Pentacles

The novella hits you hard. Loneliness and abandonment could not have been dealt in a better way. Yet the mother who abandons her son for the love of another man has not been made out to be a villain. The story develops at a rapid pace sieving through the author's commentary on contemporary issues like a jet plane. The end is not the end; it is the simmering start of another story - untold and unfinished and left for the reader to spin his or her own tales in his or her own souls based on the material provided by the author. You stay with the book for a long time in your hand as you believe to have entered the book.
The poems are narrative poems - very well etched out without losing the poetic structure and sense; they deal in interesting and at times, suspenseful stories of love, betrayal, loss, family life and hope.
Please gift this slim book to yourself. You can read it conveniently in the aeroplane or at an airport between flights.

New Life is a melancholic tale of a man deserted by his mother in his growing up years. The beauty of the tale is - the sufferings that this man undergoes during his boyhood are not dramatically written but subtly reflected and interwoven with the inadequencies of modern life to create that ambiguous void that we can identify with so easily.
The poems are free verses telling biographical stories of interesting men and women using evocative images of the stark reality of urban life. The concrete prison of urban life and the unfulfilled desire to escape to a simple life is aptly brought out in The Tower.

New Life is a deliberately structured incomplete novella. What happens to Kingshuk when he finally meets his mother - if he does? Do Kingshuk and Seemanti fall in love eventually? What kind of a new life is Kingshuk able to live finally? The author does not answer these questions directly. For he wants us to etch them on our souls by ourselves. The story-poem Tower stands out like a tower and for a moment describes our lives - our era - like no other piece of poem can. Chasing could scare you. Wow!

A book to read by the side of a mountain lake. A book to read amidst the cacophony of a modern shopping mall. The book has calmed me down. The truth is I seemed to have reached the epicenter of my restlessness reading this book. Modern classic - cult fiction!

New Life is excellent. The change of scenes between the narrative parts and the author's commentary on related issues is very interesting and intense. But it should have been longer and taken us deeper. The poems are more stories and less of poems.