The Love Monster — by Nandha Kriskar
Price: Rs. 49 INR(Kindle Edition)
ASIN: B07Z2TDZYB
Buy here: https://amzn.to/2WOBKUz
When I was a little boy, I wasn’t afraid of monsters. In fact, I believed I had a small, blind, blob-like monster lurking around, waiting to devour me. However, I was afraid of people who’d say they’d stay, but then leave in the middle of the nights. They are the real monsters. The leaving kind. They come. They love. They hurt. They leave. They are like seasons, except they don’t come back.
Love can be unfair: it’ll give us swords in our hands, put armors on our bodies, but make us lose our battles to rosemallows and raindrops. It will make us sacrifice our nights, it will make our armpits smell better, and it will make us to look up for a deluxe restaurant with amazing reviews to take someone special to.
We sometimes love people to the point where we exhaust ourselves, and that is not a good thing. Love shouldn’t exhaust us. Neither should it make us exhaust ourselves. But, when it does, it is on us to get ourselves back to who we were before we dried, to recharge love in us back to full. Unlike many things, healing is not a stage in a process. It is the process. Taking a long hot shower, sleeping on the floor to get yourself grounded, and hiding under your covers so the darkness won’t notice your tears are the stages we cross to heal. Maybe you have been there, or you are; either way, we all know what it feels to have something cracked in us.
The Love Monster is a celebration of that crack. It puts words to those feelings that we all have felt one time or another. It is beautifully sad, real, and everyone’s. I only see people write about love as if it’s a magical ride on a unicorn. Sure, it is that, too, but what about the nights when we cried on pillows, to muffle the sound of our ego tearing? Haven’t you ever wanted everything to disappear so you can be alone and happy for a while? Didn’t you never want to tell the world how brutal and animal love can get? So, why just decorate love? Why not read love in its naked, animal, and rawest form? Whatever that maybe?
This book is inspired by people, things, and memories I loved. But, you’d be surprised to read how we all love and get hurt the same way. The book is split into three parts: Dawn, Dusk, and Dark. Dawn and Dusk have short, pithy and poignant prose and poetry on love, life, and every feelings in between, while Dark deals with raw emotions — that flow when we are alone, and scared, and remote to ourselves — in the form of long prose.
My take on the book:
The Love Monster is a collection of musings and poems centered around love. The kind of love that is not about romance and sweet memories, but which caused heart break and devastates an individual. The book is divided into three parts — Part 1 is named Dawn, Part 2 is named Dusk and Part 3 is named Dark. Parts 1 and 2 are mostly dedicated to musings while part 3 consists for poems.
Overall the book has nearly 400 works of the author, which I believe is a huge achievement for one person to put down their thoughts around a single theme. The thoughts and feelings expressed by the author in these lines are mostly emotional, are thought provoking and have deep meaning. The words in the book question the notions of love we believe in and how it feels all rosy and dreamy as long as it exists but can tear us apart when the person moves on, leaving behind a huge vacuum.
The book succeeds in filling the reader with a gamut of emotions though the central theme is love. The title is apt and conveys the crux of the box. I would suggest the reader to take this book slowly with few pages each day to completely relish the emotions and message hidden in these pages. The book is heart touching and thought provoking at the same time. A must read for romance lovers and for those who love poetry. I am looking forward to reading full pledged novels from the author as he shows potential with these short works.
My rating:
4/5.