Textbooks in Bangladesh tend to be written by foreign authors. Those that are written by Bangladeshi authors, emphasise on examples in a non-Bangladesh context.
Divakaruni has a message to send with this novel. To her, independence entails not just liberation or freedom from subjugation, it also means doing the right thing for oneself and for the people around us.
Although the book is written in English, he has plenty of doubt to dispense about the language, its usefulness, acceptance, and communicability when it comes to writing and creating art in Bangladesh.
It is the disease that maintains the upper hand in the plot. A jarring voice of its own, the toxins spilling across the pages in bold, chaotic words.
Part memoir, part magical realism, this is a story about identity and the idea of home.
The story of the ailing Bhawal prince, Ramendranarayan Roy, the Mejo Kumar, who while taken to Darjeeling to recuperate, died and was cremated there, under mysterious circumstances, and who then returned years later as a wandering ascetic with partial amnesia!
Andy Warhol suggested they tape their conversations on his Sony Walkman, to which Truman Capote agrees.
Nehru was revolted by Nazism and the persecution of Europe’s Jews. Bose…felt that the Indian struggle for freedom should override all other considerations.
Storytelling is a space in which, as writers and readers, we experience the ways of how we know the world and interact with it.
Tanveer Anoy’s second novel, Duradhay (Anandam, 2021), felt like a punch to my stomach; a wake up call, to be more precise.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, seems to come as an admirable choice compared to the Nobel Prize’s controversial recent history.
Anyone familiar with Toni Morrison’s work would know about the gutting picture of slavery and racism that she painted with her stories.
Identity is mercurial: it shifts and morphs into a new being at the change of a breeze. That change is glacial, and often happens on its own volition; but one can also grasp a new identity, hold it tight till it engulfs the old, and thereby change the trajectory of their life completely.
Oorja, as her name suggests, is a bright young girl who is the main protagonist of the story. The novel begins with her travelling back to India after her mother’s demise. She reaches home only to find her father missing. The rest of the book is a journey of love, healing, and rediscovery of her own self.
Sufibad O Sufider Shorup Shondhaney (‘In search of the nature of Sufism and Sufis’), written by Syed Rezaul Karim and published in 2020 by Bangla Academy, is a welcome addition to the meager collection of books written in Bangla on Sufism.
From August 2021, Daily Star Books was excited to have joined Bookcentric’s monthly reading challenge, which invites readers to read and review books following each month’s designated theme. Under August’s theme of books with nautical themes, here is what our readers read—and reviewed—last month!
Typical of any Samanta Schweblin story from her International Booker-longlisted collection, Mouthful of Birds (OneWorld, 2019), a sense of anxiety is strongly perceptible here, especially through the characters Fi and Pe. One grows afraid of them as they start showing both lovingly caring and Big Brother-like tendencies. What heightens the ominous halo surrounding these two is the hostages’ inability to translate their emotions; why would someone who provides for you not give you a way out?
In Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul (Vintage Books, 2019), Khan delineates a personal map of Kabul, taking the reader through the “shadow city” that can be found in its still-standing monuments, libraries, pleasure gardens, theatres, shopping malls, wedding halls and graveyards.
