3 out of 4 stars
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Rukhsat The Departure by Sujit Banerjee is an anthology of twenty-six contemporary short stories inspired by an alphabetical prompt. Each story takes its cue from a name from A through Z, each exploring a distinct theme or mirroring a previous story with a new character.
Banerjee’s short stories cut to the quick; their visceral impact remained with me after I had finished the book. The author doesn’t skim over a theme or emotion but delves deeply into human motivation, loss, loneliness, and hardship. The resulting stories are often dark and painful to read, but the messages they communicate have a bare-bones truth about them that the brief and powerful medium of the short story conveys brilliantly. The writer focuses mainly on the themes of loss, change, aging, madness, death and love’s regression to indifference in long marriages. I thought of some of the stories as diptychs since they worked in pairs to tell a story; examples of this would be Eklavyya – My Real Name is not Gustav and Gustav – Fifty-Eight Years. By mirroring stories, Banerjee dealt with pluralistic truths in his anthology. My favourite story, the one that embodies what Banerjee set out to achieve with this anthology, is Abhimanyu – The Beginning. It is the first story in the anthology and sets the tone for the rest of the book. In Abhimanyu, the author’s expressive writing, and his consciousness of time and mortality present an uncanny story, which reads like an observance of human beings through the ages and timeless gestating months with an accelerated view of human nature of one who is about to become part of our society unwillingly.
What I found most impressive about Rukhsat The Departure was the author’s creative response to the alphabet prompt. He managed to grow with the challenge and delivered twenty-six stories each dealing with a definite theme. Banerjee’s writing is both spare and lyrical; this quality establishes a unique reflective mood. He also evokes the fleeting nature of a human lifetime by including a character’s youth, middle age and declining years in just a few pages.
Rukhsat has numerous errors that I found difficult to ignore, especially toward the end of the book, which wasn’t thoroughly edited. The editing of this anthology was not the best; no book is perfect, but Rukhsat needs serious work to help it shine. What bothered me most were awkward sentences, odd turns of phrase, spelling mistakes and incorrectly used prepositions. If readers decide not to pay attention to the mistakes, they’ll find a book with much to offer them.
Taking the editing problems into account, I’ll rate Rukhsat The Departure 3 out of 4 stars and I can recommend it to readers who enjoy short stories, anthologies and stories about the murkier side of the human condition.
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Rukhsat The Departure
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