Author: Gopikrishnan Kottoor
Publisher: Katha
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 219
ISBN/UPC (if available): N/A
Description
There is indeed a degree of quietude, an admirable sense of balance in linguistic usage and the handling of a rather complex theme, which characterizes A Bridge over Karma.
This first novel, like Arundhati Roy’s draws sustenance from the soil of Keral’as enchanted, if tragic landscape, where love, passion, disenchantment and Karmic retribution remain entangled in a very intricate manner.
Kottoor paints pictures beautifully in his narrative. The words speak, and a character comes out live, hits you in the face. This is true for most of the characters you meet in the novel, and particularly, for Kali and Tambaran. This is no mean achievement and gives promise of better and bigger things to come.
The poetic picture-painting is coupled with a very intimate sense of observation and attention to details, which is yet another characteristic of successful fiction-writers. They miss nothing that an average intelligent man would see. They see in addition things which are not visible to ordinary mortals.
Kottoor has indeed given the readers a well-knit, competently crafted, immensely readable novel where fictional prose partakes of the rhythm and cadence of poetry. He is most certainly a fine addition to the growing list of Indian fiction-writers in English.