Book Review: Museum of Memories by Amrita Mukherjee

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For an author, short stories are always an excellent way of expressing a story with brevity that has an impact of suddenness. A short story is like a boxing punch, or alternately, the way one gets caught in the momentary beauty of looking at a flower or a butterfly, and remembers them for a long time.

This book, Museum of Memories, I purchased last year and got to read it now. It is a collection of thirteen wonderfully written short stories, The blurb says, these stories are “fiction based on real incidents.” Truth can be stranger than fiction! I’m sure, the author has put her own wonderful skills to make those shards of reality more impactful. The stories are a melange of emotions The wide variety of emotions dealt out in so little spaces makes reading a bitter-sweet experience 😉 For once when you’ve been put through the pathos of a character, and still those emotions are there stuck in your head, the reader is dealt with another story which has totally opposite emotions being felt by another character in another story in a totally different setting.

In a way, if one wants to feel the story – there is ample of it, and one should take time and read these stories slowly giving space to the feelings that these stories evoke. Alternately, if one wants to be bowled over by the skilful writing of the author, one can devour this book and it won’t take much time.

The stories well portray that even when the main character of a story is someone who is poor from some remote corner, or someone who is cosmopolitan having exposure to various countries, they have the same basic feelings that tear them and with which they have to come to terms in their own unique ways. A story may end really horribly for the main character, while in another it can be coming in terms, and in still another it can be fighting back in subtle ways.

In a way this collection portrays the eternal dance of human spirit through the various facets of life. Thankfully, the author ends the book in a typical Bollywood style HEA (Happily Ever After) short story.

An excellent book to read.