corridor, he kind of excelled himself in his second novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, a rollicking, lip-smacking, throat-bursting satire on babu life in 19th century Calcutta that was full of the clever, rip-roaring humour that Sarnath has made his own. Barn was loosely based on the mood of a seminal work on Calcutta’s low, colloquial life in mid-19th century…

When I die/ Do not throw/ The meat and the bones away/ But pile them up/ And let them tell/ By their smell/ What life was worth/ On this earth/ What love was worth/ In the end Did we ever let Kamala Das know, whose poem the above is excerpted from, now that she is no more, the worth of love? Or for that matter, poetry? Is the worth of love explicable? Can it be measured in daylight hours and…

When a famous, globetrotting writer writes a book describing in commanding detail the decaying mansion whose limestone peels were scattered across your own childhood, about urban legends that fluttered in your youth, the imposing porches above crawling footpaths that you manned at night or the sweating streets from your summers past, you are bound to be momentarily carried away. But the reverie does not last long because in A Dead Hand: A Crime in Kolkata, Paul Theroux is only occasionally…

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni carries a reputation, somewhat disagreeable for an Indian origin writer of English fiction, of selling a redoubtable mash of dishy and desi exotica wrapped in a clever, bare-bone style of storytelling. But that has not come in her way of mastering a following in her adopted country, the US. She has also been able to marshal a fan base in India, the country of her birth, a readership with a high constituency of women, who are sophisticated…

Those were wonderful wonderful times. The middle of the 18th century. Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, was an extension of the first city in many ways — in its riches, its arrogance and its excess. Except that in Calcutta these great imperial values included even the despondent native elite who, flushed with wealth, invented the most absurd and obnoxious ways to get rid of it. Sarnath Banerjee’s second graphic novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers has many…

There is a famous Laurel-Hardy strip where the two are soldiers stationed somewhere on the India-China border. They are worried about their dwindling resources till one day they chance upon the fact that the war had ended long ago and nobody had informed them. One cannot but sense a certain degree of sadness in what is an example of comic unreason. Beasts of No Nation, a ghastly tale of civil war somewhere in Africa, carries a tragic intensity that is…