Some fictional characters at times seem to pop out of the printed words of novels, narrative poems, short stories and plays. You feel they are directly conversing with you. So real do they appear.
Take, Tom Sawyer of Mark Twain, Kabuliwalla of Rabindranath Tagore or David Copperfield of Charles Dickens to exemplify.
On turning over the pages of works by Sabarna Roy, you feel their characters are talking to you, narrating their happiness, pathos, failure, success, evil intentions and good nature. Their characterizations are so strong and indelible.
Though fictional yet the characters crafted are so realistic that you often feel they are conversing with you and you often tend to link your life with some of them.
A critical assessment of his books -- Pentacles, Frosted Glass, Abyss, Winter Poems and Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012-2018 – leaves the readers with little doubt that he charted out a new literary path in mirroring a person's life with all its vicissitudes.
No wonder the stalls storing these five novels in the book fairs in Kolkata and elsewhere have grossed many visitors and buyers.
Sabarna Roy not only started mirroring the grey areas of modern industrial society in which many finer elements of mankind are evaporating as they have to survive under unique circumstances in which human greed, lust and betrayal gain supremacy but also evolved a lucid narrative style of his own.
This is an era in which the milk of human kindness does now flow; the lava of greed burns human heart and mind.
A Bouquet of Five Books
Sabarna Roy today occupies a high pedestal among post-modern novelists not because of his presenting realistic plots, which often appear like kaleidoscopic diary of a man but also due to the fact that he elaborated how to accept defeats, loss, betrayals and failures with supreme ease.
Crux of the five books authored by this technocrat–turned-author is humanity that permeates the dark dance of modern self-centered era devoid of benevolence in an authentic manner.
Sabarna Roy is a wordsmith! His words appearing in his five books are worth incisive analysis.
To substantiate this, let us make a short thematic presentation of his five books some of which charted new waves in English literature for containing writings of variant genres and mixed genre.
We will do this with the latest addition to the bouquet of his books: Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012-2018. At times, you would feel it is more of a personal diary or semi-autobiographical in nature than a linear novel with wonderful surreal and dark connotations meandering into many directions of life.
This book created massive readership following.
A recipient of the Literoma Laureate Award for fiction in 2019, this First Class Honours Civil Engineering Graduate of Jadavpur University, created an intellectual storm in Indian literary scenario with his first book Pentacles.
This title initiated a new trend in English literature as this not a conventionally written piece for it has a long story named "New Life" and four long narrative poems each of them talking about a person's evolution in life.
His Frosted Glass, a collection of 14 stories and 21 poems, is a linguistic bonanza cum food for intellectual thought for the readers. It explains human relationships the way a painter paints a landscape: many colours, different shades, and myriad nuances.
Abyss, best seller in Kolkata Book Fair, was written in a new style. This play, a thriller, revolved around murder, mystery and human ethics. The scenic descriptions are extremely realistic and feel like a narrative documentary being played out.
The author, invited as a speaker on an opening day at the Noida International Literature Festival 2019, showed his natural instinct as a poet in Winter Poems, a collection of poems graphically depicting imagination of home and imagination of death: the two eternal imaginations that differentiate man from other animals.
