Spaced Out by Time

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Two Salvador Dali paintings feature prominently in the cover design of Rajorshi Chakraborti8217;s compelling debut novel: 8220;The Sleep8221;, which depicts a giant sleeping head held up by crutches, and 8220;The Persistence of Memory8221;, which shows a landscape eerily bedecked by melting clocks. It8217;s a fitting design for a book strongly rooted in the surrealist tradition. Running through Or the Day Seizes You are a continuous sense of dislocation, of time being stretched out to the point where it doesn8217;t mean anything, and a paranoia based on uncertainty about where dream-life ends and waking-life begins.

Which also means it8217;s difficult to catch the book in a straight plotline. It doesn8217;t have a conventional beginning, middle and end, and it feels almost irrelevant to summarise the contents. But for the record, here goes: Niladri Dasgupta, a Calcutta-based man in his mid-30s, discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. Shortly afterwards he leaves the country and goes to London by himself, returning only five years later to attend the funeral of an uncle who was murdered during an altercation at a traffic jam.

Soon he learns unpleasant truths about the reasons for the estrangement between his father and the deceased uncle, discovers that a vital part of his life 8212; involving his family8217;s cruelty towards a neighbour 8212; was founded on an falsehood. He visits his ex-wife, is struck by how completely she has settled into a new life without him. Intercut with this are vignettes from his life in London 8212; including an extraordinary, dreamlike passage set in a sex club and a trip to Normandy that ends in a terrifying, hallucinatory car chase. Near the end of the story, Niladri is fleeing once again, this time as the result of his father8217;s foolishness in taking on a powerful local ganglord.

Nothing in this plot is remarkable of itself, but what8217;s notable is the ease with which Chakraborti creates the sense of a life that8217;s perpetually adrift. In its refusal to draw obvious connections between various episodes in Niladri8217;s life, this book is, paradoxically, more effective than a conventional narrative would have been. This is a story about missed connections, about the vast spaces that can exist between people in close relationships, about being repeatedly distracted from important tasks. At its centre is a passive narrator, content to be scribbled on like a blank slate. 8220;Forgive me if I narrate nothing in order and have omitted so much that must have occurred around me,8221; Niladri says at one point, 8220;I probably represent it as if I were alone with my feelings in some underwater womb surrounded by silence.8221;

In fact, the abstract elements in the book are so effective that it8217;s almost disappointing when a more straightforward presentation of ideas is made: in, for instance, a long monologue about corruption in high places, the hegemony wielded by the powerful over the weak and how the world8217;s rich are part of a conspiracy to keep the poor in their place. Looked at as a self-contained whole, Or the Day Seizes You can be mystifying, but chapter by chapter or fragment by fragment it8217;s a thought-provoking first novel that deserves to be noted.