It may not be auspicious for a book to begin with an introduction about ennui. But Daisy Rockwell gives the subject the same light touch she brings to the translation of Usha Priyamvada’s Won’t You Stay, Radhika?, framing it within the broader tradition of bourgeois languor as well as all the ennui-adjacent varieties of female melancholy that exist in literature …
It’s October, the weather is changing and there’s this sweet sense of idleness around me. in 1967, and translated into English by Daisy Rockwell, it tells the tale of Radhika, a young woman struggling to find her place in her own country as she comes back from the U.S. after completing her master’s degree in fine arts. After she loses …
