“With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.”, February 28, 2008
By R. Kyle Knoxville, TN
I love to hear East Indians speak. There’s a lyrical beauty in the accents and when they tell stories, even the mundane becomes something extraordinary. We have three narrators in this excerpt whose tales will at some point be entwined. Emperor Akbar had been so taken with a fire worshipper than he’d embraced the faith himself: “He’d even had 1001 names in Sanskrit collected to adore the sun, which courtiers read out loud at noon.” Understand that the number of words a culture has for a thing indicates its importance. Creating new words for the sun is quite a deliberate act or worship. Elsewhere, a blind writer recognizes the fire worshipper with Akbar as a character he’s written many years before: “Could it be possible, that one of his characters was now writing his story?” A young girl, Ashwini watches dancing and wishes “to wrap the whole world in a sari, a sari as light as starlight whose colors were as varied as the smiles of a thousand sunrises, as the sighs of hundreds of sunsets.”
This isn’t an excerpt you can read once and review. This is my second pass through this manuscript. I’ve gleaned more through each passage. Initially, the prose transports and you’re just reading for the next exquisite line. The next passage renders a deeper meaning and a different connection. The excerpt is as much philosophy and metaphysics as it is story and probably should be read as such. Nartana Premachandra’s obviously got more planned for us and I believe it will be well worthwhile to watch for this author’s forthcoming works. She’s got a valuable message for those who are willing to explore our consciousness.
`.. we are all connected, each one..’, January 24, 2008
By Jennifer Cameron-Smith (ACT, Australia)
In this excerpt, Nartana Premachandra takes the reader on a quite wonderful ride through a world (or can it be worlds?) of belief, experience and mystery. I have read this excerpt four times. I have reacted to the excerpt in at least three different ways.
My first reaction was that although I enjoyed the prose, I was overwhelmed by the whole. I wrote a review to that effect, and moved on. Or thought that I had.
Fortunately, my subconscious mind kept traveling, kept exploring the imagery and digesting the language. My initial review no longer reflected my thoughts and so I withdrew it in order to try to make sense of the journey taking place in my own mind. And so I find that the story I read and the story I am reading are connected but no longer the same. I want to make the journey in order to explore, and hopefully to understand, the degrees of connectedness. I am not sure that I will end up at the same destination as the author, but I am now confident that the journey is worth taking. I want to read this novel. I want to explore the possibilities.
Appears to be a stunning read, January 20, 2008
By Monette L. Bebow Reinhard “author of Felling … (Wisconsin) I will admit to being perplexed to where this author is going with this, but I believe I understood the references well enough to look forward to the whole novel as a very enlightening read. It was especially stunning the way the present led to the past, with the same name indicating the same soul, leading to a moment of death as a journey through time.
This is what I would call an intelligent read, something to savor and explore rather than just read and put aside. I hope I’ll be able to read it all someday.
