u/panda_and_ellies

While scrolling through Amazon, I came across this work and immediately ordered it. Finished it in a day, thanks to the beautiful prose that invites you into the stories instead of projecting them towards you. After many days, I read a collection that raised my curiosity for the writer's creativity. After reading each story I immediately thought, let me read one more because I'm excited to know what the author has written next. The collection starts with a wonderful story of comic relief presenting thoughts on kindness and concludes with a second person narration discussing the ordinary lives that form extraordinary stories. Ahead is my review for this short story collection!

Filled with wit, humor, reflections on life, and its experiences, VP Kale's Karmachari is a collection of short stories originally in Marathi and translated to English by Vikrant Pande. This short story collection is a love letter to the office goers or the Karmacharis. Though it is situated in Maharashtra, it speaks to the whole nation and the age that has its life closely intertwined with the office culture, be it a government office or a corporate, the whole idea of having a job and going to the office for the purpose of sustaining a good livelihood is what makes human experience worth documenting when it comes to this particular book.

To begin with, every single story is titled on the name of the protagonist and I have attached a picture of the content page as well because that was one of the very first things that attracted me towards the book, foremost being the title of the collection itself, that is Karmachari. It is a story of ordinary people living ordinary lives and having ordinary experiences, but what makes this work extraordinary is the beautiful writing of VP Kale. I have never read any other work by Kale and was getting introduced to his characters, writing style, narration, and attention to the human detail of existing. It has been a great experience for me.

The stories span over many different themes. Love, grief, marriage, birth, death, spiritualism, jealousy, everything. You name it and you'll have it in this collection. But what's interesting is that they do not come at you in the most direct of ways, neither didactic nor preachy. In fact, they are presented in the form of philosophies and decisions that characters take and in the process, the reader is also confronted by similar dilemmas and confusions.

At first glance, the stories do not seem extraordinary and we at all times think that the characters are someone that we already know of, and these are not extraordinary people, and thus, there is no heroic conclusion or heroic action taking place. But that is the whole point of Kale's writing. The very last story of the collection creates a culminated point of view of what Kale's goal is while writing. He aims to capture ordinary life, document their experiences, and present them to the reader with the hope that readers will find themselves in his stories.

One thing that was absolutely fantastic while reading the book was the comic and humor that was so impeccably woven into the narrative that it did not feel like a translated work at all. It is a feat of the translator as well that he could bring such essence into writing and it felt that we were reading an original work of Indian English writing.The nuanced observations of characteristics, especially of those who are living, earning a livelihood in an office with peons, clerks, office boys, bosses, juniors, transfers, government desks, rooms filled with papers that no one's going to read ever, etc., etc. gave an experience of reading that was wholly, beautifully real and relatable. The feeling of this relatability with characters and experiences does not come because one might be a part of an office, but through the ultimate human existence, which no matter where they exist, experience the same emotions, think the same way, react the same way, and the baser emotions of what is it like to be a human stays the same.

Another interesting thing about the collection is the narration that takes place in first person or a third person. This choice is so wonderfully executed that it at times feels the boundary between a text and a reader is removed and we as an audience are getting a panoramic view into the life of these different characters who are traveling and discussing their philosophies of life. Speaking of philosophy, every character has their own philosophy and lookout towards life and how to navigate through it. This aspect opens so many avenues for meditations and ruminations over ordinary and everyday life experiences that I'm sure days after reading or years after reading someone might experience a situation and then immediately go back to one of the philosophies shared by the characters.

I am absolutely thrilled after reading the book and it felt like a warm hug from an Indian writer to the Indian audiences having the most ordinary Indian experiences.

4/5 ⭐

Thanks for reading bieieieie

Hey, completed a book today and have a few (more than a few actually lol) thoughts to share. Also adding some highlighted parts of the book in no special order.

Courtesans Don't Read Newspapers by Anil Yadav is a collection of one novella and five short stories, all based in and around Varanasi.

The novella, titled Courtesans Don't Read Newspapers, is a story of the sex workers living in Maduadih area of Varanasi. As someone who is quite familiar with Varanasi and its local places, reading the novella was an experience that was filled with, “oh, so did this actually happen?" I am not very sure if the novella is set at a historically correct time or if the names that have been used allude to someone real, but the core of the matter is that the theme speaks and resonates wholly and truly with the universality of a sex worker's reality. The language is easy, given the fact that it's a translated work, I am very sure that reading it in Hindi would have been a much better delight because of the loss of syntax essence that translation does (the hindi title is नगरवधुएं अखबार नहीं पढ़ती and that itself holds much more intensity than the english title). However, to quite a great extent, the reading experience was interesting and gave a sense of comic relief at times as well. Coming back to the theme of the novella, it at times feels like any other newspaper story with a lot of characters. And some of them, I am sure, we have met or heard of someday or the other here and there. It shares the reality of sex workers, how they are denied agency but demanded submission and work by almost everyone, especially those who hold power. The marginalization of the women, especially prostitutes, and them living in the fringes of society is something that is already well known, but the idea is reinforced in the novella. The novella also has a very interesting strain of journalism, investigative journalism to be precise, where we see a character who is a journalist trying to find stories about prostitutes and in a way trying to help them. He is printing them, bringing forth new leads into the stories. But in the end, the editor of the newspaper a bit annoyingly tells him that “courtesans don't read newspapers”. After completing the novella, I was brooding over the title thinking that the writer had chosen to use the word “don't" instead of "can't” . This choice of saying courtesans “don't" read newspapers instead of courtesans "can't” read newspapers speaks volume. The title is not limited to the lack of literacy found in sex workers, but the lack of interest that this section of the society has in the mainstream media because it has constantly denied them agency, honesty, and dignity.

