Book Review: 'To Cut A Long Story Short' Is A Brave And Delightful Caper Of Imagination

In an era where literature is being increasingly shaped to appeal to the niche and targeted in curated conversation rooms, Ranjan Sen’s To Cut A Long Story Short appeals to a wide cross-section of readers, who read for the joy and the pure thrill of it.

A seasoned banker with stints in international banking in leadership positions, Sen’s prose is impressively fashioned by an innocuous intrigue into the world of what must have, or could have been. While engaging a child-like flight of imagination across the eleven stories, Sen anchors them in the reality of the times - at different points in history which transport the reader immediately to the deftly constructed settings. 

The amount of reading and deep dives taken on by Sen prior to penning the stories is evident in the way he takes on the arduous task of description and conjuring up the imaginative spaces for the reader with professional ease. While all stories present a starkly different set of descriptive markers, characters and, historical elements, one never feels uncomfortable in gliding into the pace and tone of the next. What sets Sen’s language apart is a wonderful fusion of lyrical fluidity and masterful control of elements. The language reflects a wonderful sense of literary economy with which Sen manages to bind the collection together despite its vastly different worlds.

Stepping into the world of a contemporary collection of short-stories conceived in the post-truth era, one would never expect a rapid transportation to the world of Chandragupta, Chanakya and the Mauryan royal hierarchy. With Keeper Of Records, Sen makes his point heard by triggering a journey into the past, where the reader is eased into not being merely a fly-on-the-wall but a participant, tickling the ever-present juvenile desire of shuttling between timelines, a few pages into the collection. The descriptive brilliance of the stories is accentuated by the usage of language, which never feels burdensome or tepid across the entire tapestry of characters and their realities. 

‘To Cut A Long Story Short’ achieves a rare feat of making nuances, history and creative liberty equally accessible to the readers as it is to the author. The world of yore draws the reader in as much as the present and it is in Sen’s ability to weave the personal into fiction does one find the answer. With a story like the 'Source Code' Sen drifts back to his familiar worlds, here, of banking, harnessing parlance which might not appeal the reader immediately, but as one takes on the journey with the characters, their anxieties, their emotional moorings, and most important, the setting, there is a shared sense of understanding of the world. Sen, very efficiently, moves beyond linearity to plant context and root the characters in the literary present and the past, ensuring the reader’s investment. His ability to switch between the first-person and the third-person speaks of his ability as a narrative observer and also as an active social participant.

The collection is a perfect all-season read presenting a matured shuttle among the worlds of parables, experience and urban historicity nurturing an inexplicable joy of thriving in a no-man’s land between imagination and reality, and being everywhere all at once.

To Cut A Long Story Short is a collection of stories authored by Ranjan Sen and published by Om Books International, priced at Rs 395.