Book Review
Every
person has a story to tell: his/her own. Life is a tale full of sound and fury,
as Shakespeare’s Macbeth realised to his sad dismay. How the tale is told makes
the difference. Roma Gupta Sinha narrates the story of her life in Destiny’s
Favourite Child, whose subtitle ‘An Autobiography of a Rebel’ is what
actually drew me to the book. The book is published by The Blogchatter (a
community of bloggers) as part of its E-book
Carnival. It became obligatory for me to review this book by virtue of the
terms and conditions for the authors who participate in the Carnival.
Roma has, no doubt, an engaging story to
tell. There is a childhood that struggled with a profusion of cousins in a
joint family in which the author’s parents were absent. There was the
disquieting stand-offishness between the parents. There is the eventual loss of
mother and alienation from father. And so on.
Trauma makes autobiographies fascinating
stories but only when certain depths are gauged. While reading Sinha’s book, T.
S. Eliot’s women kept coming into my psyche and going out “talking of
Michelangelo” and leaving me with the feeling that “I can connect / Nothing
with nothing” until the challenge rose within my consciousness: “Do I dare?”
Sinha’s autobiography leaves much to be
desired. The least she could do was to get a good editor and avoid the errors
that stare in every page ruthlessly. Writing is more an art than expeditious communication
of one’s feelings and emotions. Sinha fails to take care of both: diction and
depth.
thoughtful interesting synopsis
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