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Literary Review
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
SUCHITRA BEHAL
Eight-year-old Jamie is addicted to his Prayer. This is no ordinary one; it is a secret that Jamie discovers almost by accident. The prayer promises to fulfil all his desires and make his dreams come true. All he has to do is send it to at least seve
n people.
Jamie wants to use the Prayer to get his separated parents back together. But little does he know that in sending the prayer out, he forms a chain of horror and destruction that touches these seven people in ways that cannot have anything to do with a human mind. Even as the prayer takes its first victim, it replicates itself on the computers of others who have touched that person’s lives.
Sergio, Raima, Lisa each one becomes a victim of their hidden desires. Even as the prayer lets them witness the completion of their most intimate thoughts, it snuffs out those very lives. Jamie stands mute witness to this as his mother and, later, his estranged father have a chance meeting but this time they have to fight off the forces of the evil that Jamie’s mother senses hovering around the prayer.
While she urges Jamie to destroy the prayer, others who try and delete its existence are shocked and horrified to find that, once installed into the computer, there is no going away.
This tiny book spins horror in a cross between sci-fi and old fashioned nightmares, making it the first in an entirely new genre of horror writing.
The Prayer; Al Raines; Undercover Utopia; Rs. 249
A small fictional town on the margins of Central Africa is the focus of this story written years ago by French novelist Paule Constant. It tells the story of Tiffany Murano and her parents, who fly into this abandoned bit when her father takes over a
s chief medical officer of Ouregano.
The book traces seven-year-old Tiffany’s development with a sense of hilarity and sadness but also provides a deeply telling critique of the political reality of the times as well as the relationship between the colonisers and the locals.
In this little place the white French are placed at the highest rungs of society be it the judge, the medical officer or the teacher while the rest, members of a Dutch mission, a single African doctor at the local hospital and finally the prisoners and the lepers follow.
The story describes in detail the conflicts between the white French and others whom they look down upon.
It brilliantly caricatures the African doctor, who feels he is much above the average African but remains completely uncomfortable and subservient to the white patients he is called to attend upon from time to time. The only store in the village is run by a half-drunk white who has escaped to this remote part of Africa after having killed someone.
He spends his day drinking in his dirty dusty shop, but is nevertheless accepted since he is the provider of all the goods that the French need in order to survive this harsh reality.
Paule Constant captures the obsessions of human nature and its greed with a pen dipped in compassion. Her characters are so lucid that one can almost see them up close.
She has effortlessly captured the bigotry and the destruction of the African continent in that period. The translation of Constant’s work from French to English has opened the doors for readers to delve into uncharted territory.
Ouregano; Paule Constant, translated from French by Margot Miller, Rupa, Rs 295.
Part three of Samit Basu’s Gameworld Trilogy, The Unwaba Revelations, provides a stunning landscape where a way has to be found to save the world. Namely by defeating the gods at their own game. But this is a daunting prospec
t considering the fact that the gods are cheating and refuse to follow any other rule except one: they cannot be defeated by their own creations.
An epic battle ensues where Kirin and Maya are left to their own devices to fight through. Murder and mayhem abound with frequent betrayals where each one is suspect. Both Kirin and Maya have nothing more to guide them except an eccentric and crazy old chameleon and their band of rag tag followers. Like the earlier two parts, The Unwaba Revelations once again is a romp through earth, sky and middle earth unveiling feats of such daring that readers are left gasping for more.
The Unwaba Revelations; Samit Basu; Penguin; Rs 295.
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