BOOK REVIEW OF- The Inimitable Chaos of Life

By- Maliny Mohan


Paperback, 1st, 192 pages
Published- April 29th 2017 by Story Mirror
ISBN13-9789386305466
Edition Language-English


THE PLOT IN BRIEF-

A naive girl of eighteen is trapped in a dungeon, which changes her
and her capturer’s life forever. Afar, tucked away in the sleepy
terrains of a town in Kerala, a married woman is determined to revisit
a forbidden part of her past. A model-turned-MBA aspirant is scourged
mentally for a decision she almost made three years back. Back in the
less happening village of Kanyapuram, an aspiring author loses a copy
of her very first manuscript.
True to its title, ‘The Inimitable Chaos of life’ is an amalgamation
of enthralling stories borrowed from the chaotic pages of life, which
allure you to relive the multitude of unique emotions humans are made
of.

THE TITLE-

Isn’t life chaotic? There are only patterns, patterns on top of
patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by
patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we
call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t
understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables. So yes we are all tangled up. The title
provides you with a glimpse that we are all pre occupied with our own
problems of life. You see Real love is always chaotic. You lose
control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect
yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given
and that’s the secret. Yes I finally figured out that not every crisis
can be managed. As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can’t
protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also
have to embrace chaos.

REVIEW OF THE BOOK-

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination
into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to
bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman
on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down –
sometimes, something tears through them that leave them in shreds and
you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At
other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this
ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can
actually bring home something that is food, food for the human
community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
I just loved this collection of short stories not because of its
title, but because of its beautiful amalgamation of reality and
expectations. Jiya in the story ‘metamorphosis’ was characterized so
beautifully, that one would immediately fall in love with the story.
The metaphorical idea behind the word metamorphosis is so beautifully
crafted. Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path
of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall
asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginable cells,
as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The
caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were
foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and
link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the
caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a
nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing
butterfly. The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes
unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry
with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is
to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on
powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and
alliances built among those engaged in them.
From ‘metamorphosis’ till ‘fortitude’, this book would let you look
‘through the kaleidoscope’, ‘for a reason’
Each and every delivers a message which indicates that we are the
inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and
mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an
indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order
on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos. To be precise it is
cognition that is the fantasy. Everything I tell you now is mere
words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be
able to explain to you the form of Will. My explanation would only
show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a
correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus
correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of
Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity,
lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the
individual as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a
unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just
the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence
is communication, and communication, existence.

YOU SHOULD READ THIS BECAUSE-

1.      THE BEAUTIFUL AMALGAMATION OF REALITY WITH EXPECTATIONS.

2.      THE SMALL YET THE BEAUTIFUL MESSAGES LEFT AFTER EVERY STORY.
3.      You would feel beginning to think that to hope isn’t the same as to
expect something. To hope is to believe that life is an acceptable
chaos.

And lastly we are all entangled within this INIMITABLE CHAOS

RATINGS-

Overall I would like to rate the book 45 on a scale of 50.
4 stars out of 5
1.      Originality of the plot and sub plots- 9/10
2.      Net emotions in the story- 9/10
3.      Usage of words and phrases-8/10
4.      The title, cover and the illustration-10/10
5.      The net impact on the readers- 9/10




KUDOS TO Maliny maam- It was really a beautiful plot.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maliny Mohan is a doctor who resorts to appeasing her passion to write
during her leisure times. She was born and brought up in Kerala, where
she spent her summer days in the exhilarating company of her friends
and luscious greenery. She has contributed to a short story anthology,
titled ‘Love and other enchantments’, brought out by a group of five
authors – The Fictitious Five and another titled ‘ Colours- Different
shades of love’. An avid blogger and an ardent admirer of subtleties,
her dream of becoming an author sprouted wings in the pages of her
blog. A Piscean by birth, she is passionate and strives hard to listen
to her heart, every time it beats out of sync. Her tales mirror her
eye for beauty in its varied forms, sometimes resplendent with the
most vibrant of hues and at other times poignant, enriched with
subdued shades of grey and black. Apart from being passionate about
writing, she is also a trained dancer, lover of solitude, bibliophile,
tea-lover and an amateur poet.

Reviewed by-
Sayan Basak
Kolkata