Bliss Mountain - by Aashish Kaul (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"It made an impression, this sudden light filling the scene, cutting deep through strata of memory."

Moving from New York to London, from Sydney to Delhi, from the mid-Hudson region to the vale of Kashmir, Bliss Mountain blends finance, architecture, literature, and geopolitics against the sublime drama of nature and natural forms to offer a kaleidoscopic view of our globalized and fragmented moment in history. Meanwhile, in a minor key, unfolds a story of life and death with hallucinatory visions from Thomas De Quincey's famous piece 'The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion'.

British Romanticism, American Modernism, and what the author calls Contemporary Globalism come together in this short novel to offer a distinctive vision of the last four decades. But the story is as much of the past as of the present and takes one right to the edge of a near dystopian and speculative futurity. One could, if one wished to, draw parallels here between the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression, and the nightmarish reality into which the book empties itself out.