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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 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...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
25 comments
Read more