Where We Set Our Easel - Mandira Pattnaik - Bog

"Where We Set Our Easel" is a micro collection of 11 prose pieces following a single narrative arc. The reader tags along when a boy and girl, still in college, meet. The narrative then follows their journey through hardships & kids, a battlefield accident, love lost and love regained."Where We Set Our Easel is a marvel, a chapbook-length collection of stories that are as textured and nuanced as poetry yet novelistic in scope. The trajectories of the two main characters are set in motion from the first sentences of the initial story, a meditation on a Van Gogh painting that moves from a future time back to the snapshot of a moment in front of a café that's both sorrowful and ironic in its raw hope. Throughout the book, time is juggled-fast-forwarded and reversed, telescoped and microscoped- as the early, hopeful days of a marriage turn sour and ultimately dissolve. Like any great painting, the story here is in the details, the before and after of love, the intimacy of two lives as they converge and ultimately diverge." - Sarah Freligh, author of A Brief Natural History of Women