Crumpled Letter

Pain, Fear, Pleasure, Togetherness, Anger, Resignation... A description of the myriad emotions that define one word...love. A collage of events, both past and present, is woven together with philosophical reflections on life and art. Why does the narrator choose to write his story? Is writing a form of self-flagellation, a way of arriving at the truth, or a compulsion? The central theme of Crumpled Letter is freedom, one that the word and the world are seeking from each other, but which will always elude human experience. The novel brings to light the difficult area of interaction between language and reality. Joshi carries out the experiment with a courage that borders on stylistic brinkmanship. The effect is a poetic prose that has no parallel in the history of the Gujarati language.