Sudipto Chattopadhyay

A Nowhere Man: fault lines of love Sudipto Chattopadhyay

Sudipto's people pull me like string magnets. Difficult to stop reading" - Ujjal Chakraborty, Eminent novelist, and National Awardee film scholar. "Captures an artist's deepest longings, restlessness, loss, void and confusion. The surreal and the real merge to create a certain delicious madness. The narrative is gorgeous, deeply moving, lyrical and hilarious" - Brahmanand Singh, National awardee and a leading writer. Conventionally, a first novel often suffers the contradictions inherent in sentimentality and piety. It is also branded with the blemish of autobiography. A first-time novelist is eager to pour out his heart and hence his work becomes baroque in its excesses. The author of A Nowhere Man realizes and relishes all that. He is, by your leave, the quintessential zealot, exploring a narrative and expounding a thesis at the same time. What emerges is a work that is comic, sentimental, and macabre. The novel is an irreverent exercise at madness and mindless mayhem within the confines of a racy narrative exterior. There is both conceit and humility, garbed in the guise of Avant-Garde adventure. On the one hand, it tells the simple story of those who loved, made love, lost or won, on the other, it aspires to be a pious elegy of suffering in transit.