All that jazz and other Path-breaking Tales is a smorgasbord of emotions written by the much revered and lauded author Lopamudra Banerjee.
It’s dream-like writing laden with a potpourri of emotions that emanate the radiance of a poem. It’s an eloquent treatise on the woozy dizzy yet exuberant powers of love, longing, and beyond. The stories will sabrage layers of your emotions that lay dormant beneath a cross-hatch! The author almost takes on animism and you find a beating element in the stories that she captures in a crescendo of lyrical cadence spiked with an occasional splinter of emotional gradation.
The novella will make you bask under a fuchsia umbrella of a plethora of emotions! The author beguiles the readers with her beautifully engineered story. The gripping life of Amrita and Joydeep will stay with you long after you’ve read it. The Bengali lines tucked in between amplifies the beauty, and you may hear an epiphany, as I did!
“Amar swapner rajye tomar shei mukh unki diye jaay/ Proti din-er majhe tomay khunji smriti-r kobita-y…”
Also, the lines from chapter seven gave me goose-bumps:
“Some days you just burn in the flames of a destitute desire
Some days the flames ask you what provoked that fire…
You bathe in your accursed desires,
Deep within, you nurture a nameless fog”
The short stories are drenched in unique aroma of their own.
The story, “Park Street” emphasises on love and soul-connection. I was nostalgic while reading the author’s description of Park Street on a Christmas eve!
“The voice dangling in my furtive black sky, the nameless, sacred scar I wrap around my asphalt neck, bruises me. “
The poignantly beautiful lines tug at my heartstrings.
How can I not mention “A Fistful of Want”! This is my personal favorite!
The way the author has described the manifold nuances of Anupama the protagonist whirred my heartbeats! It had me thinking if the character Trina really did exist or it was a mere shadow of Anupama’s past, a figment of her imagination!
The story gripped me until the end and few teardrops trickled down my cheeks as I could see my own reflection in Trina, just as Anupama did!
The author has eloquently portrayed the unrequited love and longing, of hit and misses of a young woman fighting pyrexia of mind war of what IS! Engulfed with diffidence and apprehension, finally, Anupama makes peace with the paradigm shift in her life in a new country, with her husband, away from Kolkata, yet carrying her hometown and the good and not-so-good memories in the pit of her bosom to last forevermore!
“She is pulled in a soaring current of longings, opening herself in layers, like petals, trying to find her moorings in the azure night sky”. These lines are eerily relatable!
All that Jazz is a breathtakingly beautiful book that you would want to add to your bookshelf.
I want to thank Lopa Banerjee di for writing such a brilliant book for us to read, feel, perceive, discern and savor!
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