Man and Madness - a book review

This book easily goes under the category chic lit, a term that has gained currency thanks to a profusion of female writers. If this is the author's debut into the world of letters, then she deserves a mention among those who braved the perils of writing and forged ahead in spite of the odds inherent in such a venture. The style, if I can use that word to refer to the manner of this writing, is quaint and impulsive, an emotional outburst. The book shows promise that a more balanced and mature work may be expected from the author in time to come. 

Man and Madness reads like  a collection of impressions from a personal diary. The impressions are hastily put together to make a linked narrative after the manner of a monologue. The thing that strikes most as a discordant note is not its verbal meanderings, nor its debatable association of love with madness, but its utter lack of editorial support. Even if one ignores the strange juxtaposition of words, one is unlikely to ignore the way some are spelled. To top it all, the title smacks of sexism, unless it is intended in its erstwhile meaning in general of a human being. 

The narrative style - for lack of a stereotype to describe it, I shall use the word existential, but without the tremendous connotations that the word carries - is painfully repetitious of a single simple theme of a woman being misunderstood and man, the selfish, egotistic, mad man, never really understands the beauty and fragrance of love that the woman so easily emanates from every breath of her life.  

To add to the pathos of man-woman love, there is the woman who is bruised mentally and and also terminally ill. Even in that condition, she overwhelms all who come into contact with her, with her unflagging goodness and the inexhaustible source of love. She is the very personification of love that man in his crude, crass and infantile nature would never understand. He is the very personification of madness. And paradoxically, the woman is ever seeking love in return from that man who he is patently incapable of giving it.  

Poesy is prosaic, though it succeeds certainly in breaking the fatiguing routine of the narrative. Unrhymed meter, 'emotion..._not_ recollected in tranquility...', there is in it the same expression of unrequited love that underlies its prose counterpart. 

The dry unedited narrative seems to have been hastily culled from the pages of a personal diary that was never intended for publication. It served perhaps more to assuage one's own feelings, as a means to unburden one's heart, as a way of catharsis for one's own pent up emotions. 

The drawings look suspiciously like those found in The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. While neither the theme nor the literary merit bears any resemblance to that great work of art, this needs to be brought out for the sake of the record. 

Man and Madness by Aparna Banerjee Sarkar published by All About Books Global