Indian Winter
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15
Ratings1
Average rating4
A queer writer travelling through India can't escape the regrets of his past nor the impending ruin of his present. "I am leaving for the winter - I have to get away from this small town and all its dangers - to write, read, think, all the most important things in the world but which are thought the least important, the most expendable." Thus begins the Indian winter of our narrator, a queer writer and translator much like the author, a winter that includes a meandering journey through India, trying to write about a long-ago lover whose death he has just learned of. While on this journey into memory, he flees his current faltering relationship in search of new friendships and intimacies. Inspired by Antonio Tabucchi's Indian Nocture, and by the writings of Anaïs Nin, Rachel Cusk, and Carole Maso, among others, Indian Winter finds itself where the travel diary, the kunstlerroman, poetry, and autofiction meet. But the heartbreak brought on by his unravelling relationship and his family's inability to accept his queerness cannot be outrun; as he traverses India, our narrator can't help but repeatedly encounter himself and the range of love and alienation he has within.
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I'm a sucker for any novel written by a poet. The dense amalgamation of poetry given room to breathe across chapters. And even as the narrator muses “a fiction of carefully crafted language with flowing sentences and paragraphs always makes me suspicious” I found the language hypnotizing.
A queer poet, uncertain or maybe ambivalent about his current relationship, and learning of the death of a former lover, escapes to India. It is the country of his parents and he recounts the sun of Varkala, the loneliness of Bengaluru, and the doom of Hyderabad. It's a queer, brown, Eat, Pray, Love — a travelogue filled with wry details of the many people he encounters that nonetheless reveals that “few are the people that live close, and listen hard.”
