A worn out book only indicates its popularity. Feeling proud that I read a book from my long-pending to-read list and the book has not disappointed me.
When I was reading this novel, I too was changing jobs so I could relate to the absurdity that the protagonist felt in his first job. His restlessness about the absurdity beautifully expressed in some of the lines like this one:
“Movement without purpose, an endless ebb and flow, from one world to another, journeys and passages, undertaken by cocoons not for rest or solace, but for ephemerals”.
Much of the narration is as graceful though a tad bit slow. It was amazing to read about the India of late 80s and to realise that not much has changed since except for the technological invasions. The exchange of letters feels nostalgic. An itsy bitsy complaint about not mentioning the Hindi songs in Hindi but as translations. Makes one think that the book was intended for the English (Anglo) readers, what with one of the quotes in the book asserting the Bengalis’ fascination for English!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading English August. Ending with another lovely paragraph end from the book:
“At night he would lie awake and hear the clack of his uncle’s typewriter and watch the dark shape of the bougainvillaea outside the window, and see in its twists and turns a million things, but never his future”.
No comments:
Post a Comment