“So much darkness”: Looking for the Light in Bitan Chakraborty’s The Mark, by Indrajit Bose

Book Reviews Indrajit Bose The author at the Zakir Hussain Delhi College during the Bengali Literary Festival 2018 / Photo courtesy of bitanchakraborty.com Simplicity and quiet elegance never fail to impress us. The effect of a good short story often is like a fugue or an adagio in a musical composition, creating impressions fugitifs, in the best manner of the impressionists, sketching in a mood or elaborating on a motif or theme. Bitan Chakraborty’s The Mark (Shambhabi Imprint, 2020) is unquestionably a collection of short stories revolving around the everyday lives of ordinary characters that leaves an impression of serious engagement with the contemporary Indian milieu and is also aesthetically pleasing. Chakraborty is already an established author of the novel; his foray into the short story adds a further dimension to his existing repertoire. A writer must “convincingly create an illusory world if he is to captivate his readers,” Chakraborty has said, and he appears to have lived up to his aesthetic or writerly principles in The Mark. Peripheral and marginal lives lived by characters grappling with the challenging socioeconomic realities of our times, mediated with narratorial control and poise—these are what make the stories in The Mark a testament to the craft of a storyteller and short fiction writer par excellence. The stories in the collection revolve around everyday life and broad human themes—the despair and... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2020-04-21 13:18:37 UTC ]
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Thousands mark 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death with pledges to continue his fight for civil rights

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[ Los Angeles Times | 2018-04-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A Pre-Scandal Mark Zuckerberg Said Users Trusted Facebook To Protect Their Privacy

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Here’s everything Mark Zuckerberg didn’t say, and probably won’t

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[ Fast Company | 2018-03-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Netflix's first comic book is Mark Millar's 'The Magic Order'

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