Now Reading: Four women in a bar tell stories in Ladies’ Night
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Four women in a bar tell stories in Ladies’ Night
Frontline reviews Sucheta Dasgupta's debut fiction collection Ladies' Night, where four women gather in a bar and tell stories. The book, priced at Rs 499, explores themes of memory, voice, and forgetting.…
The Story in Brief
Frontline reviews Sucheta Dasgupta's debut fiction collection Ladies' Night, where four women gather in a bar and tell stories. The book, priced at Rs 499, explores themes of memory, voice, and forgetting. The women are unnamed, identified by traits like Bubbly, Gaunt, Obnoxious, and the White-Haired Woman. Bengal's landscapes and culture form a fifth character. The collection blends realism, satire, myth, fantasy, and meta-fiction. Ghost stories and a journalistic sequence about a silenced feminist writer underscore the fear of being forgotten. The final story offers a quiet, perfect ending.
The Indian Opinion
Some may dismiss a debut story collection as too experimental or niche. But Ladies' Night shows that formal playfulness can serve serious themes without losing coherence. The book's insistence on letting women speak for themselves, rather than being spoken about, is a refreshing antidote to narratives that reduce female experience to stereotypes. The real test will be whether it reaches readers beyond literary circles.
Source: frontline.thehindu.com
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