Book Review - The Other Side Of The Table

Talk about deviant/unusual narrative and this book stands out from the rest of the crowd like an apple in a box of mangoes. An apple as fresh as they come.

Though it's not easy to review something you find extremely beautiful and I'll nevertheless try to be as neutral as I can. But, let's read the blurb first..

--- Circa 1990.A world drawn and woven with words. A bond punctuated by absence and distance...Two continents. Two cities. Two people.And letters. Hundreds of them.Over years. Across oceans. Between hearts.

Between Abhi, who is training to be a neurosurgeon in London, and Uma, who is just stepping into the world of medicine in Kolkata. As they ink their emotions onto paper, their lives get chronicled in this subtly nuanced conversation through letters ... letters about dreams, desires, heartbreaks, and longings... about a proverbial good life falling apart, about a failed marriage, a visceral loss, and about a dream that threatens social expectations...Letters that talk. And don't. Letters about this and that. Letters about everything...Letters with a story you would never expect. ---

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The Other Side Of The Table
By Madhumita Mukherjee
240pp | FiNEPRINT!
$21.95 | Rs195
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Author Madhumita Mukherjee's debut novel 'The other side of the table' is a story of two people told thorough letters. Living thousands of miles apart, Abhi and Uma, the protagonists in the book, have only letters as the thread which connects them. And they use this thread to share with each other everything they have. They share their joys, their sorrows, their dreams, their reality, their love and it's loss, their heart and life.

I dare say I've yet come across a book which has so simple a plot, yet manages to leave such an impact on you. 'The other side of the table' is a book so meticulously written, that you for once do a double take and think if it was really a book written by a first time author and not someone who is adept at the art with volumes in experience. It takes you on a ride of subtle familiarity through years of expressed and unspoken emotions.

Though, since the whole book is written in a chronology of letters, it is definitely not something which is meant to be read in a single sitting. The cover too starts to make more sense once you've dipped your feet in the pond a little. But I guess that's the case with almost every other book. One aspect about it though, might hold you in amazement when you start to think about it. It's the fact that even though the protagonists are sending each other simple letters, hundreds of them, but nothing in them ever seems repetitive, and which I think is no mean feat on part of the author.

As far as the overall experience go, I'd say that there would most probably be some questions in your mind while you go through the book and maybe even after the end. Questions like how did Uma and Abhi came to know each other in the first place? But maybe they turn out to be irrelevant sometime later on, just like the want of an epilogue. And I don't think that these can exactly be regarded as negative points of the book. Not for me at least. 

Summing it up, I'd say the book is something which magically holds you, makes you think and feel the emotions hidden inside those letters. It also, in a very indirect but a deep and profound manner makes you relate your life with that of Abhi or Uma. As I said above, the story very much feels subtly familiar.

I loved the book, and I think it would be difficult for anyone to not like it. Having said that, I think it would suite well readers of a slightly mature age group, teenagers might not find it easy to relate to this book. But read it by all means if you want to, and I think a 4.5/5 would be my testimony for this statement. The other side of the table is the kind of book which doesn't beckon you from the shelf to pick it up, but one which you'll be glad to have, later on. 

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An abridged version of the review was published in Hindustan Times on 27.04.13. Find it here.


Disclaimer: The links to the online shopping stores in the review are for quoting purposes only and do not mean that they offer the best price. Nor do they imply any sort of recommendation from me.

Image from Google.