![]() ![]() Ritwik, whose name means "priest who officiates at a fire sacrifice", stands at the mouth of a furnace in a Calcutta crematorium, stripped naked to the waist, clutching a bundle of burning twigs. ![]() Mukherjee also leads his readers to the ultimate border crossing, from ego to empathy, as he movingly inhabits the distress and disorientation of his characters. The author is equally bold, traversing eras, continents and personae as he shifts from the Bengali countryside a century ago to Brixton in the 1990s, from the perspective of a middle-aged English spinster to that of a gay Indian man in his twenties. All these border-crossers populate Neel Mukherjee's deft first novel, A Life Apart, lending it the audacity of their transnationalism. And people, as immigrants and colonisers. ![]() Birds, as apparitions in unexpected climates. What crosses borders? Books, if there's a will to translate them or teach their language. Gaiutra Bahadur reads an ambitiously transnational debut. In Neel Mukherjee's first novel, a young Calcuttan hiding out in 1990s London reimagines the life of an English spinster in turn-of-the-century Bengal. ![]()
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