Subimal Misra more or less declared war on the well-behaved short story.
These twenty-five pieces, written across the 1970s and 80s, move between fiction, reportage, collage, political tract, cinematic montage, fable and deliberate sabotage. Misra called them “anti-stories”, apt as he puts conventional narrative on trial.
The terrain is Bengal under political violence, famine, class division and the lingering wreckage of colonialism and bourgeois respectability. Newspaper fragments, statistics, folklore, sex, poverty, absurdity and brutality interrupt one another rather than resolving into neat plots. In “From the Morgue on Bhawani Dutta Lane,” bodies, madness and a decaying zamindar house collapse into one another; elsewhere a fable about God distributing lifespans sits beside satire of modern political language. Misra was strongly influenced by cinema — particularly Godard — and the stories often behave more like cuts, splices and jump edits than prose moving dutifully from A to B.
There is genuine hostility toward passive reading here. Misra’s stated ambition was to disturb the reader, and the translator warns that the work asks you to relearn how to read it.
Edition & condition: Harper Perennial / HarperCollins India, 2018 edition. Paperback. Translated by V. Ramaswamy. Light shelf and handling wear visible to covers; internally clean and bright from the pages shown. Very good condition. This Harper edition runs to 282 pages.
