This review is only my personal opinion as a fairly new writer. I hope some of my comments are useful.
There is some good writing here and I loved a lot the imagery and similes.
I can relate to the experience of the narrator, my wife nearly died from an infection and I remember watching over her as she lay in a coma, feeling an impending sense of loneliness and loss.
However I felt confused by the elliptical language and sometimes you sacrificed clarity for a beautiful turn of phrase or a simile you were fond of. I feel the writing is too dense and distracts me from what is primarily an emotional piece. I am too busy assimilating the procession of images to feel the pain of the narrator. To me the piece is about the loneliness and despair of a man on the verge of losing his wife. I can't feel this because I'm too busy deciphering the writing.
As an example:
Sometimes I would take her out to a restaurant to have something to eat. Out of the ether thick air of the institution, that hung dense and unyielding. The act of normalcy, like high tea on the banks of the Styx.
Why "something to eat". If you go to a restaurant that is your implied intention.
"Out of the ether thick air of the institution, that hung dense and unyielding. The act of normalcy, like high tea on the banks of the Styx"
Could I suggest something like:
Sometimes I would take her away from the stink of ether that hung in the hospital. The restaurant. felt like taking High Tea on the banks of the Styx.
I feel you have some great insights and observation but they need to be expressed more simply.
This review is only my personal opinions and feeling on reading this piece.
An interesting and sad insight into global cultural impoverishment. Although the piece is well written with some lovely turns of phrase and fascinating information, I felt confused by the starting paragraph and my concentration wondered accordingly.
Floating in the clear blue waters of Bay of Bengal, east of the Indian mainland and on the edge of the Indian ocean, are a group of five hundred and seventy two emerald islands, islets and rocks, collectively known as the Andaman and Nicobar islands. This hilly archipelago with dense evergreen forests and endless varieties of exotic flora and fauna, stretches for more than seven hundred kilometers from north to south. It is also witness to a Darwinian dance of Shiva
This felt like a great wedge of information in one sentence, especially at the very beginning of the article.
I feel it needs an interesting short introductory sentence before presenting the data, perhaps something like:
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a group of emerald Isles floating in the clear blue waters of the Bay of Bengal. East of the Indian mainland and on the edge of the Indian ocean, this 720 Km rugged archipelago has endless varieties of exotic plants and animals and lush evergreen forests.
The "Darwinian dance of Shiva" is a brilliant phrase but I feel it is wasted in the opening paragraph as it is not until much later that we understand what you are referring to. I feel it is better placed later on in the piece, just before you mention Boa and her plight.
It is a loss to humanity but in the animal world of the survival of the fittest and destruction of the weak and unprotected, this is an inevitability.
This sentence is simply repeating the "Dance of Shiva" but far more clumsily and I feel it is therefore superfluous.
To the global citizens of today, tangled up in the World Wide Web and fettered to one another by a lingua franca, Boa’s reality would appear obscure, even fantastical, the stuff of science fiction. The scene could well belong to absurd drama or even of a futuristic nightmare, in which one wakes up to find oneself trapped inside a bubble, alone and unheard in a sea of voices. Or, think of a person in solitary confinement in a prison cell. Only, Bo Senior would have been free in the open, speaking all by herself in the wilderness. The truth of Boa’s predicament can be glimpsed at in surreal contexts or in indulgent fantasies. Think of Robinson Crusoe alone on a desert island before he found his man Friday. How would it be if one has to live in the company of fictional beings, without the comfort of real voices?
This passage has several effective similes but I feel it suffers from an excess of them that weakens their impact. I know it's difficult as they are all very good metaphors but could you cull some of them and leave the ones you love the best?
Overall I really liked this piece and feel that with pruning, it could be a powerful piece of writing
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