Vineet Gill is a writer and works as a senior copy editor at Penguin Random House India. His essays, often literary-critical in nature and occasionally personal, have appeared in various Indian and international publications. He has spent the better part of the previous decade trying to read and write, and trying to build a life around those two interrelated pursuits. This is his first book.
'Here and Hereafter is as much about Nirmal Verma's life in literature as it is about Vineet Gill's. There is no other book quite like it' ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA
'A literary gem' AMITAVA KUMAR
How is a writer formed? Yes, through labour, commitment, perseverance, grit and various other things that we keep hearing about. But equally, a writer is formed through the workings of a particular kind of sensibility. As Vineet Gill attempts to understand this writerly sensibility in Nirmal Verma's life and work, he finds that the personal and the literary are, on some level, inseparable.
In this masterly deep dive into the world of one of Hindi literature's pioneers, Gill looks at the scattered elements of Verma's life as ingredients that went into the making of the writer. The places he lived in, the people he knew, the books he read are all reflected, in Gill's view, in Verma's stories and novels. This is a work of intense readerly analysis and considered excavation-a contemplation on Verma's oeuvre and its place in world literature.
A quite unique book that creates a wonderful balance between the author, the work, and the age, with Gill, importantly, never losing sight of "literature as its own reality, as a world in itself". It is illuminating about many things, including how a literary biography might be written.
Here and Hereafter is as much about Nirmal Verma's life in literature as it is about Vineet Gill's. There is no other book quite like it. Written and plotted like a work of the imagination without being one, it's a memoir of reading in which books are loved not for anything other than the unfathomable mystery they hold.A brilliant book, attentive and artful. I haven't read any literary portrait in recent years that has given me so much pleasure. The book is a master-class in reading and represents the triumph of the critical voice. A literary gem.In this beautifully elliptical, erudite, extended essay on an admired writer, Vineet Gill advances both Nirmal Verma's cause and his own. The older writer's passionate modernism is freed from the linear march of the conventional biography, his books shown to form patterns of thought and symmetries of experience. And the younger writer reveals his own sensitivities by reading Verma in relation to the imbricated world of Hindi and international literature.Every great text invents a form for itself. Profoundly moved by Nirmal Verma's writings, Vineet Gill could have written a traditional biography, a work of literary criticism, or his personal impressions of the master's works. But he chose a meditative approach-an approach that allows him to converse with Verma and his art in a language that is both intense and intimate. Tracing Verma's footsteps, Vineet travels from Shimla to Prague and produces an extraordinary narrative in which a reader invokes a dead artist in order to tell his own romances.
Here and Hereafter alerts us to the many ways an artistic life can be written about and, thus, convincingly and beautifully expands the textual possibilities of a literary biography.
