Readers who enjoy de-familiarization would undoubtedly enjoy Nagarkoti’s stories. What is more, he has attempted to cover a wide hodgepodge of western philosophy.[break]
His inclusion of real-life characters – Albert Camus, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, Jacques Derrida, and so forth – has given an amazing tone to his stories.
Like other Nepali authors, Nagarkoti also uses similar settings and raw materials, but gives a dissimilar presentation.
Correspondingly, Nagarkoti’s deliberate complex language and his amusing point of view of seeing the raw materials for each story can be a role model for other Nepali authors.
We have a story writing trend: most authors have been following traditional formula of story writing, but Nagarkoti has challenged that practice of story-writing prevailing in Nepal.
His one dozen stories may be quantitatively small in amount but qualitatively they are of high standard. The pacing of each story is good and has not a single tedious scene throughout the book. Once a reader starts this anthology, he will read all 12 stories in a single sitting.
Nagarkoti’s inner strength comes out along with the interplay of fact and fiction. Sometimes he makes his storytelling like journal writing; sometimes like a soliloquy; sometimes like a newspaper report, and sometimes he goes into details.
Some readers can be flabbergasted by such techniques of storytelling; the stories don’t move in linear ways, each varies over and over again.
Most of the stories incorporated in this anthology have already been published in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and some of them have been received well. In the very opening story of this anthology, “Janmadinko Upahaar” (Birthday gift), he has tried to juxtapose two dissimilar things – life and death.
This story is so marvelously written that the reader finds himself driven to read the other stories as well. The corpse of the author himself is the main character in this astonishing story.
Nonetheless, a couple of his stories seem to be long dissertations; they would offer new cognizance of various subjects – the Bible, literature, science and so forth to the readers.
Another story “Aandhakar” (darkness) is comparatively abstract; it interlinks its storyline with various western metaphysics. And, those readers who are not acquainted with those philosophies cannot relate to the main storyline. In this very story, the author has made philosophical dialogue among James Joyce, Shanker Lamichhane, Jean Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Bhupi Sherchan, Sylvia Plath and others.
Likewise, another finely woven story “Nikas” (outlet) mixes up a couple of ideas like death of God, being and nothingness, along with the philosophy of Karl Marx and Hegel.
Sometimes, it also seems that he is trying to reinterpret the western philosophy through most of his stories. In “Metaphysics,” the protagonist makes love to a dead body; it projects scary effects on the readers. “Mokshyanta: Kathmandu Fever” offers an encyclopedic tone.
In addition, the entire anthology has also been named after this title. Nevertheless, some readers may criticize this story as grandiloquent; there is a theoretical perspective along with hybrid English and Nepali.
In course of writing, the author seems to have focused on the philosophy and disposition of his characters, and he is less concerned with the setting. Another story, “Sylvia,” already published in Sarada, a monthly literary journal, is most probably the cut stone of this collection. Along with high experimentation, it sounds like a rewritten version of Plath’s biography. More to the point, it reflects the distressing tight spot faced by Plath during her lifetime and slightly it seems to have divulged the information of her suicide.
Nagarkoti, a proficient short story writer, has his own thought on the style of story telling, and the strength of his storytelling is quite forceful like the tide of a sea.
Likewise, he can play with his characters as if they are his childhood friends. In addition, this storybook is on its own philosophy-mixed inimitable written communiqué with well-designed analogies to every circumstance that is exclusively expressive till the last page.
His way of delivering ideas through carefully constructed paragraph is striking. And, most of his stories are compelling. On the one hand, Nagarkoti’s skills of elaborating ideas are quite worth envying and, on the other, his story-weaving dexterity is quite admiring.
His choice of words props up his attempt of relating the fictional and real world.
Through the stories, Nagarkoti has made efforts to fuse his meditative ideas with perceptual concepts.
While reading his stories, readers find the author quite amiable as he seems conscious of the digression. Additionally, he seems to be successful in holding the entire plot in his grip. But some readers can affirm that to digest this book, one should mandatorily come up with western literary cognizance.
Nonetheless, regarding the hitherto accepted definition of postmodernism, most of his stories can be put under the rubric of postmodern stories as they share postmodern features and meta-fictional quality.
Also, he has dismantled the previously established story-writing trends in Nepali. Not only this, but to some extent, Nagarkoti has also tried to deconstruct western metaphysics by means of this anthology.
Related story
Worth of stories
-1200x560-1779450784.webp)
