The three plays, introduced with a skilled and analytically detailed discussion, rise above parochialisms of time, space, culture and language. They resonate with universal themes and emotions like love, duty, guilt and the sheer tedium of existence that saps one’s soul of vibrancy and one’s life of joy.
This novel is really a chronicle, like Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, of a time, and characters who lived in that time, kings, nobles, knights and wizards; what happened to them, the events of which they were part, and how they survived or were destroyed. But that’s where any resemblance fades.
Benyamin’s latest novel in English, Body and Blood, unravels a new kind of politics that interweaves faith and crime as the author deals with the influence of religious dogmatism in the lives of faithful believers. The setting of the novel spreads over a group of Indian cities and the narrative is shaped.
Lockdown. Isolation. Social distancing. Cases. PPE. These are but fragments of the vocabulary that have entered our lives with the onset of the pandemic. Now that ‘the new normal’ has been set and the countless deaths slowly become cold numbers that we scroll past on .
Each an eight page fold out hard-board book, this set of four books, Peek-a-Book by Kaori Takahashi has been very well conceptualized and designed. One of the books deals with a friend’s birthday and is called Birthday Surprise. As you unfold the sturdy hard-board colourfully illustrated pages.
Given that the picture on the book cover of Why is My Hair Curly? is of a curly-haired girl in reverie holding a pen with a journal in her hand, coupled with the title, one might anticipate the book to be about a young girl’s travails of managing curly hair. One would be wrong.