Shreekumar Varma
Harper Collins
Rs 299
Pp 332
ISBN: 8172238541
Paperback
Blurb
Goa. Beyond the sunny beaches, the music and the feni, lies a hinterland caught between the past and present. Here, soon after Liberation, the beautiful young Maria is swept off her feet by the French artist Marcel-an affair that ends in tragedy.
Decades later, it is this dark, rain-lashed Goa that writer Raja Prasad arrives in as he flees from the dreariness of his own life. It is here that he encounters Maria-a name that is whispered into his ear from a past as treacherous as the ghosts he dares to confront; a woman as enigmatic as the land itself. As he settles down to write his second novel, Raja stumbles on to the mystery surrounding Maria's death. And in the process he uncovers secrets of his own
Dramatic and intense, Maria's Room is a tale of love and memory; of the drunken Fritz and the inscrutable Milton, the delectable Lorna and the frail Ruma; of a father's fear and a son's turmoil. It is the story of a man's struggle to make sense of himself and the world.
Review
Imagination that haunts Deccan Herald
They come as multi-talented painters of life, the Indian writers of the post-Salman Rushdie generation. Shreekumar Varma is one of them: poet, playwright, editor, teacher, short story writer for children and adults, and what else. Ah, a novelist too. A decade back, Lament of Mohini was a good find for the browser of recent arrivals. Now Maria’s Room. Is it going to be depressing as the blurb implies or will it be a Shreekumar dish, a mixture of humour and tragedy?
Goa has been in the news recently for unsavoury items in the dailyspread. The backcover of Maria’s Room is no comfort either, as it splashes a bushelful of affairs and tragedy, a treacherous past with perhaps a spine-tingler thrown in. Certainly not a novel for smiling gaily and whispering delectable anecdotes. Remember Bimal Roy’s classic? Dilip Kumar’s car getting stuck in a strange area on a rainy night and the driver suggesting a dilapidated house nearby for the night’s stay. Those curtains flapping around the hero as he recognises the portrait of Ugranarain from a dim past. The entire scenario of Madhumati came back to me as I read the opening of Maria’s Room: “It drained its edges into shimmering slabs that had probably been paddy fields until last week. Black branches, leaves and a few anonymous objects crossed the road, migrating hurriedly from one slab to the other.
Great atmosphere, foggy view Hindu
In spite of a narrative flaw, Maria's Room manages to take the reader along…
Not many novels are able to combine good writing with good story-telling. Maria's Room comes close — which makes the shortfall easier to sight. This atmospheric, highly literary novel is also an example of a mis-crafted narrative, which, while containing all the elements of a powerful story, doesn't effectively arrange them.
But the elements are there. Shreekumar Varma sets his book in rain-lashed Goa, an inspired choice of setting for a protagonist on a breakdown. Far from the revelry of sun and sand, this is a Goa of overflowing streets, vivid foliage, lonely, courteous hotels. It is the perfect place to brood, and that is our narrator's intention. Following his arrival in Goa, he takes us through his sojourns to the town, his encounters with locals and fellow guests, and his abiding introspections. He is Raja Prasad, a novelist searching for material for his next book, while wrestling with the failure of his last — and more than that, with the scars of personal tragedy. Soon he shifts into ‘Maria's Guesthouse', and drifts into an affair with a young girl, even as he learns the story of another love, from another time. But the events of the past are impinging on the present, and the novel that Raja is writing begins gradually to lay bare his own predicament.
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