Centrepiece: New Writing and Art
from Northeast India
Ed. Parismita Singh
ZubaanEdited by writer, graphic novelist, and
teacher Parismita Singh, Centrepiece
offers a textured wealth of stories
told in both images and text. This
superb compilation of visual art and
thoughtful examination facilitates a
thought-provoking journey into the
methodology and motivation behind
storytellers and the mediums through
which they tell the stories of their time.The Heart of a Stranger:
An Anthology of Exile Literature
Ed. André Naffis-Sahely
Pushkin PressThis collection draws together writing
from six continents from more than
two dozen languages and sampled
across the span of recorded human his-
tory in service to the common theme of
migration and exile. Though the loca-
tions and historical contexts morph and
shift over the centuries, the power of
the human spirit to persist in the face of
upheaval and adversity is the common
denominator in this collection.Nota Bene
This trilogy gave me a whole new way of
looking at how books could be written. The
quick style blending fact, fiction, and auto-
fiction and blurring all those lines proved
to be an exhilarating experience. There’s a
bit in Nocilla Experience, the second novel,
where a filmmaker encounters a problem
while editing his latest film: a third of the
reel has been destroyed, leaving all of the
characters headless. “It dawned on him that
books and reading in the future would not
consist of hypertexts or any other techno-
logical offshoot, but this: decapitated films.”
Hydralike, the heads are cut off one by
one in these books, not literally, but nar-
ratively. Passages stop just sort of giving a
feeling of embeddedness within a character,
or when they run long (as they do in the ill-
conceived first third of Nocilla Lab, which
is one long sentence), they still maintain a
kind of icy distance, a fascination with the
exterior and not much to say about the inte-
rior, while still giving tantalizing if some-
what baffling passages such as the following:
“And this is why I don’t believe that the
explanation for inhospitable places, places
effectively deactivated from the flow of the
world, is that mankind has given up on
them, or indeed on life, given that these
things exist only in language, rather I
believe that this deactivation of inhos-
pitable places comes about because they
are the rest of the world’s daydream.”
Indeed many of the places and peo-
ple read as figments out of a dream,
and the first novella is in fact called
Nocilla Dream. A quote regarding the
Kuleshov effect found in Nocilla Dream
gives us a hint to how the book is
working: it’s a film technique in which
the same image is juxtaposed against
various other images, thus changing
the initial image (though it technically
remains the same). Is that what the
reader should make of the constant
repetition of Martin Sheen’s Apocalypse
Now monologue? How more is teased
out every time? Or how the bar in
Sardinia is like the one in Azores? These
refrains, repeated throughout the text, seem
less like anchors and more like a light slowly
revealing something in the dark.
As much as it’s about anything, The
Nocilla Trilogy is about writing and books
themselves, which is probably why I liked
it so much. It’s bold and very much itself.
Speaking about a corkboard full of messages
that sailors would leave one another in a bar
that had since sunk into the ocean: “The
corkboard and all the words it bore taking
on a different meaning entirely, a previously
unseen meaning, a meaning that breaks
through the frontier of that sometimes
insipid feeling between us that sudden-
ly, upon disappearance, becomes essen-
tial.” What happens when reality comes
in? What happens when the elements and
entropy meet the controlled chaos of the
fictionalized cut-up? These questions aren’t
answered by Nocilla. But now we have new,
better questions.
J. David Osborne
El Paso, TexasWORLDLIT.ORG 97