Review by Michelle M. Bambawale
I encountered Maria Aurora Couto through her two earlier works. In Goa: A Daughter's Story, I marvelled at the grandeur of the life she described in the palatial houses of Salcette, with their colonial connections through the Portuguese language, music, food, and lifestyle. Filomena’s Journeys: A Portrait of a Marriage, a Family, and a Culture, was heartbreaking.
Review by Selma Carvalho
We have to have an honest conversation about the role of the regional writer, that faithful chronicler of the immediacy of the life he encounters around him. He has no greater purpose other than to document this life—its history, nature, people, idiosyncrasies—captured by his indefatigable pen and preserved for posterity. Without the regional writer, literature cannot thrive, authenticity cannot thrive, geographical specificity cannot thrive.
By Augusto Pinto
Issue no 26
Raktachandan by Sanjiv Verenkar is the latest Konkani book to win the Sahitya Akademi award. It is the eighth collection of poetry of this veteran journalist and writer of books on contemporary Goan history. The title Raktachandan refers to the tree species pterocarpus santalinus (red sandalwood in English) that has many medicinal qualities. Among other uses, in the days before modern balms and ointments invaded our pharmacies it was used as a pain-killer for a variety of aches, wounds and swellings.
By Glenis M. Mendonca
Issue no 25
When the world went into lockdown, the Margao Book Club (MBC), based in South Goa-India, met over Zoom to have interesting book discussions. In a quirky moment, the members thought of trying their hand at writing verse. The eight Rasas of Bharata’s Natyashastra, were decided as a frame for inspiration. Sixteen MBC members found respite in setting their imagination go riot in verse, and a couple of months later the curator of the Club, Savia Viegas (author, artist and art curator) selected the best to create this blissful panacea to the trapped minds and christened it ‘Viral Verse’.
Review by Selma Carvalho
Issue no 24
There are so many familiar and acclaimed names the reader will recognise: Salil Chaturvedi, Anita Pinto, Jessica Faleiro, Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, Nathaniel da Costa, Veena Gomes-Patwardhan, Bina Datwani, Pantaleao Fernandes, Edith Melo Furtado, Sheela Jaywant, Jeanne Hromnik, Bina Nayak, Kornelia C. Rebello, Alisa Souza, and Alexyz Fernandes, who all have work included in the anthology…
Review by Janet H. Swinney
Issue no 24
Carvalho challenges our thinking about what it means to live in the interstices of British society, to belong to it and to be separate from it simultaneously; and what it means to be a sexually engaged woman, craving fulfillment, but to be diminished by belonging to half of society that has no real say in how things are run.
By Bina Nayak
An excerpt from Starfish Pickle reproduced with permission. Another tormenting night stretch ahead of Tara. The nagging pain caused by her tattoo bothers hers. Trying not to focus on it, she wishes, Balgo had stayed a bit longer to massage it away. Whatever he did for those few seconds seemed to work. She wonders if he’s sitting on a beach somewhere, laughing at the stars.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 23
A book excerpt and reading from A Sisterhood of Swans. She belongs to the sisterhood of swans seeking to pair for life, curving their necks to entwine with the perfect mate. Only, she has realized, her species is doomed to disappointment. Her disastrous choice in men is fuelled not just by a chaotic childhood but by a loss of sexual agency as she embarks on a series of doomed relationships.
Review by Rochelle Potkar
Issue no 21
Of every other emotion and feeling, love is the most powerful, and though this theme groans under a dismission of romanticising life, it flutters every now and then to the surface with equally redemptive qualities. What makes possible dialog between two poets, who have never met and are separated by vast expanses of time and space? Perhaps their intuitive understanding of time and space itself, and all that lies in between.
By Bevinda Collaço
Issue no 19
It happens to most people and it would be futile to fight it because a midlife crisis can be a lot of fun, provided you understand from the beginning that like a firecracker, it is bright, beautiful and burns out very quickly. The trick is to make sure you don’t get burned and put at risk all that you hold dear.
Review by Selma Carvalho
Issue no 19
Jose Lourenco too, I consider to be a regional writer. His stories, a collection of which materialised late 2020, titled The Fever and Other Stories, rarely, if ever explore characters outside of Goa. Nor do his characters bare their interiority, instead they emerge with an intense geographical specificity through a unique hybridity of reportage, observation, and advocacy for a certain way of life which, much like Baker’s peregrine, is also on the brink of extinction.
Review by Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 17
It is relevant that the Manohar Parrikar biography titled ‘An Extraordinary Life’, (Penguin, 2020) makes note of Parrikar’s ‘obviously handsome’ looks, likened by his friends to the on-screen idol Amol Palekar. Leaders are not made, they are born to greatness. They have certain qualities—a certain charisma—which instils in the masses hope and confidence. It is his good looks, his easy charm, his quick wit which endeared Parrikar to Goans, and it is impossible to think of him without feeling for him a certain admiration and affection.
Review by Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
Poetry in many ways is an unforgiving literary form; it refuses to resonate if it is not confessional. Novelist and short story writers can bleed ink borrowing other people’s lives, but the poet has to bare their own, make it available to us, the reader, and in this Fernandes excels; she is intimately accessible, her conversational style is not clouded by obscure references…
Review by Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
In the thematically unified collection, The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Press, 2019), Laura Besley sets a tone of intimacy and immediacy. In ‘The Motherhood Contract’ she writes, ‘You must not tell the mother-to-be that she may not instantly love her child.’ At the heart of being a mother is this paradox: we fall in love with that moulting mass of moth-breath we give birth too, but nothing prepares us for the reality of motherhood—the days without end, the days consumed with isolation, fatigue, and rage.
Review by Glenis M. Mendonca
Issue no 15
Irene Cardozo took over two years to read, select and gradually translate into Roman Konkani the legendary tales we have all read in English, and thread them into a book titled, Kirnnam (the rays). The book was published under the Bhurgeanche Sahitya Yeuzonn imprint by the Dalgado Konkani Academy in 2019.
By America Hart
Issue no. 14
This book tells of a journey that author Mona Dash takes, spanning ten years and two continents – India and the UK – in order to achieve what for some women seems simple: To conceive, give birth, and raise a healthy child. Some mothers face challenges when trying to conceive; others during pregnancy.
By Augusto Pinto
Issue no. 13
Her latest collection of short stories in Konkani is Aart which means ‘afflicted’ or ‘distressed’. This is Jayanti Naik’s third collection of short stories after Garjan (1989); and her 2004 Sahitya Award winning collection Athang. It contains 17 short stories written between 2005 and 2018. Incidentally some of these like ‘Uma’, ‘Naman’, ‘Itsapurti’, ‘Khyast’ and ‘Jait’ are available elsewhere to the reader in English translation in The Salt of the Earth, (Goa1556, 2017).
By Augusto Pinto
Issue no. 12
Catharsis is a Greek word which means cleansing, but in the context of the arts is regarded as the purifying or purging of depressing emotions like pity and fear by creating art that is tragic. This is what Viegas’s writing and painting attempts to achieve in Song Sung Blue, the life-story of a Goan Catholic woman named Divina
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 12
Life is not a passage of random events; it’s the constant and conscious creating and culling of culture, and in that cull, how do we retain parts of ourselves? Love ‘n Share It (2018) by Bennet Paes is, on the face of it, a fictional love story set in Paes’s beloved Sashti (roughly south) Goa, but within its many folds is the memory of a Goa lost or at any rate fading. Paes is not unique in being preoccupied with the past.
