PM Review

  This Mournable Body”: Transference from Colonial Captivity to Democratic Domestication There is a fish in the mirror , this very first line in the “This Mournable Body,” a novel by Tsitsi Dangarembga, distorts the reality that what you see out there, probably and/or actually, is not what it is; and opens up the truth that the “coolest cruising” of our expectations and the arrival of our promised land are always either suspended or ebbing.  This Mournable Body  (Graywolf, 2018 & Faber & Faber, 2020), one of the shortlisted fiction for the 2020 Booker Prize, is the last installment of her trilogy,  Nervous Conditions  (1988), which was enlisted in the list of BBC’s top 100 books that shaped the world, which she wrote at the advent of Zimbabwean independence but its narrative line was set during the colonial Rhodesia in the early 1960s when the nation and the land were going through the identity crisis, a story of Zimbabwean girl’s, Tambudzai Sigauke...

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi – On Fractional View of Self and Reality    In this literary essay, Palash Mahmud writes about  Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar  and sheds a light on her verisimility of her life with the story’s root and very reasonably his personal experience and memoir of a grandmother who had been suffering from Alzheimer for over twenty-five years. It was the night before- a pattern of time dilation that makes different realities, so do our memories- the announcement of the long list of the 2020 Booker Prize, I was returning home from work; I was also thinking about Toni Morrison’s debut novel,  The Bluest Eyes  (1970) and its 50 th  anniversary this year and how can I commemorate her phenomenal literary premier in this tumultuous pandemic age? A notification from  Granta  had popped up on Facebook alluring me to read an excerpt of  Burnt Sugar , an exciting debut by Avni Doshi, an Indian-American writer based in Dubai. As soon as...

  Recollection and Reconciliation in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life “There was a knot of tension high in his chest, something hard and coiled. It felt like a black ball stuck to the inside of his lungs.” This line within a few pages of  Real Life , Brandon Taylor’s electrifying debut, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, strikes the reader with its imagery rooted in the real life. There are many such feelings we experience in our lives but cannot express due to the lack of appropriate lexical resources. Taylor seems to achieve this effortlessly, and impeccably. Real Life ’s narrative deals, at a time, with so many old issues, shedding new lights on, peeling the imposed truths and white lies out: the fluidity of reality in respect of space and time; the fixation of identity in terms of race and sexual orientation; and the refined understandings of loss, grief, memory and mourning. Its protagonist’s evaluation by his peers and authority through the microscope of ‘white d...

  Milkman: To Hear the Universal Voice of Violence One fine day Aristotle proclaimed man is a political animal which is still echoing at the very moment of our time, however, this omnipresent idea of politics pushes the lives of “us” and “others” into troubles, into a split nut but not equal halves, always in discomfort; and one bad not-fine night the same Aristotle preached woman is a mutilated male lacking of principle of soul which is still resounding from “over the road” to “over the water”, nevertheless, that ubiquitous logic of womanhood pull all of them back to the blind alleys of losses and sorrows, always in silence. Politics in knife-edge times and womanhood in tight-knot communities are the two prime themes have been dissected under the spotlight of Anna Burns’ exquisite narratives in ‘Milkman,” which won Man Booker Prize (2018), National Book Critics Circle Award (2018), and The Orwell Prize (2019) respectively and most recently won for the 2020 International DUBLIN Lit...