Something Barely Remembered - Susan Visvanathan

"Something Barely Remembered" - Превосходные индийские рассказы

Лукосе готов следовать по стопам своего деда и вступить во священничество; родители Анны погибают, когда они плывут на свадьбу на лодке, и теперь ей придется жить с дядей и его итальянской женой в Риме; доктор Чако встречает грустную маленькую девочку, у которой убежала мать, а затем, много лет спустя, встречает эту женщину на вечеринке, но не может поделиться с ней своим знанием о ее дочери.

Эти пятнадцать рассказов дают нам острые, проницательные фрагменты индийской жизни, связанные семьей или дружбой, а иногда просто случайностью, и напоминают нам о том, как даже самое маленькое событие может вызвать самое большое воздействие. Красиво созданные, написанные с большим чувством, эта коллекция рассказов является дебютом нового и оригинального голоса.

Something Barely Remembered is a collection of thirteen short stories by the internationally celebrated Indian novelist Susan Visvanathan. The stories are woven against a backdrop of glaring memories of Lost India, are subtly located between memory and reality, and subtly suggest the extremities of how extreme things can get for an individual living in certain historical and social conditions. The protagonist Spooky—or rather Lukose, a young Indian man about to follow in the footsteps of his deceased grandfather, reckons the brutal events taking place in rural India in the postindependence period questioning his call of being a priest, instead wishes the privilege of pursuing literature (a probable caricature of Vijay Tendulkar, reputedly considering the high stakes of crusading ideology). Perhaps owing to time and the inevitable trap of writing for a global audience, the effects of loss and victimhood feel less secondary than containership pertinent for our cultureised understanding of them. In The Tug of Loss, Viswanathan embraces the unspoken grief we satiate upon reading Satyajit Ray's iconic Life Is Beautiful and again feel that, unbeknownst to us, it haunts our thoughts and incessantly builds up to mirrored emotions. Visiting her old home, Anna recalls where her family was lost from a roadside paddy boat trip, a poisonous intrusion of the darker streaks of life, for which the unexpected moves towards companionship and neurotic family in Lutèce Dido. Dream Snake—our look-and-feel blend of Gracy Phatak’s unorthodox short story structure— does not takes us into an adventurous journey parallel to Tell Me About It Later, Nana’s Minimal History chapter pieces our grandmother’s thoughts that seep back to the threads of history and time— a curiously insiduous cloud, tempting us to imagine what the cloth the cleaning lady had just uncovered would be, but remain unaware the hypothetical occurrences that swept through mornings when our relatives had spent the fresh morning petrol far away to reach the railway station, shouting words for peace! Albeit imprisoned first by a dead mother, Chako creeps a way out in Every Good One Always Dies, in spite of finding nightmares surrounding the extreme, showing us that sorrow at war has a continuous twinge in everyone’s heart no matter how they define war or its aftermath might be. Thus, Visvanathan forges a seamless loop between Henry Potter and Zadie Smith combining the loveliness and gloominess of the essay collection Little Boxes in their separate universes, not so subtly communicating with us the intricate truth of the relationships between humans and their surroundings, making quality literature attempt to be more than infinitesimal voices in captivity of activism— impossible to ignore and on re-reading, always leaving us thinking, both heartbroken and insightful—trying, out of the perplexity of cultural intellectualization, to steal away an inner grin.

Электронная Книга «Something Barely Remembered» написана автором Susan Visvanathan в году.

Минимальный возраст читателя: 0

Язык: Английский

ISBN: 9780007485406

Exquisite Indian short storiesLukose is ready to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and enter the priesthood; Anna’s parents are drowned as they make their way to a wedding by boat and she must now go and live with her uncle and his Italian wife in Rome; Chako, a doctor, meets a sad little girl whose mother has run away, and then, many years later, he encounters the mother at a party but cannot bear to share with her his knowledge of her daughter.These fifteen stories give us sharp, acute fragments of Indian lives, all linked by family or friendship, or just sheer coincidence, and give us a poignant reminder of how even the smallest event can cause the greatest effect. Beautifully crafted, written with great feeling, this story collection marks the debut of a new and original voice.