Ruins

by Gaurav Monga

"Ruins that were marked as signs of moral degradation and occurred at the end of an epoch, now appear as our consistent present. In this city they are not merely the outcomes of natural disasters or man-made cataclysms, but it is an event which we anticipate and look forward to."
--- Premjish Achari

Genres: India

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Gaurav Monga is an author originally from New Delhi, India. He taught himself German to read the works of Franz Kafka. His debut book Tears for Rahul Dutta was published by Philistine Press in 2012. He is also the author of Ruins (Desirepaths Publisher, 2019), Family Matters (Eibonvale Press, 2019), Costumes of the Living (Snuggly Books, 2020) and My Father, the Watchmaker (Hawakal Publishers, 2020)

Much of his writing has appeared in various literary magazines such as: B O D Y, Fanzine, Tammy Journal, Birkensnake, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Juked, Dismantle Magazine, Spurl Editions, The Fabulist, Ethos Literary Journal amongst others

Reviews

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One of these buildings has more exits than entrances."

I'm reasonably certain that all of the unspoken truths of architecture are contained within this book. The prose is perfectly spare and precise, leaving no space in which to conceal hidden doors, secret chambers, unrealized blueprints, unsigned documents—this proves that the author hasn't cheated, everything has been done according to code. The different sections read like maxims. They can, and must, be studied, but they can never be entirely learned. The act of reading this book is one of pure pleasure, it's like an act of subversion against the very principles delineated in the text. I read this book twice in as many days. I'll definitely read it a third time, and again after that.

"I showed up accidentally in a city where I was not supposed to be."

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reads like a weird hybrid of Kafka and Étienne-Louis Boullée's impossible architecture... the short sections read like dispatches from a zone of alienation, and the cumulative effect brings to mind a threnody of disintegration... urban squalor has never been so much fun!

[Alcebiades Diniz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another "Ruinenwerttheorie”

Albert Speer, the German architect, a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, developed in the 1930s a “theory of ruin value”. Faced with the vision of the imposing monuments erected by the Nazi regime (like the famous “Zeppelinfeld”, designed by himself), Speer had a vision of that huge stadium complexion hundreds, thousands years in the future, when Reich himself had shattered and everything was decay and ruin. Speer wrote on his theory: “He [the architect] chooses the stone, which can offer him all possibilities to form, and which is the only material to pass down tradition—the tradition that remains for us in the stone buildings made by our predecessors—to future generations because of its constancy”.

For the full review: http://bibliophagus.weebly.com/blog/a...

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Gaurav Monga's writing--reading it it is like being in a dream, a fairy tale, and in a very sophisticated world class museum all at once. In this book, Monga treats memory and space, continually returning to the motif of lost architecture and fractured pasts. A must read from India!!

[Kurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Magical realist vignettes with shades of Borges and Calvino.

[Thushara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such beautiful hopelessness . . .