SYLVIA

                  by  MAITHREYI KARNOOR

                  My rating : 5/5 stars

We live life linearly. Growing, ageing and experiencing, we pass through events which stop us by to assert the primacy of time. Still, too often, we tend to dwell much upon the emotions we happen to go through – focusing hugely on our own desires and despairs. So much so that we lose sight of the only event which is bound to be certain – death. We overlook the fact that our lives, though lived in a linear manner, are also tangentially connected to lives of others, to all those people we come across. And taken together, the web that it creates, affirms our nothingness in the immensity of this design. Wouldn’t it be then wise to live the life in the constant knowledge of it. And not to take our own emotions too seriously, to make the journey bit easier for us.

Maithreyi Karnoor’s experimental novel appears to be an exploration of this idea. She gives us a character, Sylvia, and then proceeds to create a tapestry of life which includes warps of lives of the people she either meets or stumbles by, where her own life runs as an underlying nap, at times palpable while at others, invisible.

The novel is divided into two parts. Part I tells us the story of Bhaubaab, Sylvia’s uncle whom she happens to meet accidently, and of Lakshmi, Bhaubaab’s neighbour in a sleepy Goan village. Part II consists of nine distinct stories, telling the tales of its characters who may or may not be acquainted with Sylvia. At times, one wonders whether it is the same Sylvia in each story but the author doesn’t make it apparent. She weaves these stories with a confident hand, like a weaver who knows the design instinctively and doesn’t have to necessarily abide by the set patterns of construct.

 The complete review appears here:

https://borderlessjournal.com/2021/08/13/sylvia-a-genre-bending-book/