The Art of Leaving Things Out

Recommendations is a weekly column, in our Books section, where we invite a well-known author to recommend four books translated from an Indian language. These are not just recommendations, but books that have made an impact on their creative world. 

This month, we will feature author Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari's selections.

Principles of Prediction
by By Anushka Jasraj

Wallace Stevens, one of the most intelligent of twentieth century poets, once said that poetry must resist intelligence. But the truth is it requires a lot of intelligence to resist intelligence, especially so in fiction where I suppose this would involve not only depriving the narrative arc a rational course but also both internal coherence and external consistency to its characters’ thoughts and actions so as to enable a collapse of correspondence between who we think we are and what we do in this world. This ambiguity and disconnect necessarily results in a loss of “why” and is very much native to humans, yet, it is very hard to account for well in stories. Some of the stories contained in this debut collection by two-time Commonwealth Short Story Prize-winning author Anushka Jasraj have an excellent foundation in this aspiration, and they succeed in their pursuit, constantly negating the essential “why” that we have great difficulty in parting with. (The opening story, “Drawing Lessons”, my favourite, is an example). Her art of ellipsis, the art of leaving things out, is complemented by an equally exquisite, austere prose befitting her purposes.