Review of C: A Novel by Anupama Raju: surviving lost cities, loves and words

Anupama Raju’s debut novel survives the pang of lost cities, loves and words A mix of prose and poetry, ‘C: A Novel’ is introspection in retrospect and belongs to writers everywhere 

One of the rewards of reading a novel written by a poet is that the story is sprinkled with verse. Every now and then, there are a few lines of familiarity that prose can never do justice to. 

Chennai-based poet and journalist Anupama Raju’s debut work of fiction — C: A Novel — is, simply put, a tale of two cities. Cities that make us the person we are. Cities that shape our minds, our hearts, our beings. Much like when we’re sad, everything’s gloomy, but when the spirit is happy, there’s sunshine all around. 

Raju’s protagonist lives her life between these two cities, both unnamed yet familiar. One is home, the other where she has come for a writing residency. She wanders between the past and the present, with winds of words comforting the mind. 

For writers, words are the ultimate drug. And so, she tries to escape into an expanse where only words matter and nothing else. She wants to leave behind the human worries of the world. Lost loves and failing health. She wants to write like her muse, Sylvia Plath, to taste words like words do, once again.

Then there’s Alice, who becomes something of an antidote to our protagonist’s dilemmas. She is the much-needed hallucination, the darkness that must be acknowledged if one is to see the light.

Raju brings to the fore this feeling of inadequacy beautifully. There are enough references to deteriorating mental health and it’s extraordinary to see the narrative make peace with inhibitions and find solace in memory through writing. She describes what writers go through and how they struggle with finding words, the right ones and the wrong, amidst their larger, more human failings.

C: A Novel then is introspection in retrospect. It belongs largely to writers, anywhere and everywhere, perennially in search of that which they don’t know even exists. The thing they chase but cannot define. Because the search for the story is liberating to say the least.