Mehreen Ahmed's Blog
January 1, 2024
Review of Incandescence published on Literary Heist_ reviewer_Chitra Gopalakrishnan
Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence folds into its pages the intriguing story of the making of Bangladesh as a nation in 1971. A mere gleam of an idea in the eyes of visionaries in the earlier years, this yearning emerged as a revolution and then a nation with a suddenness, with seemingly nothing preordained about the upsurge other than a swelling of protests and rallies.
But the bridled energies and emotions of people suppressed over centuries, gathered high amounts of precipitation in a short period of time like the monsoons in this region, exploding hard and fast into unrelenting violence, one that cleaved this region from its earlier geographical loyalties and devastated lives, lifestyles and destinies. Restoration has been slow in the making and is, as yet, an enterprise in progress. After all, social engineering takes time to come to fruition and comes at a price.
While the book subtly yet tangibly juxtaposes the past history of the region against the revolution and its entailing current realities, what runs as a leitmotif is the many other contrarieties that prevail within this milieu. An elitist way of life with ancestral homes, manicured gardens and orchards that contrasts with the popular will of people and their lives in the filth of slums. The raw-edged contradictions between cultural continuities and cultural pluralism. Secular values at variance with polemical views. Community cohesion in dissimilitude with individualists seeking a discrete identity for themselves. And, outgrown traditional values of morality turning incongruous with the unfolding new norms, the tentative new normal. And just so many more of such thorny anomalies.
Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence opens strikingly with the exploration of the intense longings of Mila who is torn between staying in her marriage that has lost its appeal and integrity and following the trail of a promising romance, one nipped in the bud. It follows the contours of her emotional fault lines and keeps up with her storyline with meticulous attention to detail till she arrives upon her decided-upon destination.
The tale, meanwhile, also, draws us in effortlessly and completely into the lives and incipient dreams of several women in her family and friend circle, across four generations, all associated with the House of Chowdhury. This is an enormous, magnificent residence, whose glory, riches and values are caught in a double whammy: its already diminishing influence now plummeting into irrelevance with the change in the societal matrix; the pincher effect proving too much to withstand for its residents.
In this regal, elegant house, Mila’s grandmother Raiza Chowdhury fights to retain the legacy of her home and her values even as she tries to control the lustful ways of her sons. Her mother Nazmun Banu holds on to her thrice-married husband which on the surface may appear to the readers to be submissive and weak-willed but if one cared to take a closer look it reveals her tenacity to stay rooted against all odds. Her aunt Lutfun follows her childhood sweetheart’s dreams by marrying the second Chowdhury son but eventually finds her own felicity with a spry that defines her. Prema, her other aunt, who in an audacious move abandons her husband and three children to marry the youngest Chowdhury son, says her truth is hers alone and she will stand by it even if others don’t understand or empathise with it. Shreya, her best friend, has her own journey to make, to find closure and her peace for the horrors of the revolution visited upon her sister, and, thus, on the family as a whole. Her orphaned maid Shimul has to find the courage to create her own new world when a kitchen wall literally collapses on her and injures her severely. And, Saima, her very own daughter, in complete contrast to her, wants to retrace her steps and find her paternal roots from which she has been severed.
Each of these women attempt to find their inner incandescence in their own way as the accepted and right way stands subverted. Are they all completely, perfectly and incandescently happy as they find the lives they have been denied? Maybe, maybe not. But their personal breakthroughs and choices are theirs, theirs alone, theirs to own and theirs to spurn. Some accept the conditions as they exist and others take responsibility for changing them. It is their journeys recounted with such vibrancy that lends the book its élan vitale.
The men in the book are given to licentious behaviour and don’t waste time agonizing over their wildly oscillating moral compasses. But the author’s gaze sweeps through their lives with compassion as the world as they know it begins to collapse before their alarmed eyes with each passing day, and they increasingly lose control over their lives, their self-assuredness. So despite their flaws, they demand our empathy as they are treated with compassion.
Binding all her character’s individual struggles survival together is the larger issue of the real nature of life, its elemental truth seeded in the daily-ness of living. One that has the potential to lift one from sadness to hope, from darkness to incandescence. That is if one wishes to discover it, dares to explore it and take it to an afterlife, an issue touched upon repeatedly through the book and not so fleetingly.
Mehreen’s control over the storyline is masterly as she switches from the large historical canvas to the everyday routines within a home and then into the intimacies of personal spaces, into the language of longing. The spare and sprawl of her content is in balance.
Her prose is one of liquid grace like the rains of Bangladesh, evocative and flowing. Both the rains and her words gird us and hold us within their spell. She captures the volley of gunfire as brilliantly she does the whooshes of bamboo groves.
Her gift of description is such that you can taste the history, culture and daily experiences of Bangladesh. An inkling of just how is here in these lines: “No one would understand or even care, why her love had increased lately for the incessant rainfall, and the swishes of the gusty winds, or the mists of the opaque drizzles, the frolicking birds such as the crows with their measured picks off the lake’s surface.”
