Notes
Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari's debut novel, Chronicle Of An Hour And A Half, is a deeply disturbing but essential read.
Not only is it a significant and important commentary on toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and rape culture, but it also delves into the consequences of a wife being unfaithful instead of a man in rural India. Adding to this is the dangers of the eerie, technology laden times we live in where mobs can be gathered and incited enough to commit murder, simply through a few WhatsApp messages and videos.
The writing, for the most part, is beautiful and stirs up deep emotions. My only issue, and this is probably my limitation as a reader, is that I found the multiple first-person perspectives a little hard to follow. However, I do understand and appreciate that they were necessary for the story to pack the punch it did.
The entire novel felt like reading a ticking time bomb (if that makes sense) - a sense of dread and anxiety that slowly built up to a flash point within the eponymous hour and a half.
I'll end with one of the more disturbing lines, "and they killed him again and again till he died three or four deaths because they continued killing him even after he was deader than a corpse."
