<i>Kali O Kolom</i> January 2008
This latest issue of Kali O Kolom contains articles on three foreign authors: Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (aged 90) and his novella written after a silence of ten years (its English translation has been released as Memories of My Melancholy Whores), and Normal Mailer, the American novelist who died recently. While the one on de Beauvoir is replete with commonplaces, anything on Marquez is always eminently readable, and the one here is no exception. The piece on Mailer, though informative and informal, yet fails to discuss Mailer's 1968 Armies of the Night, which won him both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and boosted the genre of creative nonfiction to new heights--though part of the problem is, as the writer correctly points out, the unavailibility of books in Dhaka . There are two graceful and affectionate in-memoriums: one of Proshanto Kumar Pal (the biographer of Rabindranath who completed 10 volumes of his Rabijiboni and yet left his task unfinished, a commentary perhaps on the amount of toil necessary to completely view the Poet's life and work), and Sanjeev Chowdhury, Bangladeshi writer, editor and musician. Among the essays there is an account of some fascinating research being conducted about women writers of pre-modern East Bengal by writer Shaheen Akhtar, two volumes of which has been published (and which also has been favourably reviewed in this particular issue of Kali O Kolom). There is also the usual complement of art/artist and book reviews, poems and short stories--among the latter Nasima Anis's Daat (Teeth) and Ashutosh Debnath's Ghashforing (Grasshopper) make for enjoyable reading. There is an usual piece on Tokyo's car shows (Motorgaari'r Kabya) by Manjurul Haque, demonstrating both a writing style and choice of theme not usually encountered in Bangla. As usual, all pieces and articles are accompanied by the drawings and sketches of some of the best artists of the country, which by themselves make for a separate category of aesthetic experience.
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