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The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma relates the inner life of Partha Sarma, a 24-year-old firmly ensconced in his shell after his first experiences with the ‘real world’ leave him frustrated and bewildered. In many ways, he is an extreme personification of this tendency among young people plunged into the harshness of the post-university world.
We pick up the story as a clearly disaffected Partha finds himself increasingly estranged from notions of ‘sensible living’ and sinking into paralysing epistemic musing. The situation unfolds as his search for meanings gains urgency through a most unlikely catalyst: infatuation.
So charmed is he by a young woman acquaintance that he associates her with all that is desirable and good and worth aspiring to. Suddenly, the price of being an outsider begins to be extracted in emotions.
The underlying assumption in this work is that character portrayal forms the core of a novel. It attempts to capture through character delineation subtle individual and social tendencies.
The shades of the protagonist`s mind are revealed through introspective journal entries and his interactions with a range of characters: a former-aristocrat who fancies himself to be a mystic; a phony, smart-mouthed idler with a penchant for stating commonsense; a childhood friend who plays the game and follows all the rules; and his concerned, mild-mannered parents. The description of the lives and the motivations of these and other characters is further used for wry observation of the Indian middleclass, the social milieu in which the story is set.
Partha as a character provides an interesting vantage point to observe society from. For one, he is intelligent but quite unremarkable. His understanding of the world is still a random grid of young-adult pessimism, academic skepticism (a vestige of his university training), commonsense, a keen eye for hypocrisy and contradiction, and utter emotionality. What makes him a worthwhile protagonist is his refusal to suspend disbelief just because it is painful; he possesses a certain intellectual honesty and emotional intensity that make his seemingly ordinary dilemmas compelling.
Alienation of various kinds are themes that run through the novel: alienation from Nature, from peers, from societal notions of success, from norms, from mysticism and religion, from so-called commonsense, and from hierarchies.
The Long Reverie of Partha Sarma traces the growth of this alienation to a seemingly unbearable point and then provides an unexpected reprieve that suggests an almost epiphanic experience of an emotion that will hold him to the world and make him go on.
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