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This
collection of fifteen short stories is the author's
third volume of short fiction, a form which she regards
as lending itself to exciting exploration into the
realm of ordinary, everyday experience. She employs a
variety of themes such as marriage, love,
disappointment, dreams of liberation, etc., to show a
complex web of human relationships at work. The
traditional form of the short story encompassed a neat
plot with a surprise ending or a climax which left the
reader with a sense of shock of the unexpected. Today's
short story, however, has undergone a protean change in
its episodic form and open ending. In the place of a
neat plot what we have is a sense of the fragmentariness
of movements. It is this fragmentariness of modern life
and the absence of any sense of a holistic world view
that these fifteen stories try to imply. The short story
can indeed be seen as a Lyric in its evocation of mood
and atmosphere. Most of the stories here do no more than
try to capture certain effects of light and space. There
is, for instance, a story entitled Her Story written
self-reflexively, the narrator facing the problem of how
to write her story. America as the promised land,
leading to the brain drain of third world countries, is
another common theme in some stories. In a world as
complex as ours one hesitates to make any profound
statements about life. But yes, at the same time one is
given brief yet startling glimpses into the hidden lives
of ordinary people.
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