Book Review by Rakhi Dalal
Book Title: Gooday Nagar
Author: Maithreyi Karnoor
Publisher: Tranquebar
Where is this city – Gooday Nagar? What does the city mean to the people living in it? Are they happy? Do they hope, love, endure? What do they do when their lives are upended — do they shatter or carry on?
Maithreyi Karnoor’s Gooday Nagar is a city which could be anywhere in any country. It’s a city where ordinary people keep trying to live their ordinary lives come hail or storm or love or pain or whatever else life throws their way. It’s a city where the ordinary stories hinge on a disquieting peculiarity governed by something unnamable or as one of the characters in the story refer ‘the greater sentience’. Imagined differently for each story, the city thus functions less as fixed geography and more a state of mind.
A bilingual author, Karnoor has to her credit an earlier novel in English, Sylvia, a Kannada one, Hettavara Neralu (Parental Shadow), and a poetry collection, Skinny Dipping in Tiger Country. Her English translations of Kannada novels A Handful of Sesame and Tejo Tungabhadra have won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Prize for translation. A writer with an unusual perspective, she has imagined a fictitious city that takes on varied hues.
The stories in this collection resist neat categorisation. In the first story ‘Return of the Salesman’ we meet common aspiring people of Gooday Nagar fascinated by the appearance of a smart English-speaking salesman. Their curiosities pique, awakening desires for a better life. With his return though, the business resumes as usual. Here, the city is a self-contained world evoking nostalgic reminiscence of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days.
‘Uncity’, composed of a poem and three striking vignettes — each starting with lines from C.P. Cavafy , is bound by a shared attentiveness to the absurdities and dislocations of contemporary life. The characters here are defined by their situations, by the peculiar worlds they inhabit. Existing in places they can’t leave, they navigate through life with serenades on the known and unknown.
‘You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
The city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
Turn gray in these same houses’
— ‘The City’ by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
These stories are about people who inhabit the city, yet whose lives remain unaffected by the places they dwell in. For no matter where they live, there is no escape from the city — it is a shifting construct — at once everywhere and nowhere.
In ‘Ringa Ringa Roses’, spinning around love and betrayal and ‘A Writing Competition’, where writing sustains the balance perturbed by COVID, the characters move through the fragile process of rebuilding meaning. The ordinary is attuned to the all-knowing but not all-loving ‘the greater sentience’ who can either metamorphose the incoherent to coherent or just let its unhurried hand write the destiny.
The most memorable stories in this collection hinge on a single, disquieting conceit pursued with both rigour and restraint. In ‘Alone at Last’, a post-apocalyptic landscape where everything has turned into cake becomes the stage for a meditation on excess, decay, and survival. What begins as a darkly comic premise gradually acquires an unsettling weight, as the quest for survival also becomes a quest for companionship.
Karnoor handles the tonal and narrative shifts in the stories with a deliberate lightness, introducing the strange without spectacle. This restraint prevents the stories from tipping into excess; even the most fantastical elements are anchored by clarity of language that makes them feel oddly plausible. As the reader move from one story to the next, the sense of disorientation deepens, until the surreal begins to feel like the only adequate language for the world the book describes.
Rather than offering a unified vision of the city she invokes, Karnoor presents it as a shifting assemblage of experiences, each story illuminating a different facet of its strangeness. The result is a collection that lingers not because it resolves its questions, but because it refuses to, leaving the reader suspended in its unsettling, darkly luminous world.
Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .
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