Book Review: This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara
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Writer and translator, Himansu S. Mohapatra reviews Vauhini Vara’s latest book, This is Salvaged (Published by Harper Collins, 2023) observing how this book is full of the joy of self-discovery.
- ISBN: 978-93-5699-386-0
- Publisher: Fourth Estate, Delhi, an Imprint of HarperCollins
- Date of Publication: 2023
- Language: English
- Number of Pages: 185
No writer in recent times seems to have reasserted the simple truth about writing as healing more persuasively than Vauhini Vara, an Indian American writer, who shot to fame with her debut novel The Immortal King Rao in 2022. It is an ambitious, though somewhat flawed, book that tries to be both a social problem novel and speculative fiction at the same time. There is a seemingly throwaway sentence in the book that seems to encapsulate Vara’s writing credo: ‘To use language to describe these beautiful things—she gives as examples the sight of a wind-swept leaf ‘somersaulting in the air’, as it passes to the ground and a horse in mid-gallop, with all its legs in the air’—is beautiful in itself’ (p. 108).
