Five Movements in Praise
By Sharmistha Mohanty
Published by Almost Island Books (2013)
Hardcover, 122 pages | ISBN-13: 978-81-921295-1-8
“A book as vast as the world, as light as breath, as passionate as love, as humble as prayer. Sharmistha Mohanty has written an enchanting book, profound and delicate, a book to which I feel particularly close: life as a journey, to discover oneself and others; the journey as an immersion into a different time, into a present that widens out to embrace the world. A journey in which the self rediscovers the most authentic truth about itself, losing itself in the landscape and in others, becoming truly anonymous or concretely universal rather than vainly subjective, as the self always is when it loves, roams, when it watches the flow of a river, the shadow descending into the valleys, the ruins of the ancient cities and the garbage of modern ones. A lucid and relentless book, but a book of praise and love - for things, others, life.”
— Claudio Magris
Five Movements in Praise is a fictional work that brings together images and text. Here, the landscape and the human have equal presence, and the pleasures of the book are not in the fulfillment of narrative expectations, but in the creation of new pathways of desire in storytelling.
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PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
“Sharmistha Mohanty is a clear and present example of the writer as caver, her work a descent into rock in pursuit of a shape half known and calling. It’s not surprising that her touchstone is the great temple at Ellora. Her reader moves with something of the excitement of the soldier who discovered that series of caves when out hunting, but the author’s stance is that of the first sculptor as he paused on the volcanic outcrop to imagine his way down into the living rock. An artist’s work has always been to chip away in a mineral darkness, but Mohanty brings to what might have turned an abstract project (the uncovering of a design fully formed in the head), a private tenderness, as she discovers image after image of a love whose emblem is the sexless caress, of lovers leaning out into nothing, of strangers meeting and touching in a mausoleum or in a painted forest.”
—I. Allan Sealy
“Sharmistha Mohanty is remarkable above all for her determination to shift narrative away from the easy urgencies of Western fiction towards a text that hovers between the contemplative and the hypnotic, sculpting extended landscapes of feeling from the quiet friction between realism and myth. To read Five Movements is like coming across an animal of a new species, but one that immediately appears to be in tune with its environment.”
— Tim Parks
“Sharmistha Mohanty’s latest novel is an intricate, idiosyncratic masterpiece which demands to be read solely on its own terms.”
— Aditya Mani Jha in the Sunday Guardian
“Moving between darkness and light, sadness and serenity, this haunting composition keeps shifting focus from major to minor keys as it shores up a hypnotic calm at its still centre... it is a narrative of restless peregrinations, across vistas of time and space, and executed with the confidence of one who is not afraid of what the encounter between prose and poetry might bring. Unapologetically elliptical, Five Movements is the sort of text that yields its meaning only to those who are willing to persist, believing that it does have comfort to offer in the end.”
— Somak Ghoshal in Live Mint
“Five Movements in Praise pursues a more ambitious course, moving beyond the internal waters of confessional, coming-of-age narrative, and aiming at the open sea of experimental literature... Such a tour de force is accomplished through Mohanty’s peculiar form of prose poetry, a rich and eloquent descant that alternates description, reflection, and speculation and is punctuated by symbolic images and allegorical figures that recur, with increasing complexity of meaning, throughout her work.”
— Graziano Krätli in World Literature Today