Description
One of the back cover endorsements for The lost Daughter and Other Stories is spot on with its remark that the hallmark of these stories is their ‘simple, straightforward and clear style.’ The idea is echoed in the word ‘genial’, used in the foreword.
Fine. But a question arises: how does transparency of style square with ‘literariness’? More importantly, what about that ‘momentary stay against confusion’ which is the sign and seal of every literary work, no matter how modest?
By this I am not so much casting doubts on the simple style as urging for consideration the possibility that the simple can also be beautiful. For Sukubina’s stories, at least the good ones, are just not simple, one-shot affairs. There is enough twist and play in them to make the reader pause and think. If the storyteller has been able to convey these little tricks and stratagems in a simple language, then it is so much to his credit. Simple language, as Jacques Barzun aptly remarks in his classic Teacher in America (1945) — albeit in the context of writing good English — is no body’s mother tongue.
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