{"id":3305,"date":"2017-10-15T14:22:07","date_gmt":"2017-10-15T09:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=3305"},"modified":"2017-10-15T14:22:07","modified_gmt":"2017-10-15T09:22:07","slug":"book-review-high-priestess-sharanya-manivannan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2017\/10\/book-review-high-priestess-sharanya-manivannan\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The High Priestess Never Marries by Sharanya Manivannan"},"content":{"rendered":"

In which the reviewer wishes someone told the high priestess to take it down a notch. Or two.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

With a click-bait title like that, you can really go very right. Or very wrong. It\u2019s an either-or situation when so much attention is being directed towards a phrase as well-wrung out and carefully-crafted as The High\u00a0Priestess\u00a0Never Marries<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say, it is intriguing enough for anybody to want to pick it up and read. Couple that with its handy size and mostly nugget-sized stories, and you\u2019ve got yourself a magnet on the bookshelf, destined to pull readers of all kinds towards itself.<\/p>\n

So far so good.<\/p>\n

\"The

The High Priestess Never Marries book cover. Courtesy HarperCollins India<\/p><\/div>\n

The reading of this collection of short pieces \u2013 thought-musings \u2013 is bound to be an experience separate from that process, and yet there are enough linkages too. The crafty wordplay the title promises you snakes through its pages and never once lets up.<\/p>\n

Sample this longing for a lover-that-once-was:<\/p>\n

And at nightfall I cuspidate my senses so I can intuit your arrival: prowl of paw, coil of wind.<\/em><\/p>\n

Or this heightened state of what I will term \u2013 for the sake of argument \u2013 self-awareness:<\/p>\n

I was once the ugly child of an exceptionally lovely woman, and I carry around the fragile vanity of those who are never secure in their beauty, never quite believe what their baby feathers moulted to reveal. <\/em><\/p>\n

But, unfortunately, that is all there is to it, really. A lot of smoke, no real fire. The relentless barrage of imagery-evoked-through-clever-wordplay gets tiresome very, very soon. And unless you\u2019re prepping for your first year of graduation yearbook contribution, you\u2019re going to want to put this one down very, very soon.<\/p>\n

If only somebody had advised the writer to tone it down just a tad bit, and get more real, so the reader could really get a feel of the characters, find a way in, this might have been a special, unique little book with a special, unique voice. Something we\u2019re given a tiny glimpse of, right at the end, in the vignette titled \u2018Sweetness, Wildness, Greed\u2019, the most masterfully imagined and executed short of the lot.<\/p>\n

\"Sharanya

Sharanya Manivannan. Photo by Catriona Mitchell<\/p><\/div>\n

What we\u2019re left with instead are words, too many of them. Words you\u2019d like to drop like bombs at a sophomore party perhaps, to counter that boy\u2019s knowledge of Pink Floyd trivia, so you could both end the night with some making out and forget about each other soon after. Words that are meant to be inscrutable \u2013 calyxed, obsidian, susurrus… the list is endless.<\/p>\n

But most unfortunately, you\u2019re left facing a big, fat lock on that house that writers create where people, real people, live and breathe and particularly in the case of \u2018High Priestess\u2019, fuck.<\/p>\n

All that, and a scathing rage for the editor who could not tell the difference between overwrought and eloquent. Fine, maybe not rage, but I most definitely have an eye-roll. Or two.<\/p>\n

Book Details:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Author: Sharanya Manivannan<\/p>\n

Title: The High Priestess Never Marries: Stories of Love and Consequence\u00a0(Order online<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Year of publication: 2017<\/p>\n

Publisher: HarperCollins India<\/p>\n

Number of pages: 296<\/p>\n

\n

Pooja Pande is the lead reportage editor for Papercuts magazine.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pooja Pande reviews Sharanya Manivannan’s debut collection of short stories and feels it could have benefitted from less wordplay and more realism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":3306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[357,91],"tags":[272,794,795,277,725],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3305"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3312,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305\/revisions\/3312"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}