Sudeep Sen’s new book, EroText, is a collection of beautifully etched micro-fiction—a debut book of fiction from a poet. It reads like a stylish stream-of-consciousness narrative, quite akin to a speaker in a Woolf, Camus or Kafka novel—immersing one’s mind in an internal monologue. This interior position makes the narratives a complex underworld of desire, fear, feeling, introspection and meditation. Rain, Maps, for instance, opens in a mesmerising montage:
“It has started raining—sharp shards of transparent sheets hit the glass of the window that threatens to crack, but upon meeting its surface, melt to water. There is a constant blur of water outside. It is a curiously inviting scene, one that seems misty with flickering crystals glowing in parallel striations—the patterns changing their tack depending on the wind’s mood-swings.”
Much like, and as in, an existentialist predicament, the narratives switch points of view, creating a multiplicity of interpretations. The lyrical surface-texture hides layers of meaning buried in the complexity of the imagery. These lucid micro-fictions/prose-poems reflect the dreamlike subconscious, taking the reader into, not so much fantasy, but a reality as perceived by the fictional characters. The creative process is the constant guiding light. Sen’s description of matter, processes and things is stark and symmetrical. But what overrides all this is the mind, its mindscape, and the mind/matter dialogue—thus creating in these poetic narratives a wonderful tension. This argumentative tension generates a heightening of the prose-style that equally reads as well-wrought poetry.
The narrative scenes shift from past to present; in the process there is dislocation of time, place and space. There is no time continuum as such, and that is why one is made aware of a fictional narrative, one micro-fiction after another, the continuity edited and spliced in a deft, cinematic manner. The characters who figure in these pieces float in the gossamer maze of our consciousness—they are not so much traditional characters but literary and historical, such as Banalata and Timur in Gold Squares on Muslin.
The micro-fiction/prose-poems in EroText are divided into five distinct sections—Desire, Disease, Delusion, Dream, Downpour. The book starts with disease that is introverted and intricate. However, gradually, the opacity diminishes and the stories take on a more linear fashion. The paradigm of time-shifts is redolent in many ways of a William Golding novel. In these micro-fiction/prose-poem narratives, Sudeep Sen maps a world of complex binaries—history/geography, love/eros, nature/machine—and also the preoccupation of the subliminal and its ‘dark’ interior. The processes are inter-textual and are replete with prose, poetry, narrative and travelogue. Sen subverts the free-verse style of poetry, shaping it into a new novel idiom where prose-narrative and poetic micro-fiction is deftly commingled. This gives EroText a unique newness that is daring and unrivalled in new Indian fiction and poetry in English, barring perhaps rare INStances like Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate.
The most striking feature of this collection is its daring non-genre adherence, which is no animadversion of style, but speaks highly of the writer’s inventiveness, subtlety, craft and technical virtuosity. In fact, Sen demystifies text and genre in this collection, and pushes and lifts the boundaries of Indian writing higher with understated grace and elegance.
(Ananya S. Guha is a professor at Shillong’s Indira Gandhi National Open University)
