Book Review: The Middle Finger by Saikat Majumdar

The Middle Finger by Saikat Majumdar

Publisher: Simon and Schuster (2022)

The first thing one notices about The Middle Finger by Saikat Majumdar is its dark grey cover with the left profile of a young lady on it with a colourful eye. It is only when you remove the jacket from the cover that you see underneath a picture of a woman’s reflection in the glass pane of a window, with a cup and some books lying by it. It is that woman’s eye that is popping through the cover image from a round cutout. In many ways, this speaks a lot about the book itself.

Every single character in the book has layers, multiple of them. On the face of it, they look very different as they struggle to go through their day-to-day pretending to be someone else. To an extent, they are scared to reveal their truest selves to the world. And yet, there are times when they see the world differently because their soul is tired of pretending. Saikat Majumdar is a critically acclaimed writer with many popular titles to his credit including The Scent of God (Simon and Schuster, 2019) and The Firebird/Play House. His writings are known to capture the intricacies and eccentricities of life exquisitely.

Read the full review on Atta Galatta's blog.

Books on Cinema

For a long time, cinema was a world I wasn’t allowed to enter. I grew up in a home where movies were banned. No television, no glimpses of silver screens, and no songs echoing from old classics. For nearly a decade, cinema was a forbidden word like a secret behind a closed door. And yet, like all things that carry truth and longing, it found its way to me. Stories have a way of finding you, slipping through cracks, whispered between pages, caught in melodies. Sometimes through the corners of borrowed books, sometimes through whispered summaries from classmates, sometimes just through the magnetic pull of posters and songs I wasn’t supposed to hear.

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