Details

ISBN-10: 0982624611
ISBN-13: 9780982624616
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publish Date: 11/05/2010
Dimensions: 6.55" L, 5.61" W, 0.46" H

My Kind of Girl

Translator: Arunava Sinha

Paperback

Price: $15.00

Overview

A modern-day Bengali Decameron, My Kind of Girl is a sensitive and vibrant novella containing four disarming accounts of unrequited love. In a railway station one bleak December night, four strangers from different walks of life –a contractor, a government bureaucrat, a writer, and a doctor–face an overnight delay. The sight of a young loving couple prompts them to reflect on and share with each other their own experiences of the vagaries of the human heart in a story cycle that is in turn melancholy, playful, wise, and heart-wrenching. The tales reveal each traveler’s inner landscape and provide an illuminating glimpse into contemporary life in India. Coming out of a great storytelling tradition, My Kind of Girl is a moving and imaginative look at love from one of India’s most celebrated writers.

Read More
Reviews
"This gentle, affecting novel is a thoroughly entertaining read, always feeling fresh as it moves from speaker to speaker. Each man reaches deep into his own memories to share youthful passions and vulnerabilities that, by the light of day and in any other circumstances, would have remained half-buried in the mists of time."
–Joseph Schrieber, Rough Ghosts

". . . Mellow and seductive . . . Just as Chekhov's characters are caught between up-to-date Western ways and retrograde Slavic manners, in the same way these colonial Indians are torn between an English forthrightness and a thoroughly Bengali muted sensuality"
–Edmund White

"It's just got the right feel . . . . At once innocent and overwhelmingly passionate, in the manner of first love . . . A novel of delicate ideas and nuances. To capture them with the right touch of lightness couldn't have been easy, yet Sinha does just that."
Mint

"A magical and totally entertaining volume–Sinha has caught Bose's dynamic and unfetted style admirably."
India Today

"That My Kind of Girl–a classic modernist tale of four passengers stranded in a railway-station waiting room at night, recounting stories of lost loves - is engrossing is thanks not only to Sinha's abilities, but to the quality of Bose's narrative, which, unlike his earlier, Calcutta-based masterpiece, Tithidore (1949), inhabits a lighter, more Maupassant-like manner instead."
Rosinka Chaudhari

". . . Bose's charming and chatty prose provides us with tales as entertaining as either of those of its predecessors. . . My Kind of Girl . . . is another fine addition to Archipelago's growing impressive list of world literature."
Rain Taxi

"Masterful. . . . Superbly translated . . . Bose's remarkable talent of throwing his characters' voices and at the same time inhabiting their skin is on full display in this slim, moving book."
–Hindustan Times

"Wonderfully decadent. . . . [Written] with consummate mastery. . . . A gem of delight. . . . Bose stokes the embers of the story alive till the last page."
Indian Express

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 0982624611
ISBN-13: 9780982624616
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Publish Date: 11/05/2010
Dimensions: 6.55" L, 5.61" W, 0.46" H
Skip to content