Event, memory, metaphor Published @ Daily News & Analysis 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… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Oct 1, 2013 | Tags: Book Review, History | Read More
The incorrigible cheesiness of the great Indian hall of fame 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… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Jun 26, 2011 | Tags: Book Review, graphic novel, Humour | Read More
Love in a once-foreign language 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… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Mar 6, 2011 | Tags: Book Review | Read More
Europe is long dead, long live Europa Published @ Bengal Post Milan Kundera’s last book was non-fiction. His last novel about the impossibility of the Odyssian return to one’s homeland, written in the wake of the collapse of Communism, was published way back in 2002. When Encounter was announced late last year, for a moment it seemed that the Czech maestro was returning to fiction after eight years. In every way ‘Encounter’ was a very apt name to follow his mono-worded titles (originally in French) Slowness (1997) and Identity (1998). But… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Oct 31, 2010 | Tags: Book Review, Literature | Read More
Calcutta, Down Under Published @ The Bengal Post 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… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | May 1, 2010 | Tags: Book Review, Calcutta | Read More
All fall down Published @ Biblio India 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… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | May 1, 2010 | Tags: Book Review | Read More
Ways of Seeing Published @ Hindustan Times Chidananda Das Gupta is an old-school film critic and thanks god for that. In Seeing is Believing, he brings into his analyses of cinema a rare rigour, without letting his scholarly text collapse into set-piece jargon. His ways of looking at Indian cinema are infused with the confidence of someone who knows his art well and can render it with unfailing insight. In this selected compilation of his writings over the decades, Dasgupta discusses Indian and Western modernity, Jungian… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Jun 29, 2008 | Tags: Book Review, Cinema | Read More
Driving across the USSR Published @ Daily News & Analysis It was the summer of 1956. No one outside the Eastern bloc had much of an idea of what exactly was going on inside the Soviet Union. The superpower was hidden from the Western gaze by the Iron Curtain. And it had to be checked out. With the help of lots of luck and some totalitarian whimsy, two Parisian journalists — Dominique Lapierre and his colleague and photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini — got permission to travel to the heart of Soviet… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Mar 23, 2008 | Tags: Book Review, Politics, Travel | Read More
For those with a weakness for strange words Published @ Daily News & Analysis There must be many instances when the telephone, the photocopier or the computer refuses to comply with your basic requests. There may be nothing wrong with them, but they either ignore you completely or take the wrong order. Those hassled by such hostile behaviour from machines would be glad to have a word for it, and there is. Resistentialism. One might also like to know that there is a word called millihelen, a unit of beauty needed (at… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Feb 24, 2008 | Tags: Book Review, Language | Read More
The life of the novel is elsewhere Published @ Daily News & Analysis It is a known fact that literary criticism from practising authors/ poets carry a whiff of fresh air as compared to those by professional critics and academics. Not that in the case of the former, the end result is necessarily superior, but they do not have that extra burden of proving the probable and extricating the improbable. Instead, as Milan Kundera’s The Curtain amply exhibits, a writer engages with the unencumbered flow of discourses and ideas that a… By Sayandeb Chowdhury | Jul 15, 2007 | Tags: Book Review, Literature | Read More