Novel
নভেরা
Not translated into English
Hasnat Abdul Hai · 1995
Synopsis
A writer, who bears the name of the author, sets out to write a novel about the sculptor Novera Ahmed, who left the country and withdrew far from everyone. He questions those who knew her, the painter Hamidur Rahman, the poet Shamsur Rahman, the filmmaker Khan Ata, the painter Aminul Islam, and combs the newspapers; little by little there emerges a woman trained in London and Florence, who stands up, in the Dhaka of the fifties, to an art world dominated by men.
Context
The book appeared in 1995 and belongs to a series of novels that the author devoted, from 1982 onwards, to lives that were at first invented, then real. In it the author stages his own inquiry among the painters, writers and journalists who had known the sculptress, by then withdrawn in France; according to a study devoted to these novels, these encounters with real people serve to make credible a life that seemed implausible. The novel was adapted in 2017 as a monodrama, performed by Samiun Jahan Dola.
Who it is for
An investigative novel peopled with real figures from the cultural life of Dhaka; the names of Bangladeshi painters and writers abound in it.
Prizes and reception
The Daily Star judges that he rendered the artist's defiance well; the researcher Rezaul Karim Sumon reproaches him with being more fiction than fact, seen through a male gaze.