WRITING short story is a challenging art. Junaidul Haque always prefers to take on this genre, which demands the writer to be more concise and to the point than other fictional prose narratives. And he accomplishes the task with consummate dexterity.

Nirbachito Golpo by Junaidul Haque offers up impeccable entertainment, to a point where the reader enjoys the entirety of the book page by page. It is a saga of passionate unrequited love, friendship and loneliness that the writer puts forth here.

Published in February 2009, a slim edition with an attractive cover to accompany it, the work is a collection of seventeen short stories. The list of contents, disided into three sections, make a compact as well as soul-searching journey taking the reader along with the narrator most attentively and meticulously from the beginning to the end.. The first part contains seven under the subtitle, in Bengali of course, The Story of Good and EviL The second part is poetically and sadly called The Awakeningof Sorrow, with five stories, while the last part comes to readers as Another Afflicted Wonder, containing altogether five stories.

Junaidul Haque bases his stories on nostalgia, loneliness, remembrances of the past and the glorious War of Liberation. Most of his protagonists are tall. dark, handsome, well bred, highly educated, cultured and above all irresistible. Some of his characters are reminiscent of Eliot's Prufrock, but he does not mean them to be like him.

The main character of the story Afflicted With Wonder, Yousuf loves to study literature, watch cricket and listen to Tagore songs. A serious student of literature with fervent passion for D. H Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Aldous Huxley, Junaidul Haque portrays Yousuf as virile, manlv and oassionate. The love affair between Babu and Shamima is so subtly and poignantly delineated in the story Saswari that it will remind us all about Romeo and Juliet in terms of the intensity of love.

Like D. H. Lawrence, Junaidul Haque, in his short stories, explores human nature through a frank discussion of sex. psychology’ and embedded internal conflict in the human psyche. His short stories can be acclaimed as artistically accomplished writings and noted for their economi-

Nirbachito Golpo Junaidul Haque Pathak Shamabesh

cal style and structure. Some of them focus on the familiar events and problems of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first.

The stories must be read for the trenchant insights the writer brings into the deepest impulses of life. Junaidul Haque's devotion to illuminating human passion and his original perspective on the problems posed by human relationships shine through in the work.

Md Shafiqul Islam is a civil servant and a former student of literature.