Taut Energy

In striving for tautness, Those Days often comes perilously close to diluting the essence of the novel, to ending up as a cut-and-dried rendition of a literary masterpiece that is rambling but never unfocused. That is not to suggest that Chakravarti's translation drains the novel of its narrative power and intrinsic elegance. It doesn't.

In fact, Those Days is a bit of a miracle: it is a translation that is almost as irresistibly readable as the original. And that is saying a lot. In Sei Samai, written in serial form over two-and-a-half years for Desh magazine and published in two volumes in the early '80s, fact and fiction coalesce seamlessly as real historical personages and fictional characters rub shoulders on the streets and in the mansions of Renaissance-era Calcutta.

Gangopadhyay is as much about substance as about style. He invests the mundane with poetic insight just as effortlessly as he transforms the larger-than-life into tangible, believable situations. Those Days misses out on virtually nothing that makes Sei Samai such a watershed in contemporary Bengali literature: its crackling energy, the unflinching iconoclasm that seems to come quite naturally to Gangopadhyay, the impressive grasp over period details that stems from the author's scholarship, and, last but not least, its fascinating gallery of characters where even the most minor of figures is given a well-rounded feel.