I presupposti per un bel libro c'erano tutti. 'Past Continuous' is the best debut novel by an Indian author since Upamanyu Chatterjee's seminal 1988 classic, 'English, August' and is one of the must-read IWE works of the 21st century. Ritwik's pain is so sustained that he walks through it in an objective daze and an ironic calm, not really belying any feelings, as though he feels too much, as though he is so brimmed with emotions, that any demonstration would be futile in itself. It is a great hook while not trying to be a hook, and I couldn't put down the book after that. The prologue, or 'Chapter Zero' here, is one of the most audacious, emphatic, self-confident starts to any novel I've read in a really, really long time. This is sweeping, ambitious, but it's also an intimate, doll-house of a work. The language in the book is consistently spectacular, which is a little surprising in a meta-fiction work for such works tend to be more concept-heavy and less focused on aesthetics, as opposed to say, a less sweeping. I love a bit of the verbose and the operatic in prose (even the bleakness is often described with a flourish here). I love this book for exactly the same reasons that Samir Dhond hates it for. The framing story (Ritwik's) is more riveting but Miss Gilby's tale often foreshadows and parallels it and together, the two tales help the book come together powerfully. The technique reminded me of Stoppard's resuscitation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The framing story here is Ritwik's and the story-in-the-story is that of Miss Gilby's Miss Gilby herself is a minor character from Tagore's 'Ghare Baire' and Neel tells us her story, a new story (because it's her version of things, including events from the original hundred year old novel) in the old setting.

A life apart by neel mukherjee