But the bridled energies and emotions of people suppressed over centuries, gathered high amounts of precipitation in a short period of time like the monsoons in this region, exploding hard and fast into unrelenting violence, one that cleaved this region from its earlier geographical loyalties and devastated lives, lifestyles and destinies. Restoration has been slow in the making and is, as yet, an enterprise in progress. After all, social engineering takes time to come to fruition and comes at a price.
While the book subtly yet tangibly juxtaposes the past history of the region against the revolution and its entailing current realities, what runs as a leitmotif is the many other contrarieties that prevail within this milieu. An elitist way of life with ancestral homes, manicured gardens and orchards that contrasts with the popular will of people and their lives in the filth of slums. The raw-edged contradictions between cultural continuities and cultural pluralism. Secular values at variance with polemical views. Community cohesion in dissimilitude with individualists seeking a discrete identity for themselves. And, outgrown traditional values of morality turning incongruous with the unfolding new norms, the tentative new normal. And just so many more of such thorny anomalies.
Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence opens strikingly with the exploration of the intense longings of Mila who is torn between staying in her marriage that has lost its appeal and integrity and following the trail of a promising romance, one nipped in the bud. It follows the contours of her emotional fault lines and keeps up with her storyline with meticulous attention to detail till she arrives upon her decided-upon destination.
The tale, meanwhile, also, draws us in effortlessly and completely into the lives and incipient dreams of several women in her family and friend circle, across four generations, all associated with the House of Chowdhury. This is an enormous, magnificent residence, whose glory, riches and values are caught in a double whammy: its already diminishing influence now plummeting into irrelevance with the change in the societal matrix; the pincher effect proving too much to withstand for its residents.
In this regal, elegant house, Mila’s grandmother Raiza Chowdhury fights to retain the legacy of her home and her values even as she tries to control the lustful ways of her sons. Her mother Nazmun Banu holds on to her thrice-married husband which on the surface may appear to the readers to be submissive and weak-willed but if one cared to take a closer look it reveals her tenacity to stay rooted against all odds. Her aunt Lutfun follows her childhood sweetheart’s dreams by marrying the second Chowdhury son but eventually finds her own felicity with a spry that defines her. Prema, her other aunt, who in an audacious move abandons her husband and three children to marry the youngest Chowdhury son, says her truth is hers alone and she will stand by it even if others don’t understand or empathise with it. Shreya, her best friend, has her own journey to make, to find closure and her peace for the horrors of the revolution visited upon her sister, and, thus, on the family as a whole. Her orphaned maid Shimul has to find the courage to create her own new world when a kitchen wall literally collapses on her and injures her severely. And, Saima, her very own daughter, in complete contrast to her, wants to retrace her steps and find her paternal roots from which she has been severed.
Each of these women attempt to find their inner incandescence in their own way as the accepted and right way stands subverted. Are they all completely, perfectly and incandescently happy as they find the lives they have been denied? Maybe, maybe not. But their personal breakthroughs and choices are theirs, theirs alone, theirs to own and theirs to spurn. Some accept the conditions as they exist and others take responsibility for changing them. It is their journeys recounted with such vibrancy that lends the book its élan vitale.
The men in the book are given to licentious behaviour and don’t waste time agonizing over their wildly oscillating moral compasses. But the author’s gaze sweeps through their lives with compassion as the world as they know it begins to collapse before their alarmed eyes with each passing day, and they increasingly lose control over their lives, their self-assuredness. So despite their flaws, they demand our empathy as they are treated with compassion.
Binding all her character’s individual struggles survival together is the larger issue of the real nature of life, its elemental truth seeded in the daily-ness of living. One that has the potential to lift one from sadness to hope, from darkness to incandescence. That is if one wishes to discover it, dares to explore it and take it to an afterlife, an issue touched upon repeatedly through the book and not so fleetingly.
Mehreen’s control over the storyline is masterly as she switches from the large historical canvas to the everyday routines within a home and then into the intimacies of personal spaces, into the language of longing. The spare and sprawl of her content is in balance.
Her prose is one of liquid grace like the rains of Bangladesh, evocative and flowing. Both the rains and her words gird us and hold us within their spell. She captures the volley of gunfire as brilliantly she does the whooshes of bamboo groves.
Her gift of description is such that you can taste the history, culture and daily experiences of Bangladesh. An inkling of just how is here in these lines: “No one would understand or even care, why her love had increased lately for the incessant rainfall, and the swishes of the gusty winds, or the mists of the opaque drizzles, the frolicking birds such as the crows with their measured picks off the lake’s surface.”
December 30, 2023
Book Review of Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed, Reviewed by Damhuri Mahammad
https://damhurimuhammad.mystrikingly....
