Review: I Am Here and You Are Gone by Shome Dasgupta

GONE_cover_medEven if I haven’t submitted to a contest, and most times I haven’t, my inner-reader and inner-editor are always hyper-critical of any book labeled as a “winner”. So while I am familiar with Shome Dasgupta’s writing through various online and print journals, I was still a bit tense when opening the first pages of his book i am here And You Are Gone, winner of the 2010 outsider Writers Chapbook Contest. Quite frankly, I was unsure whether or not the writing would live up to the label, whether or not I would feel like I had just read the first place winner of an undoubtedly high number of submissions. Would Dasgupta’s book feel, in my opinion, deserving of the title “winner”?  

The short review is this: It is.

 The long review is this:

 From start to finish, following the protagonist Jonas from Kindergarten through his senior year, we are introduced to the requited / unrequited love of Jonas for Mary, the unwholeness of Jonas’ family, and the way in which we grow, and live, from our school-infancy through our final often complex nest-leaving.

She let him wear the heels for the day, but when he got home, Mom told him that he had to wear his shoes from then on.

“I want to be tall.”

“You are as tall as you want to be—it doesn’t have to show. Be tall from inside.”

Jonas didn’t know what she meant, but when he thought about it later, it was like some kind of spiritual assertion.

“I will be tall.”

“I am tall.”

i am here And You Are Gone is a super nice mixture of these kind of micro-narratives within a well-told overarching story, like seeing a ten-thousand word text separated as eggs, yolks here, whites there:

The rain had taken his dad away the night Jonas was born. Mom always said that his dad was the kindest man with the gentlest eyes. She never married anyone after him, and during the thunderstorms, she would stand outside and ask the sky what it would like for dinner.

Too, there are several sections in i am here And You Are Gone that break from the more simplified structuring and become these even more epic poetic castles, molded in sand with narrative dexterity, something that i am here And You Are Gone shows us about Dasgupta’s growing capabilities:

I hear the calling of my name in the sound of footsteps; I do not stop until I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and see pain’s glory; we do not speak, nor do we continue to walk, but we stand still and study each other until we fall.

We are motionless: I am a mosquito, you are amber, and we’re fossilized.

Millions of years later, paleontologists will find us on a piece of bark; they will see the petrified look on our faces and wonder what had caused such eyes. We cannot answer, for we are in each other’s mouth, wishing we were made of cotton and orange peels.

And while the narratives of each small segment are finely-tuned and enormous in their meaning, they do meet with some stumbles in the resolution of the book, where the ending felt simultaneously stretched a bit beyond its capacity and also as if it were lugging more conventional baggage than the rest of the manuscript, slipping a tad out of the enjoyable poetic / conversational mixture that Dasgupta has initially fashioned.

But in reality, my only true complaint about i am here And You Are Gone is regarding the inclusion of ASCII Art (using Mary’s name) at both the beginning and the end of the book. It was that pseudo-artistic opening that made me fear for Dasgupta’s book, though the writing eventually proves the unwarranted nature of that panic. But the art is a symbolic reach that makes it tough to turn the next page, tough to see that Dasgupta shouldn’t be relegated to these crude word-pictures; he is already creating much more vivid and true images with his phrasing, his sentences, his micro-narratives crawling under our skin, and that is where Dasgupta should stay, in that vein, until we are all crawling with him:

“I don’t know any French,” I said. “You only need to know one word mon cher,” she said, “Amour.” “Oh, okay,” I said, “What’s that? Is that your name?” She moved her hands, removing my body from reality, making an atheist feel holy. She closed her eyes, and I couldn’t keep mine open, and in the darkness, I saw her touches, each touch, each graze, giving a little glow, like a million lightning bugs floating around us. I saw her moans, and I kept muttering to myself, “Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster,” hoping that the next morning I wouldn’t forget to buy a French-English dictionary.”

I Am Here and You Are Gone

Shome Dasgupta

Outsider Writers Collective, 2010

$8.00