About The Book
Mahendra is besotted with his wife Ashalata. Binodini, a young widow of exquisite beauty and sparkling mind, comes to live in his house.
The intense love between Mahendra and his wife inflames Binodini's repressed sexuality. She manages to captivate Mahendra. At another level, the story is an interplay between three women, Mahendra's mother Rajalakshmi, Ashalata, and Binodini.
My Thoughts
This book is a brilliant melodrama (rather a character study) about suppressed/repressed desires and morality.
Mohin is a Jamindar, a self-absorbed capitalist who doesn’t care about anyone else, yet is very charming.
Binodini is one of the most complex characters ever written in the world of literature. She is greedy, vulnerable, considerate, and definitely not where she belonged. She is a progressive woman suffocating by some ancient rules. What she does to break them follows an epic destruction of lives.
Behari Babu, the optimist, and do-gooder is omnipotent and has a unique ability to see through others.
Ashalata is a naïve, innocent girl who is oppressed due to her illiteracy and innocence.
Talking about this book can be a book in itself. All I can say is that this book is a gem that one cannot miss.
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About the Author
Rabindranath Tagore 7 May 1861[2] – 7 August 1941 was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became, in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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