BEST SELLER AUTHOR

QUEST

 

 

It is a small expression, but with an insightful depth. It means a search for something. For what and why? The greatest riddle of all is who is searching? Is it you, the eternal human crave or me? A longing to find the meaning of love, life and our existence.

This short novella by Aniruddha Bose examines the answer to this conundrum.

Revolving round the affluent and upper middle class milieu of the urbanized society, the characters of this novel are all pawns in the game of life. Tossing up and down through their profits and losses, accomplishments and failures, love and hatred, desire and denial, they all pass through this enigma of life. The truth they discover is life is nothing but a Venn Diagram an array of intersecting circles of relations, which includes its slices, but never its whole.

We believe erroneously in relationships. We have an elusive image of our existence. Only a few chosen can comprehend that our life is nothing but a part of a greater nullity.

The ultimate truth is that we live alone in our ‘home’ in solitude and die alone in it.

 

Aniruddha Bose’s English novel “QUEST” is an English adaptation of his best-selling Bengali novel “ANWESHAN”. He is successful in depicting the crisis of modern Indian society. This enthralling novel illustrates basic human behaviour and trudges to the mysterious world of spirituality. The author very lucidly depicts human alienation amidst a world anticipating new developments every day. Through an array of inter-personal relationships, he takes the reader from elusive fleeting interactions to the opus of the soul, based on the ‘Venn Diagram Theory’ of mathematics. Universality is the greater theme of his creation. The author reveals the concept of ‘home’ in a different light and quite explicitly relates the pitfalls of human relationship and explores its wholeness outside the social paradigms. 

Sometimes sexually explicit, the author tries to ooze out the worldly human response in a competitive environ. The human behaviour, portrayed in varied facets takes the reader on an inward journey to the alien maze of the psyche and soul, from illusion to the truth. Bose’s creation “QUEST” is an exceptional riddle for the reader to solve.