Anklet and Other Stories e-bog
61,42 DKK
(inkl. moms 76,78 DKK)
Shome Dasgupta, a young American author of Bengali descent, uses magical realism to explore his South Asian roots in this series of fourteen stories mostly set in modern day Kolkata, the city his parents came from and the one where their extended families continue to live. The stories reflect the surrealistic dimensions of an American boy/mans visits home. They engage with memorable individu...
E-bog
61,42 DKK
Forlag
Golden Antelope Press
Udgivet
4 august 2017
Længde
131 sider
Genrer
FA
Sprog
English
Format
epub
Beskyttelse
LCP
ISBN
9781936135394
Shome Dasgupta, a young American author of Bengali descent, uses magical realism to explore his South Asian roots in this series of fourteen stories mostly set in modern day Kolkata, the city his parents came from and the one where their extended families continue to live. The stories reflect the surrealistic dimensions of an American boy/mans visits home. They engage with memorable individuals, from barristas to beggars, boatment to bus drivers. The disjunct between cultures provides a nexus out of which subtle symbols develop. Thus, Tagores Kiss enacts the tension between Indias strict courtship conventions and Americas looser ones. Its protagonists deal with the human impulse to bend or break rules, much as Kolkatas favorite writer, Rabindranath Tagore, had done. Samosa invites readers into the eerily dissociative mind of a beggar. Anklet is a painfully beautiful story of dreams not quite articulated, not quite deferred. In This Is My Head we watch a familys awkward interaction with a deeply depressed uncle, who speaks gnomically: I am crazy. Watch me corrode. Dasguptas stories are compassionate, witty, and puzzling. How are we to react when an oddly intense man claims personal ties to American President Top Gun? When a badminton birdie turns out to be a real blackbird? When a simple hug makes a grieving clowns hair grow bright again? Dasguptas symbolic coding is often exquisite. In Empty Chair, the only story set firmly in the USA, one recognizes a trope familiar to Indian logicians and poets: the presence of your absence can be palpable.