The Saint of Bright Doors is a phenomenal book I read long enough ago to have forgotten most of the detail. What remains is a semi-digested slurry of images and emotions, and I can highly recommend them. If you haven’t read it, please know that the rest of this post will be more or less incomprehensible.
When I ask casual readers, that is to say, readers who aren’t read to learn to write, about their opinion of this book, the reviews are largely positive. The main complaint I hear from them is that the adventures that Fetter, our protagonist, wanders into seem arbitrary and pointless.
To me this complaint is, plainly speaking, accurate. The book is heavy on the vibes and prose, and all the adventures Fetter goes on seem episodic to the point of incoherence. Now let me tell you why that’s a good thing. (I’m sure there is an official reason for this choice by Vajra, but Barthes told me he’s dead now so I can’t ask him and am forced to guess.)
Vajra is trying to build up this city/nation of Luriat through what I recently learned is called a tour d’horizon, a journey to the bounds of the known world. This would be a banal exercise in taxonomy, except I picked up that term in an unexpected source.
For reasons unknown to gxd and mxn, I subjected myself to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities late last year. Though there is a sustained critique of Anderson by post-colonial scholars, I found his claim that nations were imagined into being through print capitalism fairly interesting. (It’s possible that’s not the claim and I’m misreading it. If so, sorry. I’m an engineer. Leave me alone.)
In focusing on print capitalism as a form of nation-creation, Anderson briefly cites scholarship on El Periquillo Sarniento, a picaresque critique of Spanish colonialism in Mexcio to note that the hero’s journey through the hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries of Mexico “conjure up a social space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony.”
If you have read The Saint of Bright Doors, this list of places above seems almost too neat. At some point in the book, Fetter stops by almost all of these settings, highlighting how they contribute to the oppression of the common public. I think this is intentional through conscious choice or revelatory through happy coincience. I think Saint is a tour d’horizon for a made-up world that is also Sri Lanka, written to induce in the reader a familiarity with the city/nation of Luriat in which you can see reflected the nation/state of Sri Lanka and its struggles with power.
Overall, I would say this is the kind of risk I don’t take in my own writing. This could easily been an excruciating slog leading from, through, and to nothing, but the prose and the density of commentary in each location end up carrying the book / 10
Abhijeet Makes Things 