Tag Archives: BengaliBooks

Book Review: ‘Sera Bhoy’ By Abhigyan Roychoudhuri

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Sera Bhoy by Abhigyan Roychoudhury is a compilation of ghost stories, though not necessarily horror. Most of the stories in the collection can be labelled as supernatural. It is a comparatively new book and this fact is reflected not only in the supporting prompts, language and mention of years, but also in the content of stories. The first and foremost feature that will capture your attention is Roychoudhury’s highly developed and refined power of imagination which has a foundation of mathematical and (other) scientific facts. There is a story where the protagonist was a scientist studying the correlation between a person’s facial features and criminal tendency. He would see fine details (patterns) in everything he saw around him e.g., the brush strokes on a painted wall. These patterns (he used to call them maps) would take form and life, and appear before him all the time.

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Book Review: ‘Rajkonya’ By Prachet Gupta

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Storytelling is an art and not all people are capable of it. Storytelling in written form is another art and not all people are capable of it either. No, I am not talking about writing skills, composition, crafting clever sentences or ideas. Instead, even if you possess all the skills and talents, you may not be able to tell a compelling story in a convincing way. Yes, it demands enormous craftmanship to catch the attention of the readers within first few sentences and then hold it long enough so that they would sit back and let the writer make an attempt to entertain them. This is even more important in the present age of instant gratification and limited attention span. But what if you are bestowed with great talent of pen and imagination to yarn a story, are able to arouse the interest of the reader not just for the first few sentences instead for the first couple of paragraphs, and in fact are able to entertain and keep them amused for the first few pages, and yet fail to make use of that opportunity and lose the interest of the reader as fast as it was aroused. Such is the case with the novel Rajkonya (Bengali) by Prachet Gupta.

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