Recollection and Reconciliation in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life : Palash Mahmud
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...