Author: Kamal Desai
Publisher: Stree
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 166
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818560407X
Description
Providing access to the major works of a leading Marathi writer which have not been translated into English earlier, this book presents two stories that embody a witty and subtly felt understanding of the tensions and cross-currents of an indigenous modernity even as they deconstruct it.
Kamala Desai's fiction is focused on the micro-levels of inner life where experience is held together by the compelling and never predictable struggle for selfhood. Nearly always, subtle and ongoing antagonisms structure and threaten Kamal Desai's imagined communities.
Before she can tear down the walls of the temple of the dark sun (Kala Surya), the protagonist must extricate herself from its tenacious and pervasive hold on her inner life. In the much acclaimed The Woman who Wore a Hat (Hat Ghalnari Bai), a woman asserts her right to a promethean venture in the face of crippling opposition. In this process the inadequacy of patriarchal constructs becomes apparent to her.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK AND THE AUTHOR:
Kamal Desai's women are brought into life in a world of complex images and allusions. To enter and inhabit this world the reader must be fully sensitive to the nuances, paradoxes and the spaces between words where wordless meaning take shape. It is difficult to be complacent in Kamal Desai's world, which offers no solace except in the hope inherent in every kind of struggle. - Shanta GokhaleKamal Desai is one of the most significant writers and perhaps the best woman writer of her generation. Her intense, disturbing and complex fiction achieves its poetic resonances with the synthesis of three strands: a search for the true self, feminist protest, and the compulsive yet futile exploration of the unknown.- Rajaram B Patankar
THE TRANSLASTOR:
SUKHMANI ROY is Head, Department of English Literature and Language at P N Doshi College of Arts and K U R Shah Women's College of Commerce, Ghatkopar, Mumbai. Her areas of research and interest are feminism and postmodernism. She has published short stories in Marathi and in English