Skip to main content

Book Review: Mumblings from the Depth by Jithu Biji Thomas

Mumblings from the Depth by Jithu Biji Thomas is as riveting collection of twenty one short stories. The collection has indeed short stories, running hardly up to 4 pages. A lot has been uncovered in this book about various shades of life via a gamut of characters and their grim and tender circumstances. The author made a desperate attempt to bring alive the voices that often lump up till throat but always scared to go out ringing.


The collection is prominent in voicing the concerns of people who are often lost in memory lanes – there is something that we all long to correct and hope to get back by hook or crook. For instances, in stories like ‘Will That Same Rain Fall Again’ – the narrator seeks to have his legs back lost in a long forgotten war but more than that he longs for a girl that used to sell flowers beneath his window during rain. The ending is heartbreaking; the tragedy of incidents is somehow uncomfortable. Other prominent themes in the book are loss, love, redemption, fear, nature, reminisces and a few more.

You may sigh in appreciation for the author at some of the stories while reading, such as Beck…Beck…Seven Minutes, and The prisoner Without a Jail. In these stories, it seems like a canvass of emotions have been painted with judicious use of vocabulary and language usage. The collection spans across various timelines, like a free fly bird, it visits Iraq, Syria, Japan, and Germany and there are stories related to Nazis trampling innocent Jews, a family fleeing the war-torn homeland in search of life in the darkness of an ocean, a Japanese person surviving the Titanic sink.

Jithu Thomas may revoke the memories of great writers like O. Henry and Oscar Wilde among the voracious and old readers. Nearly all stories are good at capturing the sense of moment and stirring a feeling of awe. His style to put a short prose before every story is terrific and helps a lot in understanding the overall tone and feel of the stories. It’s a heartfelt collection that can be read over and again. The USP is that it’s too short to finish in one sitting without bothering about breaks.

Thomas’ style is elegant with carefully crafted sentences and precision in vocabulary. All the stories are bliss to read if one is a lover of short story genre. The themes are sometimes morbid and full of evident pain, but the authorial voice always comes with empathy and compassion. To write about the awkward and the bizarre and the sad without slipping into easy criticism or mockery is what makes ‘Mumblings from the Depth’ a unique short story collection in its genre. There are no redundant cheap shots disguised as twists and turns in the end. These stories observe the trials of life with a great deal of softness and it speaks to the humanity in all of us.

Best Buy from Amazon
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should
67 comments
Read more

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo
63 comments
Read more

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r
23 comments
Read more