Blue Is Like Blue

by Vinod Kumar Shukla

English 1 edition

Stark and mesmerizing these stories puzzle, disturb and seduce the reader. Shukla whittles reality down to its bare poetic core. AMITABHA BAGCHI Vinod Kumar Shukla’s world is set just a little bit askew and, thus, the quotidian becomes unusual, the mundane remarkable. The reader is persuaded to marvel anew at the follies and foibles of the human species. ARSHIA SATTAR In what way is over familiarity akin to the uncanny? In what sense are the lives we lead each day in rooms, streets, and shops not entirely our own? To find the answer to these questions, we must read the sui generis Vinod Kumar Shukla whose work reminds us that deep originality will always find its own home and language. His translators have taken up the questions and challenges his work poses, and these superb English versions constitute their response. AMIT CHAUDHURI There’s a vein of gold in Chhattisgarh and it passes under Vinod Kumar Shukla’s house in Raipur. Shuklaj has been quietly mining it for the past half-century and more The house key hides in plin sight to see it an intruder would need to go back to 1937. to dip a particular brasslota in a specific stream of consciousness, to master the art of the delicious non sequitur, to develop an acute sense of the small town absurd, and much else. The list is long and life is short. A sensible prowler would give up and sit down with any book by this great original, these stories, destly rendered, are an excellent place to start. You’d get no richer, but you’d get up wiser and Lighter and nimbler perhaps even a better burglar. IRWIN ALLAN SEALY