I can’t sleep anymore Piano. Storms. White noise Nothing works.

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.

The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017) co-edited by Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson made significant observations about the increase in global movement of people, capital, products, cultures and ideologies;

I hold stares - I sing to the moon Rigid, motionless - senseless woes

The human race is doing quite well. There was a possibility of a climate catastrophe in the early 21st century but they came to their senses soon enough and managed to deal with it by 2050.

During my adolescent years, I devoted a significant portion of my time exploring the idea of ‘summer love’. The cinephile in me went from cheesy Disney Channel flicks like Lizzie McGuire: The Movie (2003) to masterpieces like Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), while the bibliophile in me devoured Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007) and John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines (2006). However, I had to acknowledge all the ways in which these stories didn’t feel relatable to me. Being a Bengali, I’ve grown up reading about the intense romance shared by Devbabu and Paro or watching the pangs of unrequited love in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964). Should I then dismiss the ‘summer fling’ as an irrelevant Western trope? A thing of the sunny Florida beaches and umbrella topped cocktails?

Unshaven, skeletal men, with hollow, black-ringed eyes, sitting in silent solitude in inner city gutters. Youngsters turned ageless by addiction, their endless need for the next fix drowning out all other desires, commitments or relationships.

Readers over the last two centuries have generally liked the bright and sparkling world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whereas Persuasion has often been described as “a departure from the rest of the novels, a turning away from the brilliant and public play of the mind for the deep and private truths of the heart” (Morgan 168).

Like my long dead father’s face

They said, when it will be the darkest

Splashes of blue in the springtime green,

In the state of seige that we are living in across the world, or, like myself, in an Italy emerging from the pandemic battlefield, a riveting book is our best means of being transported beyond our confined horizons.

“Mamaa, mama re! Would you like to munch on my toast and have a sip from my sugary milk tea?”

The twentieth century’s interactions with the popular revolutions, capitalist advent, authoritarianism, World Wars, repressive state-system paves the way for a frowning skepticism about the Enlightenment metanarrative and nuances the global literary firmament with dystopian motif.

Looking for exceptional reading a month after the coronavirus pandemic set in, I took up the Portuguese writer José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, reckoning that a Nobel Prize winner’s work would be well worth spending time on in these quarantine days.

On offer is a remarkably candid biography of Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the powerful story-teller of the twentieth century; highlighted by her singly recognised classic novel, Rebecca (1938). At the time,

Now that we are fortunate enough to be left behind,

One year goes by in the blink of an eye But the memories remain as livid as ever.

Any pandemic is crushing. COVID-19 is no exception. It strains cognition and emotion. It tanks economies. It disrupts communication. It alters psychology. It breeds panic and paranoia.

Look! Look outside Behold the state of the world