The publication of The Book of Death by Banyan Editions is a significant literary event – French translations of Urdu literary works still remain a rare and largely uncharted domain. We congratulate David Aimé for spearheading this initiative and Rosine-Alice Vuille for the finesse and depth of her translation. Despite its concise and compact form, the novel stands as a work of profound weight, its dark and brooding intensity lingering long after the first reading. It compels us to confront the depths of our own darkness, inevitably drawing us into a cycle of reflection and rereading.Khalid Jawed,The Book of Death,Banyan Editions (2025)Some Walter Schiller, of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Syokarig Fort, is said to have penned his introduction in the year 2211. He has recorded the extraordinary discovery of a manuscript which was written in a long-forgotten language and was decoded with great difficulty. It was found amid the ruins of the enigmatic Sesame Grove of Lizards. This site, we are told, once housed an asylum for the insane, before the town itself was submerged nearly two centuries ago to make way for a hydroelectric dam.What follows is the tormented yet darkly humorous monologue of the manuscript’s author whose time and place remain elusive, though he is believed to have been a native of northern India. His existence is defined by a persistent inability to reconcile himself with the world, a grim fixation on death, and an ever-present terror of suicide. But suicide, for him, is not merely an abstract temptation or a passing thought, it is a living entity that haunts him like a shadow. It assumes forms, ‘sometimes even turns a small domestic squirrel, settling into the pocket of his trousers,’ whispering deceptive counsels. In one particularly disturbing episode, as he wanders near a railway track, consumed by despair, the ever-present suicide urges him to surrender to the oncoming train. There are intimations that the narrator’s existential sickness stretches back to childhood and even to the prenatal realm, suggesting that if an original trauma exists, its roots are neither incidental nor accidental. A Gnostic interpretation of The Book of Death that reads it as a meditation on the inherent corruption of existence would be equally convincing. Following his mother’s disappearance, due to episodes of violence and accumulated disappointments, the narrator enters into marriage, though the hatred between father and son remains unresolved, his desire to see his father dead undiminished. He sustains an affair with a woman described as having ‘pale hands and empty eyes’, who, unlike his wife, ‘loves him from the bottom of her heart’ yet finds no happiness in his presence. While modern Indian literature, let alone cinema, treats sexuality with reluctance, Khalid Jawed approaches the marital and extramarital entanglements of his protagonist with stark realism.The novel culminates in a ‘season in hell’, where the narrator sinks into an abyss of despair and methodical self-loathing. His grotesque self-descriptions, mirroring psychological and physical decay, evoke echoes of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. One cannot help but wonder: are Rosine-Alice Vuille and David Aimé aware of whether Jawed has read Les Chants, and if so, whether its influence lingers in these passages? One may take from Les Chants: “I am dirty. The lice gnaw at me. The pigs vomit when they look at me. The scabs and bedsores of leprosy have flaked off my skin, covered with a yellowish pus”, and from The Book of Death: “I completely stopped taking care of my body. I was constantly dirty and filthy. The flow of pus from my wounds diminishes. Soon my body will be nothing more than a gaping ulcer.” Such hideous self-portraits do not merely document physical decline, they translate an existential disgust, abjection so profound that the body itself becomes a testament to inner ruin.The narrator’s father and wife, bound by mutual resentment and a shared weariness of his existence, conspire to have him committed. This descent into the abyss, an experience of utter dispossession, pushes him to the very limits of selfhood. He will only emerge from the asylum’s grasp after his father’s death, a liberation that feels less like triumph and more like the hollow aftermath of long-awaited ruin. Freed at last, he steps away from the ‘black and enormous walls’ of his asylum-prison, walking into the rain, his silhouette dissolving into the grey world beyond. Eventually, he collapses into a muddy pit, a figure as stripped of meaning as one of Beckett’s forlorn wanderers.The novel avoids the conventional ‘chapters’, dividing itself instead into ‘pages’, 19 in total. The 20th remains blank, save for an enigmatic final utterance: ‘Until infinity and beyond time…’ A silence follows, echoing like an unfinished incantation. Jawed himself, in his ‘Word of the Author’, reveals that this cryptic ending alludes to the ‘mysterious syllable’ of Sanskrit, ri (ऋ), a root that may signify ‘to engrave in stone’, a dissolution of the boundary between writer and text, between language and the ineffable.What are we to make of all this? ‘Psychiatric internment’, ‘mental asylum’, how much credence do we give to the narrator’s tale? Is this the fevered diary of a madman, a raw confession laid bare, or something far more elusive? And what if Walter Schiller, the so-called archaeologist of the 23rd century, is not the mere preface-writer he claims to be, but the author himself? Indeed, do Schiller, his University of Syokarig Fort, and his friend Jean Hugo, descendant of Garcin de Tassy and decipherer of the lost manuscript, possess any more reality than the nameless narrator they claim to recover? Or are they all, in the end, spectral figures haunting the very margins of the text, vanishing into the space of that 20th, blank page?This is neither a ‘testimony’ intended for a doctor’s diagnosis, nor one of those self-indulgent auto-fictions so en vogue in contemporary French literature, nor yet another thriller reliant on threadbare tropes. Rather, it is an authentic act of literary creation, a poem in the Greek sense of the word, where the questions it poses find answers only within the fabric of its own narrative.The title remains The Book of Death. But how are we to understand it? Several passages illuminate its meaning, though never with finality, only with a deepening of the enigma. The Book of Death may be that in which ‘our sins are indexed’, a ledger sealed to us until the moment of our disappearance. It will be revealed, but only when it is too late for us. But a more unsettling possibility emerges: its composition precedes us entirely. ‘Shaped by eternal cycles of actions’ over which we have ‘no control’, our ‘acts and sins have been pursuing us even before our birth’. A still more confounding hypothesis arises, one that resurrects the Gnostic spectre lingering throughout the novel. What if this ‘book’ is not merely an archive of guilt, but a work co-authored by opposing forces? Is it the outcome of an unwilling collaboration between God and the Devil, ‘the Devil’s pen dipped in indelible ink?’ Are our lives inscribed in advance, our fates sealed in a cosmic pact, where God must accept the Devil’s hand in his own creation?Jawed’s first novel, Maut ki Kitāb does not resolve these questions. It only opens up a multitude paths, unfurls them, multiplying their shadows. In this refusal to conclude, the novel remains profoundly appealing.To award it Prix Médicis Étranger 2025 would not only be an act of literary recognition but a rare moment of justice, one that would bring long-overdue attention to Indian literature beyond the English-speaking sphere. Patrick Abraham is a French literary critic, journalist, and author. He is known for his insightful reviews and essays on contemporary literature, particularly focusing on international writers and authors.Translated from the French original by A. Naseeb Khan.
