What Can’t Be Said Is Written | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

What Can’t Be Said Is Written | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by N.S. Madhavan |Updated: June 8, 2019 8:18:15 am

What Can’t Be Said Is Written

The layers upon layers of Raj Kamal Jha’s new novel dress the collective wound of a nation

Coming ashore in the city. (Express Photo: Neeraj Priyadarshi)

Title: The City and the Sea
Author: Raj Kamal Jha
Publisher: Penguin Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 267 pages
Price: Rs 499

“What can’t be said can be written, because writing is a silent act…”, so said a minor character in Raj Kamal Jha’s fifth and latest novel, The City and The Sea. In fact, she said that not in the novel, but at a banquet to honour her, for having won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009. Herta Müller, the German novelist, makes a Hitchcock-like cameo appearance in the novel as a hotel receptionist, does nothing remarkable other than handing over a map of the German town by the sea to the new boarders who have come to vacation. Müller grew up in Romania, under the evil gaze of Nicolae Ceausescu’s secret police, and, later, her life was under threat of certain death, when she refused to collaborate with the government.