By Kiran Bhat
Literary Fiction/Metaphysical Fiction
The Internet has connected – and continues to connect – billions of
people around the world, sometimes in surprising ways. In his sprawling new
novel, we of the forsaken world, author Kiran Bhat has turned the fact of that
once-unimaginable connectivity into a metaphor for life itself.
In we
of the forsaken world, Bhat follows the fortunes
of 16 people who live in four distinct places on the planet. The gripping
stories include those of a man’s journey to the birthplace of his mother, a
tourist town destroyed by an industrial spill; a chief’s second son born in a
nameless remote tribe, creating a scramble for succession as their jungles are
destroyed by loggers; a homeless, one-armed woman living in a sprawling
metropolis who sets out to take revenge on the men who trafficked her; and a
milkmaid in a small village of shanty shacks connected only by a mud and
concrete road who watches the girls she calls friends destroy her reputation.
Like modern communication
networks, the stories in, we of the forsaken world connect along subtle lines, dispersing at the moments
where another story is about to take place. Each story is a parable unto
itself, but the tales also expand to engulf the lives of everyone who lives on
planet Earth, at every second, everywhere.
As Bhat notes, his characters “largely live their own lives, deal
with their own problems, and exist independently of the fact that they inhabit
the same space. This becomes a parable of globalization, but in a literary
text.”
Bhat continues: “I wanted
to imagine a globalism, but one that was bottom-to-top, and using globalism to
imagine new terrains, for the sake of fiction, for the sake of humanity’s
intellectual growth.”
“These are stories that could be directly ripped from our
headlines. I think each of these stories is very much its own vignette, and
each of these vignettes gives a lot of insight into human nature, as a whole.”
we of the forsaken world takes pride of place next to such notable literary works as
David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, a
finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2004, and Mohsin Hamid’s EXIT WEST, which was listed by the New
York Times as one of its Best Books of 2017.
Bhat’s epic also stands comfortably with the works of contemporary
visionaries such as Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick.
Amazon → https://amzn.to/2DQIclm
Barnes & Noble → https://bit.ly/2Lqe9Fi
“My people. Now speaks the man destined to
make the great cats bow to feet, now speaks the man who will lock eyes with the
sun. I have found our new land. Take your canoes and follow me. A new time for
our tribe has come.”
Not a single man found it in himself to raise
a weapon, nor did a single wife open her mouth. The eyes of the eternal shone
not from the skull but from the eyes of our chief’s first son. We believed that
the spirits had bestowed him with our future. He had the eyes of life and death
and life once more.
(Bhat, we, of the forsaken world… p.
191)
Kiran Bhat was born in Jonesboro, Georgia to parents from villages in
Dakshina Kannada, India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital
nomad, he has currently traveled to more than 130 countries, lived in 18
different places, and speaks 12 languages. He currently lives in
Melbourne, Australia.
Website → http://iguanabooks.ca/
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