Blindness by José Saramago My Rating: 5 of 5 stars Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. What an irony that a book which holds, loss, filth, loot, stomp, cruelty, disorientation, putrefaction, injustice, helplessness, murder, rape, misery, nakedness, abandonment, death and unimaginable suffering in its bosom, left me with a climactic emotion of … More Book Review: Blindness by José Saramago (1995)
It is Diwali. Or Diwali eve. Or Diwali weekend. And I am, all at once, in a pensive, nostalgic mood. Some happy occasions trigger memories that assume an ominous cloak of beauty and transform everything around them into a messenger of times bygone. Last year, my mamma was with me, here, celebrating. This year, she … More The All-Season Antidote
Here by Wislawa Szymborska My Rating: 4 of 5 stars “She wants me to live only for her and with her. Ideally in a dark, locked room, but my plans still feature today’s sun, clouds in progress, ongoing roads.” With this singular clarity, Wislawa Szymborska views memory. By running a casual yet assertive hand, she … More Book Review: Here by Wislawa Szymborska (2009)
It’s not a belated birthday wish. It’s a continuing one. Breathing in the Proustian air is one of my most favorite stress-busters since the time I have been introduced to it. An air so rich yet so clear, it permeates into my lungs with its slight, caressing bend, filling me with a sense of beauty … More HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARCEL PROUST!
For a bibliophile who fell in love with Joyce’s vast, exploratory, swashbuckling devil-may-care attitudinal writing last year, this is a first anniversary of sorts. Ulysses was, is and I am certain would be, a book to read and drive rebirths, to re-read. Should I say I loved the book because I understood it, I would … More Its Bloomsday!
It’s a bit premature that I am releasing an opinion from my thought cannon on Jorge Luis Borges. After all, I am in the midst of reading only my first Borges. But it appears that I am well acquainted with him. How do I say? Like how it doesn’t matter how long but how much … More Remembering the Borgean Legerdemain
It doesn’t happen with everybody; rare is this phenomenon. That every time I come across your name, a surge of hope washes me over is unique to you, for me; for I have loved very few people which such reverence, even fewer, for this long. It is almost ten years since I first came across … More HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAFA!
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler My Rating: 4 of 5 stars In everyone’s life, there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will. Who do you remember the most? I asked myself. Those who make part of my primary circle of existence … More Book Review: We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler (2014)
Stoner by John Williams My Rating: 5 of 5 stars As a child, I had a thing for inanimate things. A sling, a pond, a pebble, a mica chip; they would catch my attention and hold it hostage. I would play for hours together with these silent, placid beings, drawing great solace from their harmless, … More Book Review: Stoner by John Williams (1965)
Happy Birthday, Sir Joyce! Its a bit of an injustice that you never lived long enough to see me, since if you had, you would have felt pleasantly proud and inflated in nurturing vanity at the sight of a fan so bewitched that she continued holding onto your works for almost an entire year, fearing … More HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAMES JOYCE!
SEEMITA DAS 