Adil Jussawalla’sSoliloquies-written when he was barely eighteen-does what only the most ambitious of literary works can do: it grasps for the numinous.
The protagonist Jian’s struggle-marked by long hours of darkness and brief flickers of revelation, by perturbation and torment and then, a floodlight of perception-is intimate, yet epic in its sweep and animated with visions so bright, they sear.
Soliloquies, written when Adil Jussawalla was barely eighteen, is a brilliant and precocious work that tests the powers and limits of language. Thayil Editions One carries, for the first time, this lost piece of Indian literary history, as well as a one-of-a-kind interview, detailing Jussawalla’s youth and friendships, and the ten guineas he once borrowed.