The Fallen Zamindar
Book Review: Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed
December 30, 2023 · BOOK REVIEW
By Damhuri Muhammad
Mehreen Ahmed's Incandescence is a postcolonial novel built from the ruins of the fall of an aristocratic family after the 1971 Bangladeshi independence revolution. Ahmed called it "The Fallen Zamindar" which was centralized in an extended noble family (House of Chowdhury), and reminded me of an extended family which was also the center of the storytelling in Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand. Its cultural dignity in Asian communitarian society hasn't only been eroded by European colonialism, but, as narrated by Incandescence, has also been destabilized by the well-educated middle class, which was actually born and raised by the Zamindars. So, modernity which is destroying old-fashioned norms doesn't come from outside, but rather from within the postcolonial culture itself. Individualism has slowly grown since the generations of Nazmun Banu's, Ashik, Sheri, Lutfun and branched out like a parasite in the Chowdhury family, until the latest descendant, Mila Chowdhury.
broken image
Raiza Chowdhury, the charismatic woman of the House of Chowdhury, the main guardian of traditional norms, had to fight against western individualism which has penetrated into the minds of her own descendants. She and her husband seem to be facing the threat of their own shadows. They certainly still have legal authority over the sustainability of the aristocratic family, and control over property and all forms of luxury in the House of Chowdhury. That's why, they didn't hesitate to expel Ashik Chowdhury and revoke his inheritance rights, because it was claimed that the youngest son's unforgivable mistake had dented the Chowdhury family's pride. However, they couldn't overthrow the critical thoughts of their children and grandchildren.
Ashik Chowdhury got caught dating a neighbor's wife. All members of Chowdhury's extended family—particularly Mr and Mrs Chowdhury—were in an uproar after he married the unapproved woman in front of a mosque Imam.Though Ashik's social status has fallen to the lowest level, he doesn't regret his individual choices which were contrary to the communal wisdom held firmly by his extended family. In fact, he became increasingly stubborn in holding to the risky principle, after getting silent support from his close siblings (Sheri and Lutfun). As the youngest son of the Chowdhury family, he isn't shy about selling pots, pans, sarees, and bed covers, which he laid out on the open pavement, to provide for his family's basic needs. He completely removed all financial dependence on his rich parents, and chose to live in a rented house in a slum area. The story about the difficulties of daily life of residents around Ashik's rented house shows how contrasting the gap between rich and poor was in the early days of Bangladesh's independence.
The next resistance of old-fashioned communal culture was played by Mila, the youngest descendant of the noble Chowdhury family. She is different from his uncle (Ashik) who was kicked out of the house. Mila doesn't mind arranged marriages. However, after marrying Irfaan, and living in the Chiwdury family's luxurious house as a young mistress, she never forgot her true lover, Rahim Alia Bangladeshi revolutionary fighter, who had actually married another woman. Mila felt that her arranged marriage was just the Chowdhury family's way of maintaining the family's dignity, and they didn't respect her individual choices. Mila's grief was an opportunity for Mehreen Ahmed to reveal the past suffering of Nazmun Banu (Mila's mother). In the Chowdury House, she is no more than a daughter-in-law, precisely the first wife of Raiza Chowdury's other son. Ekram (Mila's father) remarried another woman and was considered as normal habit by his parent. Luckily, Nazmun was the first wife, she deserved to live in the Chowdury House, and enjoyed all the luxuries of a rich wife, even though she suffered because her husband was polygamous. So, Nazmun Banu's grief was acted by Mila, her beloved daughter.
This 408-page consists of 25 titled chapters, and if read separately, felt like a separate short story. Ahmed composed it with the space and time of the present, and the past, both of which are continually connected. Ahmed's writing skill makes detailed descriptions of background scenes seem the light of twilight falling on the surface of the river, which coincides with the Azan that echoes around our settlement.
The Fallen Zamindar
Book Review: Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed
December 30, 2023 · BOOK REVIEW
By Damhuri Muhammad
Mehreen Ahmed's Incandescence is a postcolonial novel built from the ruins of the fall of an aristocratic family after the 1971 Bangladeshi independence revolution. Ahmed called it "The Fallen Zamindar" which was centralized in an extended noble family (House of Chowdhury), and reminded me of an extended family which was also the center of the storytelling in Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand. Its cultural dignity in Asian communitarian society hasn't only been eroded by European colonialism, but, as narrated by Incandescence, has also been destabilized by the well-educated middle class, which was actually born and raised by the Zamindars. So, modernity which is destroying old-fashioned norms doesn't come from outside, but rather from within the postcolonial culture itself. Individualism has slowly grown since the generations of Nazmun Banu's, Ashik, Sheri, Lutfun and branched out like a parasite in the Chowdhury family, until the latest descendant, Mila Chowdhury.
broken image
Raiza Chowdhury, the charismatic woman of the House of Chowdhury, the main guardian of traditional norms, had to fight against western individualism which has penetrated into the minds of her own descendants. She and her husband seem to be facing the threat of their own shadows. They certainly still have legal authority over the sustainability of the aristocratic family, and control over property and all forms of luxury in the House of Chowdhury. That's why, they didn't hesitate to expel Ashik Chowdhury and revoke his inheritance rights, because it was claimed that the youngest son's unforgivable mistake had dented the Chowdhury family's pride. However, they couldn't overthrow the critical thoughts of their children and grandchildren.