Moving further to the other five stories, they are comparatively shorter and deal with different elements of... rebellion and revolt from the marginalized communities, the identity crisis of modern youth, a bit of magic realism in one of the stories, and so on and so forth.

One story titled ‘The Magic of Certain Old Clothes’ was extremely interesting because it brought forward the story of a couple. Nalin had always been critical of buying used clothes from street shops. However, he is attracted enigmatically towards one of the street vendors and ends up buying many second-hand clothes. However, in the core of his heart, he feels scared of judgment by his girlfriend, Nileema, who, however, earlier had shown acceptance of wearing used clothes. And in fact, it was Nalin who was disdainfully against the idea of wearing used clothes. So this story was something that was very interesting in terms of Nilin’s dilemma.

Another story titled “RJ Saheb's Radio” is a story of a man, RJ Saheb, who gets transported to his past and starts seeing his past and smelling the odours of his past only under one condition: whenever he hears music from a radio. If the music is coming from anywhere else, or Saheb tries to consciously play a tube, there is no change whatsoever, but as soon as his ears catch even a note of radio music, he is immediately transported to the past. This brought forth the elements of magic realism that left me in a lot of wonder, thinking about the power that music and memories hold, because at times certain songs can transport us back to the past and the memories and experiences that we have had earlier.

Another story that is titled “The Folk Singer's Swan Song” is also quite interesting because it brings forth discussions on caste system, rise of a village man up to the legislative assembly, importance of folk songs, and bringing forth the elements of Bhojpuri folk like Birha, Jantsar, Sohar, Lorki, etc. It beautifully captures the age long question of whether art is ephemeral or immortal and what place do artists hold in society.

The complete book is filled with the local phrases from the dialect of Bhojpuri and others that are majorly spoken in the Purvanchal belt. All in all, the book was an easy read and fairly interesting as well. It did not take much time to be completed and I was done with it in three sittings within a span of one day. So, I don't know if it is a good thing that I was so hooked to the book or is it a bad thing that it was such a fairly easy read.

But to conclude, I would say that if someone is looking for something to pass their time or read between their breaks, this book will be a good choice.

(2.5/5 ⭐)

Thanksss bieieieieiei

The last 20 days have been extremely stressful for me. I have been emotionally exhausted, mentally frustrated, and physically tired. A lot has been going on in my academic life, personal life, and every other sphere. However, one thing that has kept me going is my love for reading. When I was young, I always went back to reading books whenever I was scolded by my parents or I was not allowed to do something. I used that time for reading. It's funny and interesting that how at 24, my last resort is still the books that I have. In the past one year, I have read a few great books under the category of healing fiction. Luckily, this time as well, in my moments of crisis, I had this book, Welcome to Hyunam Dong Bookshop by Hwang Boreum.

Speaking about the book, it is the story of a young woman Yeongju who has left her marriage, her house, her city, almost everything, just to open a bookshop, getting away from the exhaustion of a hectic job.

Excessive working hours, increasing anxiety, no moments for personal time, overarching workload leave such a profound impact on her whole body and mind that she decides to leave everything. Interestingly, this everything was what she thought that she loved doing, but when crisis, anxiety and sickness came her way, she resorted to one thing that she really liked, and that was books.

The novel has 40 chapters, and every chapter carries the story forward while bringing a new theme into the forefront. There are chapters about whether we should do what we like or do what we are good at. One of the chapters is about reflecting over our writing and understanding if we are similar to our writing or not. One chapter is about coffee and how being present at the moment is somewhat like thinking just about coffee while making coffee. Others are about understanding how to run a bookshop business without losing the charm of reading books. The different chapters are titled beautifully (I have a fondness for chapter names in novels).

The language is easy. Beautiful. Not poetic, but seems like poetry at times. It is a love letter to books and bookstores. Every page, somewhere or the other, talks about the power that solitude and a good story have over you. It gives you answers to questions that at times we are afraid to ask ourselves. It leaves you with quotations and meditations over things that one might want to ruminate over again and again. I started reading this book when I started almost crumbling under pressure, and last night in the train while coming back home, I finally completed it, marking an end to a very exhausting journey, physically, mentally, and emotionally. This is not the best literary book that I have ever read, but... I would still suggest everyone to read it as a reminder that books really save you. They have always saved you, and they will continue to do so.

P. S. Sorry for not being able to add excerpts this time. I read a few chapters in paperback, others on Kindle, some on pdf so it's difficult to get everything together. Instead I'm adding the picture of the sun that I took minutes after clicking the picture of this book.