New Books In Literature

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries. Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for