Author: Manik Bandyopadhyay
Translator(s): Dipendu Chakrabarti
Publisher: Sahitya Akademi
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 133
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126015489
Description
Divaratrir Kavya, despite its title, is not concerned with the poetry of love; rather it interrogates Bengali reader's romantic perceptions. Within its short span the novel seems to interwine the psychological, the philosophical and the symbolist perspectives on a solid base of realism.
It shows something of Tolstoy's concern in Anna Karenina for the question of family happiness (as in the case of Anath-Malati and Supriya-Ashok episodes) and something of the supreme unconcern of Camus hero in The Outsider for traditional conception of human bondage (as in the case of Heramba).
No other novel in Bengali of its time raises so many questions about love and marriage, intellect and passion, life and death, sex and religious ritual.
DIPENDU CHAKRABARTI, also a Bengali fiction writer and critic, is the Gurudas professor of English in the University of Calcutta.