Amazing portrayal of human life’s turns, twists in the books of Sabarna Roy

Storming the world of English literature with his five works analysing human psyche in its true perspective, Sabarna Roy is now in the club of those post-modern authors and storytellers who occupy high pedestal of extraordinary creativity.

Blending life’s nuances with stark realism in Pentacles, Frosted Glass, Abyss, Winter Poems and Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018 Time Frozen in Myriad Thoughts, Sabarna provided recipe for mankind’s emerging psychological problems in his works.

He dissected complex, intriguing post-modern and urban characters living in an industrial society carrying their own darkness, shadows and halo with sparklingly lucid narratives devoid of verbiage.

Sabarna adopted lucid language as a tool to analyze his characters delving deep inside their very inner boundaries combining circumstantial details with events that followed.

A Bird’s Eye View of His Works

Spreading their wings, when a bird flies in the limitless sky it really is free of fetters, chains and shackles. Sabarna too, true to an imaginative and intuitive person, flips from one genre to another with supreme ease in all his five creations.

Even within a chapter of a story, he seamlessly welds them together to elaborate his strong standpoint acting as an invisible message. We find this in all his books beginning with Pentacles.

The long story New Life, woven as a novella, reflects author’s philosophical views. Narratives revolving around the protagonist, abandoned by his mother when he was very young, for love of another man, is really piercing.

The long narrative poems — The Tower, 2001-2002, Chasing and Tara — are full of strange and unique stories blending surrealism and magic realism.

Frosted Glass, one story cycle comprising 14 long-short stories and one poem cycle comprising 21 lyrical narrative poems, is set in Calcutta eliciting darkness lurking in the human psyche baring the baser instincts.

The dialogues on delicate issues like man-woman relationships involving morals, ethics and strains, appear as real-life conversations.

Within it, figures environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanization. At the end, they are devoid of sentimentalisation and romanticization, which could have killed the sharp prose essential for examining human life in an organic society in vortex.

Rahul, the protagonist, symbolizes a modern man of our industrial society who has no control of flow of events that make, mar or guide his life and also those living around him. Naturally, the readers ask: Is this the essence of our existence?

Sabarna’s brilliant narrative and dispassionate style with which betrayal in personal relationships and resultant loneliness is handled merits critical acclaim.

The poems, composed in reflective and narrative manner, weave a maze of dreams, images, reflections and stories with Calcutta featuring in some of them like the looming backdrop of Gotham City in a Batman movie.

Abyss, his third book, a full length play in two acts with an interval, is essentially a racy crime thriller with Act one slowly building up climaxing in a crescendo of conflicts of personalities and ideas ending with an unnatural death before the interval.

Is it a suicide or a murder?

Act two, evolving through a series of interrogations to unravel the truth, deeply disturbing and affecting, unfolds into a situational thriller involving the debate about using land for agriculture or industry and the ethics of a working author.

The high points of the play are its central conflict between a mother and her daughter and its female sleuth – Renuka.

Winter Poems consists of Winter Poems – 2010 and Winter Poems – 2012. Winter Poems-2010, a 12-poem series dealing with the imaginations of death and home, unravels these two fundamental imaginations that separates humankind from other animals.

What would the pleasure of living be without the imagination of death or pleasure of running through wilderness be without the imagination of home? Sabarna questions!

Winter Poems-2012, a series of 26 small poems in narrative style, deals with the idea of loss and coming to terms with gradual wasting in life.

Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018 Time Frozen in Myriad Thoughts, published in 2019, is a compilation of ideas, political opinions, tiny stories, letters, conversations, travelogues and food articles, and is stringed like a floral bouquet.

Source: www.news18.com