Enter a gallery where art creates a unique world of its own. Each one of the frames present different facets of a hidden concept, allowing the beholder to derive his or her own meaning of the art exhibited. The experience is both enigmatic and immensely surreal.
Myriad influences
Reading Dog Space gives a similar feel. The use of words by the writer doesn’t make it an easy read but they bear a brooding sense of reality that comes forth only with a deep read into the book. All because the creative traits, as reflected from the writings, border on the very subtle. Much like in contemporary art.
And it isn’t much of a surprise why the writing has many influences of art, history and folk interpretations of culture and religion. The writer, Bony Thomas, is an artist and mediaperson apart from someone interested in history.
His experience of geography and the observations of different cultures comes across in the way dialects and innate habits are explained in each of the 10 short stories in the collection, which had appeared in Malayalam publications over a period of time. The stories are illustrated too; the art very vividly explaining the gist of the stories. The read is quite like a travel from Kochi, where the first story title, ‘Kanakettaneshu,’ is set, to glimpses of desert life in ‘Amar Singhinte Vaachu’ to stories like ‘Dog Space’ that criss-cross a medley of cultures, spaces and moods.
Intense writing
What strikes amidst such intense writing are sparks of simplicity when the writer begins some stories with ‘this is quite a big story that stretches from Kenya to Kozhikode’ and that ‘this story, the sea knows.’ They reflect an understanding probably of emotions and, more importantly, the complex universe they weave that has simplicity at its core.
It is not just the characters that attribute totality to the author’s work but also the way he makes art with words coloured in intriguing, deep, and profound aspects that make life. Just that one should look well between the words and find our one’s meanings in the spaces in between. As in a piece of contemporary art.
Dog Space
Bony Thomas
DC Books
Rs 125
