“Ghosh was born in Kolkata and was educated at The Doon School (where he was a younger contemporary of Vikram Seth); St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; and the University of Oxford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology. Apparently Ghosh once showed Seth some of his poetry, prompting Seth to advise him to stick to prose.
Still in the phase of trying to shift from formula novels to literary fiction, I struck upon this book. It has got a great literary value. Reading this book, you would make sure that you would not forget to think out of the box. The narrator in the novel talks about the inability to fly kites if you have a conical roof, he talks about lack of romancing couples and a very bad and dangerous ways to hide. If you do not get bored with the literary quality and manage to read along, you would come across a page where the narrator takes Khulna, a town in Bangladesh as the center and Srinagar, a point on the circumference, with a radius of 1200 miles, and draws a circle. The way the things are explained after that is truly mind-boggling. That very thought process deserves many awards. The narrator describes what 1200 miles is, in the real scope of things. It is what they say, fundoo.
‘The Alchemy of Desire’ is my weakness, probably because that was the first ‘literary’ type of novel I really loved. Until then, I was plain bored. So, if I had to compare it with the Alchemy of Desire, I would give Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Shadow Lines’ a very good and well deserved 7.5.
I would not recommend it to the lovers of Agatha Christie and Sidney Sheldon. No way. Not even to the better readers who love to read the commercial stuff which the new breed of Indians is writing. I would have enjoyed this novel had I been a much more matured reader. But I laid my hands on it, well before its time.
Excerpts:
One could never know anything except desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not within oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s own image in the mirror.
But he knew that the clarity of that image in his mind was merely the seductive clarity of ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered detail.
The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings-so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between the words and the world. This is a silence that is proof against any conceivable act of scorn or courage; it lies beyond defiance-for what means we have to defy the very absence of meaning? Where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated-because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.
I was a child, and like all the children around me, I grew up believing in the truth of the precepts that were available to me: I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there exists another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of that silence.
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