Boats Against the Current
About this book
Told through a magical realist lens, Boats Against the Current follows the entangled story of Babu, a sensitive and absent-minded child, and Milon, a street-smart but violent youngster, as the pair navigate mid-20th century Bengali suburbia. It sweeps across 150 years and seven generations, following the fortunes of a family as old as the ancient forest, firmly rooted in the alluvial soil of Gangetic Bengal.
Boats Against the Current challenges the canonical tenets of the coming-of-age novel. The story is rhizomatic in its narrative structure, reflecting the human condition, the non-linearity of memory rather than the linearity of time. Its multiple story threads are interwoven and interspersed; they branch outward before converging.
The translation holds this, the idiomatic pulse, the bleed between worlds, both abstract and real, without softening the edges. It does not locate the novel in a quaint, distant land of mysterious men and women with inscrutable practices and mystical beliefs. Instead, it places the work where it belongs: at the vanguard of modern literature.