‘The tiger smelt the mouth of the cave from a distance. The mouth of the cave knew that the tiger was on its way.’

It’s easy to imagine Jenkins from the lower sixth sniggering away at that one. To be fair, those lines are taken out of context, and are leant legitimacy and gravitas by the rest of the text, but still, at heart, the book comprises a sequence of allusions to the genitalia.

What Prakash Kona does well is to constantly shift the focus, blur the lines between the man and the woman, so that we are never sure whether the narrator, the declarer of love, is male or female. They are both – Kona stresses the unity of love – two people come together and become whole, one new person, a single loving entity. Indeed, this is love without prejudice – at times we seem to be reading of one man’s love for another, or of the love between two women. We realise the tiger, potent fiery phallus at first, has slowly, imperceptibly become the symbol of woman – her maternal instincts are stressed, her feline femininity is revealed. Is the cave now man? We do not know; it doesn’t matter.

There is much to be appreciated here, in Kona’s shifts of perception, lively metaphors and delight in the English language. Take this, the first line of ‘The Turnip-eating Fanatic’ (itself a great title):

‘If every corner has a corner to its credit then I am cornered to believe that corners never end.’

I have no idea what that means, but it sure is pretty.

Nonetheless there is a limit to the number of these short pieces that I can read in a row. The first is charming, the second interesting, the third, fourth and fifth seem like more of the same. Different metaphor, same basic idea. After trying a couple of times to sit down with the book and plough through it, I shoved it in my internal outhouse and assigned it the role of ‘Bathroom Book’. I read one or two most mornings and set it aside for the rest of the day – even then I only finished it out of a sense of duty.

At bottom (unfortunate phrase in conjunction with ‘Bathroom Book’, but bear with me) is the vague suspicion that what I am reading is merely a series of 62, admittedly very good, flowery sex scenes from larger novels, each isolated and compiled into one tome. If I read about the tiger and his/her cave in the context of a greater story I would think ‘Blimey, that’s a well written naughty bit’. But they are really simple improvements on the stock ‘A Rocket Ship Launches into Space’ or ‘The Train Steams into the Tunnel’ – interesting, fun, but not the stuff a whole book is made of.

I enjoyed ‘Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace’ at first, but it didn’t grip me. There was nothing to make me want to read the sixty-second piece, or even the twentieth. I certainly wanted to like it. The idea is interesting, and there is a simple honesty about it that I appreciate, but it falls down in the execution. I certainly wouldn’t know who to recommend it to as a worthwhile read.

Tim West is a philosophy graduate living in Edinburgh. Ill-equipped for the realities of the outside world, he patiently awaits the day the government stops boycotting the Arts and gives him some money to return to university, or ‘the womb’ as he is often inclined to think of it. Having said that, all or most of his pleasures derive from exploring outside the outside world, and he is a keen traveller, devoting all spare cash to heading off around the globe in search of excitement and treasure. His likes include coffee and old books, and his dislikes include pragmatists.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.

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