Novel
कारागार
Not translated into English
Banira Giri · 1978
Synopsis
In Kathmandu, a middle-aged woman who has never married has lived alone since the death of her parents. The novel follows her relations with her brothers, then the affair she begins with a married man, an extramarital liaison that the book recounts without evasion, making a woman's solitude and desire the heart of its story.
Context
The author's first novel, known at first as a poet, the book appeared in 1978 and is among her most widely read works; it was reissued by Manjari in 2018. A sequel, Nirbandha, appeared in 1985. The author, who also wrote a memoir, Mero Avishkar, and travel writing, gives voice here to a woman alone facing her family and society. Banira Giri would later receive the Sajha Prize for Shabdatit Shantanu, in 1999. The book has been translated neither into French nor into English.
Who it is for
For reading a Nepali woman's voice that dared, as early as 1978, to speak of solitude and desire outside marriage.
Prizes and reception
Decades after its publication, the novel still sells and keeps a prominent place in bookshops.