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| “Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.” – Slavoj Žižek |
The Part I Left with You by Rahul Saini is a light-hearted, chucklesome and
unputdownable contemporary fiction novel that dives deep into the waters of
love; while exploring varied opinions on and experiences of love, relationships,
break-ups and moving on, it strives to close in on the realities of this ‘ugly
and cruel world’. The book narrates the stories of three main characters – one
mostly witty, another melancholic, esoteric and the third who is turning over
the page she was stuck on for long in order to start afresh.
The narration of this book involves all these three characters’ POVs. It
is a fine and balanced mixture of different kind of narrative techniques,
including first-person, third-person (limited omniscient) and epistolary style,
which in my opinion, completes any piece of literary work because using these
literary devices in the non-linear narrative writing keep us readers hooked and
emphasizes on little themes of the story and it is what makes a truly gripping
novel such as this. Rahul Saini has handily achieved this. On top of
everything, the cozy contemporary writing style worked like a charm on me.
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| “Artists’ lives are just endless struggles and that struggle ends only with their last breaths.” – Rahul Saini |
Talking about the content, each of the 34 chapters seemed to me like a
separate short story discussing a distinct subject, idea or viewpoints, or
narrating a subplot, backstory or (my favorites from this book) completely
different short tales – story within a story – fascinating and magnificent. What
I mean to say is that these chapters have something very unique to offer from
craziness to drama to dreams to arguments to philosophy to romance to thrill to
sorrow…you name it. These all short stories are linked together by these three
characters and what they are seeking out.
Having said that, let me briefly introduce you to the characters. Ratna
is in love with her favorite author, Ronit Sukhdev. The book opens with this
amazing poem titled ‘Not Gibran, On Love’ written by Ratna (honestly, I
recorded this poem several times day after day, but like most of you, I hated
my recordings, so it only made to one of my best friends), for she is a
literature and journalism student and for this fact and a little lie, she gets
an opportunity to stay with the love of her life for a few days. While ecstatic
Ratna wants Ronit to be a little cheerful if not as much as her, Ronit‘s life
has come to a standstill as he hasn’t yet gotten over his break-up with
Nitasha. He has completely isolated himself from the world and does not wish to
publish his work anymore. It has been a year since the break-up and Nitasha is
finally coming to terms with her choice of letting go of her relationship with
Ronit and she’s carving the way out with newfound hope.
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| “To learn an art is an act of meditation. You can’t keep jumping around, running all the time, trying a hundred things, understanding nothing and pretend that you are learning everything.” – Rahul Saini |
The best thing about this book is that it has books everywhere. In every
alternate chapter, you can find book titles, quotes, bookstores or other
bookish stuff. The author has expounded a lot of powerful arguments, opinions
and statements on love, life and the world that are worth knowing by heart. I
would like to quote a few such lines here. However, it doesn’t make the book
downright ‘serious’. Nope. Rahul Saini has totally wrung out the essence of
comfort and amiability from the writing style. Ratna’s character is a witty
character, for she can turn anything into humour, be it because of her lack of
wisdom or her childlike behavior. She’s a humorous character indeed, but not a
caricature at all! I loved everything she did and how she behaved around her
crush, for whatever reason, because I can’t imagine staying with my crush and
not messing up. She made me laugh and some lines made me emotional too.
The primary theme of the book is what the title suggests. While it’s not
appropriate to reduce any work to a sentence, it represents an idea that ‘when two people spend a lot of time
together, they lose themselves and gain each other’. This is what is
happening in the book. Now, I won’t go in-depth regarding this. There are
plenty of other subjects discussed and tackled in those individual short
stories I talked about, forming minor themes and elements that hold the potential
to make a real difference. There are also things that you would want to ignore,
which are just characters being themselves.
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| “If creative people were happy with the world around them, they would never feel the urge to create anything new.” – Rahul Saini |
Anyway, my favorite take-away from this book are those unforgettable,
significant stories/chapters that provide you the food for thought. Some of
these are – one on Slavoj Žižek (yeah, I copy-pasted that), another on the
mirror phase, and the third titled, ‘The Shark in the Pool’. Apart from that, I
liked Ratna’s relationship with her father and the depiction of how differently
books are important to the lives of authors and readers. Not eulogizing, but I
can’t express my admiration enough for the illustrious writing style that
really got me high; I relished it, of course except for a few parts.
Lastly, ‘The Part I Left with You’ is a charming, cozy contemporary book
and an absolute page-turner that you would want to read around this time to
feel lighter; it has way more tales and joy in store for you than what its
synopsis promises.
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| “When two people spend a lot of time together, they lose themselves and gain each other.” – Rahul Saini |
Happy Reading!
