Skip to main content

The Road to Xanadu

 





Book Review

Title: Xanadu

Author: Harshita Nanda

Format: PDF E-book

 

Harshita Nanda’s novella, Xanadu, is more about a road to Xanadu than Xanadu itself. The idyl is not natural or easily available. It has to be created. It demands much agony and endurance from us. This novella is about those agonies and endurances. That is precisely what makes it enjoyable too. Utopias can’t entertain us; they can only satiate us and then leave us exhausted with ennui. The reason why there aren’t any utopias in the human world may be precisely that. We have all the potential to create utopias. But we won’t create them. In fact, if someone does create one, the others will sow the seeds of all possible vices there and kill it. That is how human nature is. All our good literature is about those vices and follies of ours. Any good novel has to end where the idyllic Xanadu begins. And that is just what happens in Harshita Nanda’s novella too.

The plot revolves primarily round Anita, Bhoomi and Harish. Anita is a young woman when the storyline starts. A British young man, Derek Rogers, captures her heart. But Derek has to leave India when his parents decide to withdraw to their own country after India wins independence. Anita is reluctant to join them leaving the hill town she loves much. We meet the aging, solitary Anita in the first chapter who eventually gets a little girl named Bhoomi for a friend.

Bhoomi has to leave Anita soon as a catastrophe leaves her fatherless. Her mother, Shalini, belonged to an aristocratic family in the city and had been disowned for marrying a poor hillman for love. Following the tragic death of her husband in an accident that also destroys their house, Shalini returns to her parents in the hope that they would understand and accept her. If family honour is what got her disinherited, the same family honour gets her back in and the business sense that usually accompanies such ‘honour’ gets Shalini married to Arjun who is settled in the US. Arjun had remained a bachelor all these years just because his love for Shalini had been unrequited. Unrequited love is a dominant theme in the novella.

The marriage takes Bhoomi to America where life turns miserable for her as well as her mother who is unable to forget her dead husband.

Harish is a young boy whom Bhoomi had become friends with as a little girl while she lived in Shalini’s parents’ house. Fortune favours Harish who gets good education in an elite school.

The plot now takes some very interesting twists and turns and leads the reader to an unputdownable climax.

It is a short book that can be read in about an hour. The story is narrated skilfully though it is the author’s debut work in this category. The plot has a Dickensian neatness and finesse, not to mention the suspense that the end of each chapter carries. The book is a sure indication that this author will go a long way and give us excellent works in the future.



PS. This book is part of the Blogchatter E-book Carnival and is free to download now here.

My contribution to the same Carnival is LIFE: 24 Essays which is also free here.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJune 21, 2021 at 2:01 PM

    Hari OM
    Oh I say, I missed seeing this title when choosing my few - must go check it out! Thanks for the review to tease the grey cells &*> YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 21, 2021 at 4:58 PM

      And Harshita will be the gainer. With your perceptive review.

      Delete
  2. parwatisingariJune 22, 2021 at 10:48 AM

    If Tomichan recommends I read.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Deepika SharmaJune 22, 2021 at 6:10 PM

    A wonderful review of a very well written book.
    Deepika Sharma

    ReplyDelete
  4. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuJune 23, 2021 at 12:24 AM

    I had read all the A2Z posts . Your review has added more brightness to it now .

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rajeev MoothedathJune 24, 2021 at 8:27 AM

    Yes, it is lovely book that I had enjoyed reading during the challenge. Your review does full justice to the work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. SatabdiJune 28, 2021 at 3:13 PM

    Your excellent review is the perfect companion to Harshita's amazing book!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more