Ashik Chowdhury got caught dating a neighbor's wife. All members of Chowdhury's extended family—particularly Mr and Mrs Chowdhury—were in an uproar after he married the unapproved woman in front of a mosque Imam.Though Ashik's social status has fallen to the lowest level, he doesn't regret his individual choices which were contrary to the communal wisdom held firmly by his extended family. In fact, he became increasingly stubborn in holding to the risky principle, after getting silent support from his close siblings (Sheri and Lutfun). As the youngest son of the Chowdhury family, he isn't shy about selling pots, pans, sarees, and bed covers, which he laid out on the open pavement, to provide for his family's basic needs. He completely removed all financial dependence on his rich parents, and chose to live in a rented house in a slum area. The story about the difficulties of daily life of residents around Ashik's rented house shows how contrasting the gap between rich and poor was in the early days of Bangladesh's independence.
The next resistance of old-fashioned communal culture was played by Mila, the youngest descendant of the noble Chowdhury family. She is different from his uncle (Ashik) who was kicked out of the house. Mila doesn't mind arranged marriages. However, after marrying Irfaan, and living in the Chiwdury family's luxurious house as a young mistress, she never forgot her true lover, Rahim Alia Bangladeshi revolutionary fighter, who had actually married another woman. Mila felt that her arranged marriage was just the Chowdhury family's way of maintaining the family's dignity, and they didn't respect her individual choices. Mila's grief was an opportunity for Mehreen Ahmed to reveal the past suffering of Nazmun Banu (Mila's mother). In the Chowdury House, she is no more than a daughter-in-law, precisely the first wife of Raiza Chowdury's other son. Ekram (Mila's father) remarried another woman and was considered as normal habit by his parent. Luckily, Nazmun was the first wife, she deserved to live in the Chowdury House, and enjoyed all the luxuries of a rich wife, even though she suffered because her husband was polygamous. So, Nazmun Banu's grief was acted by Mila, her beloved daughter.
This 408-page consists of 25 titled chapters, and if read separately, felt like a separate short story. Ahmed composed it with the space and time of the present, and the past, both of which are continually connected. Ahmed's writing skill makes detailed descriptions of background scenes seem the light of twilight falling on the surface of the river, which coincides with the Azan that echoes around our settlement.
December 14, 2023
December 12, 2023
Mehreen Ahmed's Pushcart and Best of the Net Nominations
November 19, 2022
July 26, 2022
Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed
https://thepoetrymarket.wordpress.com/
Book Reviews
“IncandescenceIncandescence”
By Mehreen Ahmed
406 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9863807-0-4
Dark Myth Publications, Copyright 2022
Review by LB Sedlacek
In a series of passages that read like vignettes, Ahmed gives us wonderful vivid prose inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s The Last Poem—Shesher Kobita. Ahmed says in her introduction to the book that “What’s important in this book is the exploitation of the characters to the extent of what to expect from life, in general, both philosophically and materialistically?”
Ahmed achieves answers to these questions and more in this new book. She reshapes in a way the one might think a traditional novel like book should be written. It is enlightening as well as an enveloping way to read – think Paulo Coelho type of books and writing.
From the section entitled “Wave”:
“On the bank of the River Kali, the two cars pulled up. The
passengers sitting in them squeezed, came out of the cars
jostled by each other. Looking out into the murky waves,
they waited for the lifelines in the offing.”
Ahmed creates an all immersive atmosphere within these pages. It’s a journey you will want to take with her characters.
Ahmed is also author of “The Pacifist.”
Book Reviews
“IncandescenceIncandescence”
By Mehreen Ahmed
406 pages
ISBN: 979-8-9863807-0-4
Dark Myth Publications, Copyright 2022
Review by LB Sedlacek
In a series of passages that read like vignettes, Ahmed gives us wonderful vivid prose inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s The Last Poem—Shesher Kobita. Ahmed says in her introduction to the book that “What’s important in this book is the exploitation of the characters to the extent of what to expect from life, in general, both philosophically and materialistically?”
Ahmed achieves answers to these questions and more in this new book. She reshapes in a way the one might think a traditional novel like book should be written. It is enlightening as well as an enveloping way to read – think Paulo Coelho type of books and writing.
From the section entitled “Wave”:
“On the bank of the River Kali, the two cars pulled up. The
passengers sitting in them squeezed, came out of the cars
jostled by each other. Looking out into the murky waves,
they waited for the lifelines in the offing.”
Ahmed creates an all immersive atmosphere within these pages. It’s a journey you will want to take with her characters.
Ahmed is also author of “The Pacifist.”
July 19, 2022
Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed
IncandescenceReviewed by
Dr Modhura Banerjee
Assistant Professor and Head of Department
Jamini Mazumder Memorial College, West Bengal.
