sábado, 3 de agosto de 2019

The Warmest Colour | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

The Warmest Colour | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Sumana Roy |Published: August 3, 2019 12:40:41 am

The Warmest Colour

Vinod Kumar Shukla’s literary universe is lit up by a culture of slowness and shyness

Blue is Like Blue: Stories Vinod Kumar Shukla Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra & Sara Rai Harper Perennial 168 pages; ` 399


Every book is a stranger, or was meant to be. We came to it accidentally — on a relative’s bedside table, in a library, in second-hand bookstores, and, occasionally, in book reviews, the imagination drawn to an unusual title. I speak of a time that no longer exists, goaded as we are by the deus ex machina of publishing today, where what is outside the text, in print and social media, is meant to drag our attention to what is inside it. Vinod Kumar Shukla is, therefore, a lovely anachronism — he belongs to a culture of slowness and shyness, of both the writer and the way his works journey, travelling on foot instead of the brokered and artificial speed of immediate canonisation that is now commonplace. It is slightly wrong that I should begin with the writer and not his writing — for here is a man who rejects, and indeed subverts, the personality cult of the artist.

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