Herbert

Presenting a completely new language and remarkable narrative power, this novel is a testament to how a story, despite its size, can become a vivid account of its time and life. Renowned storyteller Devesh Roy believes that no other novel as original as Herbert has been written in Bengali in contemporary times. Poet-storyteller Nabarun Bhattacharya, awarded the 1997 Sahitya Akademi Award, is among the rare writers whose debut novel received this award. This work, which created a tremendous stir in contemporary Bengali literature, had already received the Narasingh Das Award and the Bankim Award. This novel is not merely the biography of the protagonist, Herbert Sarkar, but the tale of a man, traversing the history of his time, who carries a history within him and who, unsuccessfully, intervenes in his own time to give meaning to his ordinary life. The novelists narrative, presenting the history of time and opening a window to the history within Herbert, begins each chapter with lines of poetry from nineteenth-century Bengali poets, serving as a life philosophy. The saga of an ordinary man, encompassing individuals, generations, ancestral homes, neighborhoods, cities, relationships, brotherhood, alienation, social order, political systems, resistance to systemic change, capitalist modernity and its cruelty, is constructed. All this, with such intense impact in such a small novel, is possible due to its unique composition and distinctive language style, which, unlike the conventional and familiar conventions of novel writing, are Navarun Bhattacharyas original invention. This novel is the history of time, not the past that has passedit continues. And Herbert, too, does not diehe is reborn again and again.