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There is simply a definite benignant of storytelling successful Indian English penning that traces its roots to an aesthetics that focuses much connected the mean than the message. This is not needfully a atrocious happening — each stories payment from a cautious honing of craftsmanship, an attraction to detail. It is lone erstwhile method takes centre stage, making the communicative the conveyance to showcase its scope oregon prowess, that it falters and loses shape.
Sonali Prasad’s debut novel, Glass Bottom (Rs 499, Picador India) promoted arsenic 1 of the literate premieres of the year, comes dangerously adjacent to this slippery terrain. Set against the backdrop of the Arabian Sea, it tells the communicative of 2 pairs of mothers and daughters who unrecorded by the sea, Luni and Himmo, Gul and Arth. The chasm betwixt them couldn’t beryllium wider: A azygous mother, Luni works arsenic a home assistance and a hairdresser successful a salon, the second feeding into her unusual obsession — collecting hairsbreadth strands to usage for tapestry successful her spare time. Her girl Luni, successful the meantime, collects the floatsam the oversea spews, adjacent arsenic she tries to negociate the shadowy lack of a father. Gul, connected the different hand, is an academic, her girl Arth, an creator navigating her estrangement from her parent and the decease of a beloved grandfather. As a tempest brews implicit the coast, the communicative dips successful and retired of their idiosyncratic tragedies, mounting them up against the larger canvas of ecocide wrought by an aggrandising propulsion for development.
In itself, this is simply a premise teeming with possibilities. In this clip of accelerated biology change, clime fabrication is simply a genre that is progressively gaining currency, adjacent if its practitioners are inactive uncovering their mode astir the scope of the Anthropocene. Prasad has a consciousness of scale, of however earthy disasters permission their imprints connected individuals and communities, particularly connected the lives of women: “The women, meanwhile, trapped by work to their loved ones… got tangled successful grass, metals and bushes; did not question higher crushed if the waves had stripped them naked; and were recovered gashed, wrapped, strangled, without fingers and toes, clinging to their aged and young”. She possesses, too, a journalist’s oculus for quirks and details — Prasad’s journalistic enactment has appeared successful The Guardian and The Washington Post, among others — the bulldozer that is the reply to “illegal encroachment” erstwhile it comes to the poor, the money-power nexus that determinedly keeps its eyes unopen for a expansive edifice successful the aforesaid neighbourhood oregon the unit that invariably strikes women first.
Where Prasad’s penning wavers is successful its singular absorption connected style. Written successful an elliptical fashion, interspersed with choral asides and allusions, it often becomes a dense morass of linguistic conceit that distracts alternatively than draws the scholar in. There are sections of beauteous penning that seizure the liminal abstraction these characters inhabit but they bash small to adhd heft to the communicative oregon transportation the crippled forward. One is near with a consciousness of committedness — for Prasad’s caller does springiness an denotation of her endowment — and frustration, astatine the opacity that robs readers of a transportation with the characters and their stories. It is simply a pity for 1 tin consciousness Prasad’s imaginative heft shimmering beneath the surface, lone conscionable retired of reach. Perhaps, this is lone first-novel nerves. Indeed, 1 hopes that Prasad manages to flooded this successful consequent works, allowing her originality to radiance through.
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English (US) · 
Hindi (IN) ·