Radiating the Incandescent: Reading Ahmed and Remembering Tagore
Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence is a parallel exploration into the conflicts and stasis of liberation offered by eternal love and sluggish boundaries of nuptial domesticity. Mila, Rahim, Papri, Irfaan are Mehreen’s own version of Tagore’s Labanya, Amit, Ketaki and Shovonlal from his pathbreaking novel ‘Sesher Kobita’ ( The Last Poem) that has inspired the author in different phases of her adulting. Rahim And Mila,much like Tagore’s Amit and Labanya are star-crossed lovers, who redefine love by freeing it from the shackles of carnal domestic fulfilment which would in turn corrupt the purity, intensity and incandescence of what they possessed. Their love was their only chance at eternal, infinite, rejuvenation within their limited mortal existence which they did not want to soil through matrimony. Therefore, they chose to marry different partners Papri and Irfaan, who were prosaic alternations of their poetic love. Papri, a sad orphan, victim to her own circumstance, having little choice but to accept the second position in her husband’s life and Irfaan hopelessly trying to domesticate and match up to an undaunted spirit like Mila, both inevitably ending up in tragic isolation.
Mila is as strikingly iconoclastic as Labanya, yet at times so fragile, vulnerable and confused about her choice between accepting her love for Rahim or abiding to her duty as a wife to Irfaan, questioning the ethical boundaries that societal hegemony has taught her or accepting them stoically. Every choice and slips had it consequences, ensuing its own trail of tragedy, adding to the essence of Mila, taking her world by storm. Mila is guilt-ridden for her affection for Rahim due to her empathy for Papri, yet she indulges in his letters, finds validation in his love. Mila is terrified of waking-up late and displeasing her in-laws yet some how fathoms the courage to break away from a failing marriage which refuses to accept her individuality. It is the quirky women characters like Mrs. Chowdhury, Saima, Rabeya that light up the world of Incandescence. However lines like “She loved her life, she hated her life, she just didn’t know what to do with her life, her suffering purpled like the blooming jacarandas under silent, grey sky”- is where the true treasure of the book lies. It brilliantly demonstrates the skilful art of Mehreen Ahmed, her dexterity with rhetoric, her craftsmanship of language, her fondness and familiarity with the soil of Dacca. Such beautiful and powerful expressions to communicate complex human emotions is indeed a rare find. The novel is strewn with poetical diction often used to depict the raw interplay of the human world with the nature-both in its vernal tides and withering winters. The trees, the sound of azan, the aroma of coffee, the fallen branches, the lakes, the rotting grass, the changing seasons affect and predict the emotional landscape of the humans.
Dr Modhura Banerjee
Assistant Professor and Head of Department
Jamini Mazumder Memorial College, West Bengal.
Radiating the Incandescent: Reading Ahmed and Remembering Tagore
Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence is a parallel exploration into the conflicts and stasis of liberation offered by eternal love and sluggish boundaries of nuptial domesticity. Mila, Rahim, Papri, Irfaan are Mehreen’s own version of Tagore’s Labanya, Amit, Ketaki and Shovonlal from his pathbreaking novel ‘Sesher Kobita’ ( The Last Poem) that has inspired the author in different phases of her adulting. Rahim And Mila,much like Tagore’s Amit and Labanya are star-crossed lovers, who redefine love by freeing it from the shackles of carnal domestic fulfilment which would in turn corrupt the purity, intensity and incandescence of what they possessed. Their love was their only chance at eternal, infinite, rejuvenation within their limited mortal existence which they did not want to soil through matrimony. Therefore, they chose to marry different partners Papri and Irfaan, who were prosaic alternations of their poetic love. Papri, a sad orphan, victim to her own circumstance, having little choice but to accept the second position in her husband’s life and Irfaan hopelessly trying to domesticate and match up to an undaunted spirit like Mila, both inevitably ending up in tragic isolation.
Mila is as strikingly iconoclastic as Labanya, yet at times so fragile, vulnerable and confused about her choice between accepting her love for Rahim or abiding to her duty as a wife to Irfaan, questioning the ethical boundaries that societal hegemony has taught her or accepting them stoically. Every choice and slips had it consequences, ensuing its own trail of tragedy, adding to the essence of Mila, taking her world by storm. Mila is guilt-ridden for her affection for Rahim due to her empathy for Papri, yet she indulges in his letters, finds validation in his love. Mila is terrified of waking-up late and displeasing her in-laws yet some how fathoms the courage to break away from a failing marriage which refuses to accept her individuality. It is the quirky women characters like Mrs. Chowdhury, Saima, Rabeya that light up the world of Incandescence. However lines like “She loved her life, she hated her life, she just didn’t know what to do with her life, her suffering purpled like the blooming jacarandas under silent, grey sky”- is where the true treasure of the book lies. It brilliantly demonstrates the skilful art of Mehreen Ahmed, her dexterity with rhetoric, her craftsmanship of language, her fondness and familiarity with the soil of Dacca. Such beautiful and powerful expressions to communicate complex human emotions is indeed a rare find. The novel is strewn with poetical diction often used to depict the raw interplay of the human world with the nature-both in its vernal tides and withering winters. The trees, the sound of azan, the aroma of coffee, the fallen branches, the lakes, the rotting grass, the changing seasons affect and predict the emotional landscape of the humans.
