Ruins

Gaurav Monga doesn't tend to write massive books (so far), but instead focuses on vignettes and short stories tinted with a sense of mono-no-aware, blended with meticulous prose that doesn't fall prey to adjectivitis or verbosity. I'd argue that "Ruins" can be read as vignettes, but feels closer to prose poems or a lost piece of writing of a less depressed/anxious Kafka, or of a less surreal Bruno Schulz. This is genuine literature, here focusing on the lesser know notion of "Ruinenlust", the inherent value and appreciation of ruins.It is a testament to the author's skill that he manages to evoke an almost elegiac sense of disintegration without it feeling bleak or depressing, evoking genuine beauty. The focus here is most assuredly not the lamentatio, but the consolatio.Beyond being beautiful, this book values your time as a reader. It may be slim, but I got more out of it than many books of thrice that length. There is serious depth to ponder here.Highly recommended.

RUINS explores the relationship between the environments we make (including the ways we shape our body) and our inner identity.The pieces in the first part of this short and lapidary text are reminiscent of Escher prints. Though more abstract they evoke courtyards that have no exit, colorless cities one cannot escape, corridors that lead only to other corridors, memories that have no presence except in one location, living that feels like wandering but goes nowhere new.In the latter part of the book, we encounter individuals struggling to find viable forms of artifice with which to shape their lives. Arvid moves from being an actor to being a marionette to making marionettes, to becoming a writer who is trying to stabilize loss. But "...he concludes that the act of writing, itself, marks a veritable surrender, a resignation towards ruin, and in this way can be compared to antique art in so far as they are both remains."Monga also presents us with a poet whose translators drew a diagram of the poet's dwelling to clarify his work. However, the diagram exerts its own powerful attraction in which even the translators become entrapped. "The are already beginning to regret having come here at all, wandering aimlessly down the hallways, getting lost in the round corners."Hegel famously remarked that "Athena's owl flies at dusk". This mesmerizing book is a fable of fragments and fragmentation, as the pursuit of constructing form leaves only shells. It gives us a strange journey in terrains we thought were familiar.