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Veronica and the Gongora Passion

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Veronica and the Gongora Passion is a marvelous collection of stories that displays the range and the generosity of Ghose's style and his mastery of form. What makes these stories, fictions and tales so vivid and so penetrating is the mysterious and magical quality of the author's style. Ghose's sentences shimmer with poetic detail and power, and in them the perceptive reader will notice the extension of a rich literary tradition that includes Proust, Chekhov, Flaubert, Woolf, Balzac, Faulkner, Beckett and other great writers.

Contributing to the beauty of Ghose's prose is the philosophical weight of these stories. Again and again, Ghose explores the role of language and its influence over the human perception of reality. We use language in an attempt to express reality, and yet, the words, no matter how precise, no matter how beautiful--the words simply cannot convey all that we need them to. Ghose's story, "Arrival in India", whose narrator experiences a false homecoming that leaves him doubly exiled, is a good example of the power words hold over us. Ghose, through a style that often uses indirection, hints, and suggestions, shows that what we call "reality" is larger than any of the formal ways humans have of conceiving it. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," as Shakespeare would have it. And Ghose, like Shakespeare, uses language to show that much of human experience rests on, is buried under, and ends with, a terrible silence.

The settings in these 15 stories are diverse, ranging from Latin America to Pakistan to Africa's Mediterranean coast; but again, it is the style of the author's approach, the quality of the formal structure of the stories, that makes these stories truly "exotic." Ghose's fictional worlds often seem violent and strange. Many of his characters long for a worldly paradise, but end up driven by mysterious compulsions and obsessions that operate beyond the more traditional human motivations of fear and desire. Quaglino, in "A Translator's Fiction", is compelled to act out primitive rituals until he faces a dark epiphany that we, the privileged readers, discover is only a formal device designed by powers Quaglino could neither control nor understand. And later in the collection, the main character in "The Savage Mother of Desire", a man who understands his town's new policies on birth control, ends up transformed into a horrifying figure from a cultural fertility myth. In its modern and degraded state, the ancient myth compels a violent act of vengeance.

Ghose is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections of poetry and literary criticism. His literary reputation has not been served well by critics and reviewers who choose to focus on labeling writers along strictly national or ethnic boundaries. The only agenda Ghose serves is the agenda of great art. The stories in this collection, spanning several decades, are a measure of his literary integrity and they are proof that Ghose has achieved that rarest of qualities among fine writers: a unique voice in Fiction.