No. of pages – 560
Published -30 August 2024
Publisher – Penguin Vintage
Cover Illustration by Prabha Mallya
Cover design by Ahlawat Gunjan
Phantoms Of August was translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha. It is the winner of Bangladeh’s Gemcon Literary Award 2020.
Mashrur Arefin is a renowned Bengali writer, poet, and translator best known for his translations of Homer’s Iliad, and Franz Kafka’s stories. Mashrur is a commercial banker by profession, leading one of the top banks in Bangladesh as its CEO.
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction from Bangladesh and India into English. He also translates fiction from English to Bengali. He has published more than 80 translations so far.
In Chapter one, he says “Guilt, like sorrow, pain, grief and loneliness, is one of the mind’s primary negative emotions. I observed that at the beginning of each August- I was in India for a few days early in the month this year, and witnessed a nasty incident – I was not only overcome by these feelings, but also beset with anxiety and resentment. As soon as the month of August arrives, I’m inevitably battered by these emotional hurdles. So even if some if it seemed new this time, the overall sensation – for which there is no suitable Bangla word in my repertoire – was nothing new for me. “
Blurb from Amazon –
An unnamed narrator takes it upon himself to discover the truth behind the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, who led Bangladesh’s independence movement from Pakistan, which was achieved in 1971, and his entire family. With literary greats for company, the narrator negotiates his complicated personal life and his philosophical and literary musings even as he locates a gun to shoot the assassins who are still alive. Hallucinatory, flitting between reality and dreams, and traversing the length and breadth of Dhaka, this is a fever dream of a novel, an individual’s quest while navigating the scarred and traumatized mind of a nation.
Link to Amazon India
Book Cover
