Herbert
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
May 1992. In Russia, Boris Yeltsin is showing millions of communists the specter of capitalism. Yugoslavia is disintegrating. United Germany is uncertain about their next move, and communism is collapsing all around. And in a corner of old Calcutta, Herbert Sarkar, sole proprietor of a company that delivers messages from the dead, decides to give up the ghost. Decides to give up his aunt and uncle, his friends and foes, his fondness for kites, his aching heart that broke for Buki, his top terrace from where he stared up at the sky, his Ulster overcoat with buttons like big black medals, his notebook full of poems, his Park Street every evening when the sun goes down, his memory of a Russian girl running across the great black earth as the soldiers lift their guns and get ready to fire, his fairy who beat her wings against his window and filled his room with blue light .
Surreal, haunting, painful, beautiful and astonishing in turn, and sweeping us along from Herbert’s early orphan years to the tumultuous Naxalite times of the 1970s to the explosive events after his death, Bhattacharya’s groundbreaking novel is now available in a daring new translation and holds up before us both a fascinating character and a plaintive city.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This nimble novel from Bhattacharya (1948 2014), his first translated into English, follows a young man in Calcutta who claims he can communicate with the dead. Readers know in the first chapter that Harbart has killed himself, and the reasons why unfold over the course of the book. Harbart, whose parents died when he was young and who has been largely ignored by his other family members, becomes close with his cousin Binu until Binu is shot and killed by the police. Soon after, Harbart has a vivid dream in which Binu speaks to him and reveals the location of his secret diary. This moment convinces Harbart of his ability to channel the dead, and soon others from around the world are visiting Harbart to communicate with deceased loved ones. Eventually, Harbart receives a letter that leads to his downfall, but the narrative has one final surprise up its sleeve in its closing pages. Bhattacharya's slippery narrative slithers forward and sideways through time, and is complemented by the clever, often coarse prose ("Harbart saw that he was kneeling before ten enormous toenails growing out of someone's two enormous feet"), resulting in an acute, idiosyncratic reading experience.