July 5, 2022
Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed
Incandescence
https://amzn.asia/0nmSHsh
Regarding my new novel Incandescence, there is much to say. The story is set in the East. It is about a young impressionable girl, Mila Chowdhury, and her growing up in a dysfunctional, amoral fallen aristocratic family. Living with her extended family consisting of her grandmother, uncles and aunts, mother, and father, and fumbling through her adolescence, her unique exposure to life’s predicaments makes her privy to a paradox of existence. She wants to learn about the true nature of morality and the correct path to life, and how life manifests after death—the relationships of life with time in life and afterward. Time, teetering on the edge of life and death is a teaser that steals away surreptitiously the essence of life to the bare bone.
The story spans over three generations and every generation adds a new perspective to the novel. Mila finds out more about her mysterious family from a diary bequeathed by her grandmother. As she jots her own thoughts to it, the pages of the diary transform into an intergenerational family saga. More jottings are imminent with the new generation and are unstoppable as life is. The diary which has a life of its own, evolves in its own right as characters in it are intrinsically drawn to it to add a new entry every time—like an open book of life in which unfinished stories of many dots wait for the next entry to connect to a new dot.
The family saga is ongoing as the diary, but it reshapes into something new just like the human genome. When a child is born it takes the genes of his/her parents but becomes a new personality. The weather-beaten brown diary is thus old and dilapidated. Its pages are torn, used, and tired—it has had a long life but life is continuing and so is the diary.
The book ends nearly about three generations when the diary is also handed down to the fourth generation. The protagonist has a nominal role. It is the togetherness of all the characters which brings vibrancy to the book. The old house in which they live is not a relic but an extended character that has silently taken in the sighs and the despairs, and the love and the happiness of its residents. It immortalizes them somewhat in an unspoken history imbibed on its cold, old walls.
In a tale within a tale, the novel continues to weave many a tale from its various takes to the lead-up to the emotional maturity of the characters as viewed through the lenses of Mila Chowdhury—her growing up, the civil war, and her relationships with the members of the family, all tell many a tale of an unforgettable chain of events and memories.
Esoteric is another element that strongly binds the narrative. This is an insightful observation by a visionary who sees time and its relationship with humans not in the narrow sense of life only, but also in the afterlife. Hence, there are several depictions of visions that tie to the context of the narrative.
From a feminist angle, Incandescence can be viewed as a novel that has slowly been woven into one without any deliberate attempt at any particular agenda. The protagonist is a female who was greatly influenced by her equally strong grandmother led the pushcart at a time when the feminist movement wasn’t even born. The grandmother made radical choices as did her granddaughter. Although, by then the movement had established itself. Unbeknownst to the movement thereof, the novel falls straight into the lap of an untapped territory of the feminists for those characters.
https://amzn.asia/0nmSHsh
Regarding my new novel Incandescence, there is much to say. The story is set in the East. It is about a young impressionable girl, Mila Chowdhury, and her growing up in a dysfunctional, amoral fallen aristocratic family. Living with her extended family consisting of her grandmother, uncles and aunts, mother, and father, and fumbling through her adolescence, her unique exposure to life’s predicaments makes her privy to a paradox of existence. She wants to learn about the true nature of morality and the correct path to life, and how life manifests after death—the relationships of life with time in life and afterward. Time, teetering on the edge of life and death is a teaser that steals away surreptitiously the essence of life to the bare bone.
The story spans over three generations and every generation adds a new perspective to the novel. Mila finds out more about her mysterious family from a diary bequeathed by her grandmother. As she jots her own thoughts to it, the pages of the diary transform into an intergenerational family saga. More jottings are imminent with the new generation and are unstoppable as life is. The diary which has a life of its own, evolves in its own right as characters in it are intrinsically drawn to it to add a new entry every time—like an open book of life in which unfinished stories of many dots wait for the next entry to connect to a new dot.
The family saga is ongoing as the diary, but it reshapes into something new just like the human genome. When a child is born it takes the genes of his/her parents but becomes a new personality. The weather-beaten brown diary is thus old and dilapidated. Its pages are torn, used, and tired—it has had a long life but life is continuing and so is the diary.
The book ends nearly about three generations when the diary is also handed down to the fourth generation. The protagonist has a nominal role. It is the togetherness of all the characters which brings vibrancy to the book. The old house in which they live is not a relic but an extended character that has silently taken in the sighs and the despairs, and the love and the happiness of its residents. It immortalizes them somewhat in an unspoken history imbibed on its cold, old walls.
In a tale within a tale, the novel continues to weave many a tale from its various takes to the lead-up to the emotional maturity of the characters as viewed through the lenses of Mila Chowdhury—her growing up, the civil war, and her relationships with the members of the family, all tell many a tale of an unforgettable chain of events and memories.
