Book Review | An unconventional debut that still misses the plot

Anupama Raju’s debut novel, C, is a dreamy amalgamation of poetry and prose, a lyrical tour de force that quivers with deeply felt impressions and emotions. It is a narrative of an inchoate crisis of the spirit and its eventual emergence from darkness into light — from the depths of confusion and obsession to a measure of self-awareness and self-worth.

The unnamed first-person narrator arrives at a university campus in a town in a foreign country to pursue a writing sabbatical. The city, referred to simply as ‘C’, is one that is cloaked in perpetual night. The writer acclimatises herself to the eternal murk of this sunless place, one that is illuminated only by electricity and occasionally pierced by vast white gulls that soar overhead. Though she remembers, and at times longs for the sights and sounds of her hometown, her native ‘C’, as it were, she also feels an overwhelming kinship with the wintry shadowland that cocoons her now.

That is perhaps because she knows all about darkness, and nurses pools of it within herself— the depression she has wrestled with, her suicidal tendencies, and the unfulfilled and obsessive love she has for a man. He suffuses her whole being, and she builds a cathedral of expectations around him — wanting him to respond more, reciprocate more, and flood her with an intensity of emotion that matches her own. But he never satisfies her emotional yearnings. His reactions are always laconic, his expressions always subdued, and at times, brutally absent altogether. He remains at a remove, loving her perhaps, but never tearing down the awful barrier he has chosen to erect between them — that he has “commitments” and “responsibilities” elsewhere, and that she can never be first in his priorities.

As she journeys into her thoughts of the past and present, her narrative intertwines with the voice of ‘C’ — that darkling town. C anoints her as its storyteller, empathising with her, and silently urging her to tell not just her own story — but also that of the town — a story that is as fantastical as it is metaphoric.

The novel clearly has autobiographical undertones — like the narrator, Raju is a writer and a poet and she too went on a writing fellowship to another country. In fact, this particular work seems to have been mostly written during that writing sojourn. However, the story of C is not contained in the usual framework of a plot. The narrative is part allegorical, part a procession of lyrical imagery, which makes the story nominal and fragmentary. The novel is also strewn with Raju’s poems, and this, coupled with the liquid grace of her prose, casts a spell on the reader.

This is not a conventional novel. But then Raju’s is not a conventional voice. Her sensibilities are those of a poet, and one would be interested to find out whether this talented writer will harness her imagination to such things as plot and characterisation the next time she approaches the literary form of a novel. 

C: A Novel
By Anupama Raju
Aleph
pp. 234, Rs 699