Posted by: netaZneta May 28, 2005
Quagmire-------Deep
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Deep ji, Thanks for sharing your story. Here are some basic observations, to be used, abused, or ignored as you wish; they mostly focus on the first part of your work. Please indulge me. The mystery, the suspense is established effectively. Who is this Dibya, perhaps a hot, ex-flame who wants to rekindle old memories? Is there a love story lurking? How is this "conflict" going to be resolved? Questions like these are evoked early and help maintain the readers' interest in the narrative. Also, the dialogue is well done. The flow of a telephone conversation, with a distracted speaker trying to squirm out of an awkward jam, is captured realistically, with light humor--for instance, when Arun explicates on his irritation over questions like "yo kaha paryo?", and when he enjoys the upgrade from "ko boleko" to "Hazur ko bolibakseko". On the other hand, besides being difficult to perceive sensually, I think the play on the sweet/soft/firm voice of Bidya is overdone. And the one time the voice is made concrete through a simile ("misri"), it does not work, at least for me. "Misri" is pure sugar and suggests a sense of the saccharine, I think. In contrast, here is my favorite sentence: "He blessed a dusty paper by the phone with Dibya's numbers." Unlike the "sweet voice", this is a concrete, poetic, and evocative image, which can be further fine-tuned with more details, if the author so wishes. (More in a moment)
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