Esoteric is another element that strongly binds the narrative. This is an insightful observation by a visionary who sees time and its relationship with humans not in the narrow sense of life only, but also in the afterlife. Hence, there are several depictions of visions that tie to the context of the narrative.
From a feminist angle, Incandescence can be viewed as a novel that has slowly been woven into one without any deliberate attempt at any particular agenda. The protagonist is a female who was greatly influenced by her equally strong grandmother led the pushcart at a time when the feminist movement wasn’t even born. The grandmother made radical choices as did her granddaughter. Although, by then the movement had established itself. Unbeknownst to the movement thereof, the novel falls straight into the lap of an untapped territory of the feminists for those characters.
December 23, 2020
The Blue, Red Lyrae by Mehreen Ahmed: A Review
Basha Krasnoff reviewed on Dec 21, 2020
A Review of The Blue Red Lyrae
by Mehreen Ahmed written by Basha Krasnoff
Editor, Portland Metrozine
it was amazing: 5 Stars
I have been intrigued by Mehreen Ahmed’s “way with language” for some time: as a reader, as a writer, and as an editor. Several of her stories have appeared in the literary publication I edit and in fact one of them has been woven into the fabric of this volume, The Blue Red Lyrae. The two companion stories, “Offing” and “The Cheshire Grins” are a complementary pair.
In both stories, Ahmed uses fluid language like crystal clear spring water that gently bubbles over the sharp places in the story line. She constructs her sentences and images to flow around and through the reader’s senses to pull the imagination onto alternative paths of reality. As Ahmed writes, “my soul never at peace, oscillated between here and there, between a temporary world of the body and elsewhere, a life of the mind or of the spirit. Of the mind, I noted with care. An inner self of being, where dreams took place, more so in hibernation.”
Typically, in mid-sentence, Ahmed asks the reader to suspend disbelief that the character could know or do or act in a particular way and be open and willing to follow to the completion of the story where the author leads us. As she tells us, “Destiny, life’s destination had to be made of course.”
The protagonist in “Offing,” Rhonda, expresses an affinity between herself and Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like Clarissa, Rhonda wants to show empathy for her husband but reflects on her emotional dilemmas with brooding dissatisfaction. As tension and disharmony increase in her marriage, Rhonda wonders about her husband’s place in her life. She is conflicted over what made her marry him in the first place. And like Mrs. Dalloway she engages in self-torture wondering what she might have missed not marrying the man who longed to marry her so many years ago. Both characters spend a good amount of their waking hours in wistful longing.
Ahmed tells us that her character “has been seized by a hunger, a hunger to see a blue butterfly in the first Sun, and a dazzling, plumed peacock of extraordinary colours.” The author proceeds to unfold for her characters and her readers dazzling images of extraordinary colors. Yearning gives her protagonists a profound capacity for emotion, which many of her other characters lack. Even so, her protagonist is always concerned with appearances and keeps herself tightly composed, seldom sharing her feelings with anyone. Constant streams of internal dialogue and external convivial chatter and activity keeps her soul locked safely away, which make her seem shallow even to those who know her well.
In “The Cheshire Grins,” the protagonist lives alone on a hill with her Cheshire cat, King George who is, much like Alice in Wonderland’s cat, a very significant character in Joe’s life. In this narrative, Joe is a neglected and abused child, who is abandoned and consigned to live in an orphanage by her evil stepmother. Joe grimly makes her way through unspeakable horrors to one day recede to a cabin high up in the hills with her cat. Except one stormy night, George, who hates the rain, disappears into thrashing winds and a biting downpour.
For this character, Joe, time begins to “slip surreptitiously.” Sometimes, she feels as though “the past had blanked out. That time didn’t exist” at all.” Joe felt as if nothingness defined her existence. The author tells us that “time is the ultimate reality, an eternity.” And that ‘our finite existence within this infinite reality is a paradox. This existence only gives us the illusion of an eternity of false reality. Hunger, pain, and desires are all finite and false realities that exist in the head.”
Slowly as she searches unsuccessfully for her Cheshire Cat, Joe began to see a different self. “It was her, the little girl in the orphanage but her small body was gone. It had vanished. It had grown into a new person in a new body. This newness, it was all her.” The author explains how fate opens new paths for people, new openings and new endings and that it is the “I”, the individual, that accounts for the suffering of every man and every woman throughout the ages.
While constantly overlaying the past and the present, Ahmed strives to reconcile a life lived in a mind filled with potent memories - with life-affirming acts. Throughout her stories, and through her references, the author tells us, “In wakefulness, she slept. In sleep, she woke up. There was a dream. That she had fallen into an abyss; she tried to breathe. There was no breath left in her lungs, but she resuscitated. Her dreaming paved a way to a parallel world in another reality of wakefulness.”
