Guestbook

  1. I have read all of the short stories on your website and I am amazed at how just a few sentences of yours can put me into a land I have never been to before! You have the incredible ability to let me see, feel and even smell the walkways and houses of a new reality.

    All I can stay is please keep writing! You are truly gifted!

  2. I have just read Dilruba Z. Ara’s story The Theft for the second time. While I have been intrigued by her work since I first discovered some of it two or three months ago The Theft puzzles me. Is it complete when the suitcase falls open? I can see how it can be but as the reader I’m not certain. In a format such as a bound collection this would be clear. Maybe this is nitpicking but for now I had to get this out of the way.

    The protagonist calls herself a voyeur and I feel as if I’m spying right along with her. This builds tension and makes this reader a participant in it. That tension provides a gripping element. Tension permeates The Theft throughout.

    Does Ara avoid spelling out sordid details as a matter of propriety? Is leaving key revelations to the reader’s imagination a style choice? Maybe the author shouldn’t be required to explain these things. A famous crime writer once told me, “I don’t think it graces an author to explain his work.” I apply this to myself and tell people who say, I didn’t get why this character did this or that, “the reader decides what it all means. Once it leaves my hands it belongs to the reader. It says what he/she thinks it says.”

    Not that D.Z. Ara’s characters’ intentions and actions aren’t clear but they do leave questions and for a reader who has never been to or near Bangladesh the questions do lead to more questions. Would our protagonist have been in trouble if the brother-in-law had caught her spying? How much? In the end we believe she told him in her oblique manner. Is she in trouble now? If it is all opened up among the family where does she stand? Will she be attacked as a trouble-maker. My sense is that she will — they will defend him. Possibly cast her out. But Ara has presented us with living people and we need to consider them as such. This a reality many people must contend with daily. In the United States a story such as this might lead to many possible outcomes. Maybe in Bangladesh the possibilities are much more limited.

    ———- Charlie Killeen

  3. Pingback:Guest Post & First Chapter Reveal/Virtual Tour ~ A List of Offences by Dilruba Z. AraEdit

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