Used Book

📖 The Scoop

sed Book, appearing nine years after Playing The Dark God, brings into life characters both ordinary and not so ordinary. From romantic suicides and consumptive chauffeurs to aging secretaries and degraded poetesses, from gifted healers and vivacious stars to dispirited models and doddering princelings. Here, places tell tales too. Desolate ruins and spooky tombs, ravaged cityscapes and lush hill stations, humdrum suburbs and lost childhood homes reveal their sudden secrets.

Used Book moves from the predominant mood of love, the sringara rasa that distinguishes Paranjape's two earlier collections, to a deeper sympathy and a sense of engagement. A sharper awareness of the bitter ironies and tendentious follies of the human condition now temper his postmodern playfulness and compelling wit.

Dexterously woven into these poems are inspired, inane, triumphant, or oppressive journeys into childhood and adolescence, social and emotional deprivation, exile and expatriation. Past and present, fact and fiction, memory and oblivion contend with plangent sufferings or luminous liberations, testing in the process the very limits of apprehension and textuality.

Genre: Poetry / General (fancy, right?)