Ahmed is fascinated by the paradox of living in a physical world while believing that it is embedded in another realm that exists beyond the senses. She knows that the senses fall short of detecting all of reality but somehow we must continue to live in the “real” world. If you enjoy mind challenging scenarios filled with literary, historic, and philosophical references, every one of Mehreen Ahmed’s works will prove a challenge, and a delight.
A Review of The Blue Red Lyrae
by Mehreen Ahmed written by Basha Krasnoff
Editor, Portland Metrozine
it was amazing: 5 Stars
I have been intrigued by Mehreen Ahmed’s “way with language” for some time: as a reader, as a writer, and as an editor. Several of her stories have appeared in the literary publication I edit and in fact one of them has been woven into the fabric of this volume, The Blue Red Lyrae. The two companion stories, “Offing” and “The Cheshire Grins” are a complementary pair.
In both stories, Ahmed uses fluid language like crystal clear spring water that gently bubbles over the sharp places in the story line. She constructs her sentences and images to flow around and through the reader’s senses to pull the imagination onto alternative paths of reality. As Ahmed writes, “my soul never at peace, oscillated between here and there, between a temporary world of the body and elsewhere, a life of the mind or of the spirit. Of the mind, I noted with care. An inner self of being, where dreams took place, more so in hibernation.”
Typically, in mid-sentence, Ahmed asks the reader to suspend disbelief that the character could know or do or act in a particular way and be open and willing to follow to the completion of the story where the author leads us. As she tells us, “Destiny, life’s destination had to be made of course.”
The protagonist in “Offing,” Rhonda, expresses an affinity between herself and Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Like Clarissa, Rhonda wants to show empathy for her husband but reflects on her emotional dilemmas with brooding dissatisfaction. As tension and disharmony increase in her marriage, Rhonda wonders about her husband’s place in her life. She is conflicted over what made her marry him in the first place. And like Mrs. Dalloway she engages in self-torture wondering what she might have missed not marrying the man who longed to marry her so many years ago. Both characters spend a good amount of their waking hours in wistful longing.
Ahmed tells us that her character “has been seized by a hunger, a hunger to see a blue butterfly in the first Sun, and a dazzling, plumed peacock of extraordinary colours.” The author proceeds to unfold for her characters and her readers dazzling images of extraordinary colors. Yearning gives her protagonists a profound capacity for emotion, which many of her other characters lack. Even so, her protagonist is always concerned with appearances and keeps herself tightly composed, seldom sharing her feelings with anyone. Constant streams of internal dialogue and external convivial chatter and activity keeps her soul locked safely away, which make her seem shallow even to those who know her well.
In “The Cheshire Grins,” the protagonist lives alone on a hill with her Cheshire cat, King George who is, much like Alice in Wonderland’s cat, a very significant character in Joe’s life. In this narrative, Joe is a neglected and abused child, who is abandoned and consigned to live in an orphanage by her evil stepmother. Joe grimly makes her way through unspeakable horrors to one day recede to a cabin high up in the hills with her cat. Except one stormy night, George, who hates the rain, disappears into thrashing winds and a biting downpour.
For this character, Joe, time begins to “slip surreptitiously.” Sometimes, she feels as though “the past had blanked out. That time didn’t exist” at all.” Joe felt as if nothingness defined her existence. The author tells us that “time is the ultimate reality, an eternity.” And that ‘our finite existence within this infinite reality is a paradox. This existence only gives us the illusion of an eternity of false reality. Hunger, pain, and desires are all finite and false realities that exist in the head.”
Slowly as she searches unsuccessfully for her Cheshire Cat, Joe began to see a different self. “It was her, the little girl in the orphanage but her small body was gone. It had vanished. It had grown into a new person in a new body. This newness, it was all her.” The author explains how fate opens new paths for people, new openings and new endings and that it is the “I”, the individual, that accounts for the suffering of every man and every woman throughout the ages.
While constantly overlaying the past and the present, Ahmed strives to reconcile a life lived in a mind filled with potent memories - with life-affirming acts. Throughout her stories, and through her references, the author tells us, “In wakefulness, she slept. In sleep, she woke up. There was a dream. That she had fallen into an abyss; she tried to breathe. There was no breath left in her lungs, but she resuscitated. Her dreaming paved a way to a parallel world in another reality of wakefulness.”
Ahmed is fascinated by the paradox of living in a physical world while believing that it is embedded in another realm that exists beyond the senses. She knows that the senses fall short of detecting all of reality but somehow we must continue to live in the “real” world. If you enjoy mind challenging scenarios filled with literary, historic, and philosophical references, every one of Mehreen Ahmed’s works will prove a challenge, and a delight.
August 30, 2020
Author Shout Reader Ready Awards
http://authorshout.com/2019-reader-re...
The Pacifist Silver Award Recommended Read, 2019
Moirae Bronze Award Honourable Mention, 2019
The Blotted Line Bronze Award Honourable Mention, 2019
The Pacifist Silver Award Recommended Read, 2019
Moirae Bronze Award Honourable Mention, 2019
The Blotted Line Bronze Award Honourable Mention, 2019
