Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 5/5
- The whispers relax the ears; their cutting through a loud bonhomie triggers irritability.
- The tears are often judged and thoroughly vandalized by the knock of the palm. Why there absence forms a structural dryness? I eventually stop guarding it.
- To be quite is bravery; I believe! To speak more is unwise. I detest both. To speak little is considered ordinary but the words not spoken help to realize extraordinary pursuits. I speak, therefore, less!
- Resilience is a charm so long forgotten. Doesn’t endurance serve better purpose? I abhor walls barricading the ‘entire me’. I can still part with something, sometimes; the pain is less and all I need is to endure.
These are ‘details’, neither biased nor perfunctory. I would call their splurging the mind neither insinuation nor cutting of diamonds in a refinery. They are observations, indeed, yet self-sustainable in its own spine. For instance, a book torturously kept on the shelf has the right to feel neglected. But, it could imagine itself to be perfectly laid among imperfections. Which of the two is an aberration is our perspective, and eventually we learn to see life through it. Life usually reveals itself in these anomalies; what we choose becomes our ‘true path’. The ‘details’; an arabesque of expressions slighting on the edge, falling through impressionistic vertex of the gullible mind, carry a characteristic of their own.
IA GENBERG in her revitalizing book, ‘The Details’ cuts the corner; in the process slides an unrefined coarse sledge that life will eventually offer. We will often run, sometimes accept or even try to squander our absence but in the midst of all this divergence, is it really possible to miss the ‘details’?
The protagonist, a woman, innocuously professes the details of her past webbed in the profligate intuit of discretions.
The Details….
Johanna is intoxicating. Her friendship is ‘love’ erratic; an unwanted clamor of the fine nuances of life. She importunately piles the heaviness of luxuries on me. I fail to assemble but know that these mental hinges can be dangerous. We share the love of books but hey! It’s not the only thing that keeps our boat roaring. Her impropriety comes on suddenly; an impressionistic shift of facial expressions is indiscernible to me. She is a big nut and I am a small seed; can we carry on? The details continue…
I meet Nikki; the incredibility to test myself for details when it comes to her cuts the ground beneath my feet. It’s like you meet someone, and gradually the serenity turns into a sinister plot of finding ‘to what extent a person is capable of being paradoxically immune and escape with impunity?’ That is what Nikki is. Despicably inclined to disarray, Nikki is not indolent but a partaker of disconcerted mental baggage. She leaves me to have an organized life with James; someone please ask her if a fallen leaf can ever be en masse with the leaves hanging from the branch? The details continue…
I finally find a lover, Alejandro. Some beautiful moments and he leaves; but not without assembling some details for me. You know the rhythm of life is such that it predisposes us to move on but we rather want to stick with our assumptions, uncertainties and finally remain ‘stuck’. Isn’t it so true? I now find my own truth; my details…
“A day in a life of a heart should not be more than its beats. If it stops after that, then there should be no remorse.”
‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’—finally alone in a febrile state and all these details strike as a coup de main!
‘The Details’ is esoterically engaging and picks up subtleties of relationships and emotions that we fear to pass through; is it really fear, or the condescension patterns deny us the privilege. It’s not always easy to pick on ‘anxiety’ and the cumulonimbus it forms around the cerebellum. Or the idea of living; if it’s ephemeral, which it is but don’t we all live like immortals as another fine day awaits us? These ‘details’ liberate us from the strait-laced and intransigent virtues; we flow like a deliquescent river.
TAKE AWAY
Thoughtful and liberating….