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Bliss Mountain
“It made an impression, this sudden light filling the scene, cutting deep through strata of memory.”
Moving from New York to London, from Sydney to Delhi, from the mid-Hudson region to the vale of Kashmir, Bliss Mountain blends finance, architecture, literature, and geopolitics against the sublime drama of nature and natural forms to offer a kaleidoscopic view of our globalized and fragmented moment in history. Meanwhile, in a minor key, unfolds a story of life and death with hallucinatory visions from Thomas De Quincey’s famous piece ‘The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion’.
British Romanticism, American Modernism, and what the author calls Contemporary Globalism come together in this short novel to offer a distinctive vision of the last four decades. But the story is as much of the past as of the present and takes one right to the edge of a near dystopian and speculative futurity. One could, if one wished to, draw parallels here between the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression, and the nightmarish reality into which the book empties itself out.
Drawing on modernist form—the movement back and forth across time and space—and Romantic-era history, Bliss Mountain travels from Kashmir to New York, taking in the troubled history of Partition, the death of the protagonist’s father, the financial crisis and, in its closing sections, the COVID pandemic. Finance, empire, personal and environmental concerns all weave together in a novel that meditates on the place of the aesthetic in our personal lives but also in our social lives.
–Paul Stasi, author of The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
Like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and their French modernist contemporary Marcel Proust, Kaul’s fiction is animated by epiphanies, those heightened moments of poetic perception or spiritual insight that pulse through and transform daily life. The writing is keenly attuned to the ways in which the present returns echoes or reminders of the close as well as more distantly-lived past. And always, it is a present and a past steeped in literature and the world of ideas.
–Jacqueline Kolosov, author of Modigliani’s Muse and Memory of Blue
A multinational tale set in New York, London, Sydney, Kashmir, Bliss Mountain attends to the full context of place that includes history, architectural movements, and geologic time. Settings range from Manhattan’s modernist skyscrapers sitting atop shifts in the earth’s mantle to the Himalayan mountains standing steady above human drama. This capacious perspective engages the simultaneous largeness and smallness of human experience and offers in fiction what Scott Russell Sanders has described as a hallmark of the essay form: “a record, on paper, of the individual mind at work and play.” The novel is reminiscent of the writings of W.G. Sebald, Carole Maso, and Jeannette Winterson, for whom “character” is often less about individual histories and contexts than about shifting perspectives and tensions between interior and exterior realities. Kaul’s attention to the preoccupations of family, grief, and how we carry loss forward in life offers a pleasurable and moving read.
–Michele Morano, author of Like Love and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain
Moving from New York to London, from Sydney to Delhi, from the mid-Hudson region to the vale of Kashmir, Bliss Mountain blends finance, architecture, literature, and geopolitics against the sublime drama of nature and natural forms to offer a kaleidoscopic view of our globalized and fragmented moment in history. Meanwhile, in a minor key, unfolds a story of life and death with hallucinatory visions from Thomas De Quincey’s famous piece ‘The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion’.
British Romanticism, American Modernism, and what the author calls Contemporary Globalism come together in this short novel to offer a distinctive vision of the last four decades. But the story is as much of the past as of the present and takes one right to the edge of a near dystopian and speculative futurity. One could, if one wished to, draw parallels here between the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression, and the nightmarish reality into which the book empties itself out.
Drawing on modernist form—the movement back and forth across time and space—and Romantic-era history, Bliss Mountain travels from Kashmir to New York, taking in the troubled history of Partition, the death of the protagonist’s father, the financial crisis and, in its closing sections, the COVID pandemic. Finance, empire, personal and environmental concerns all weave together in a novel that meditates on the place of the aesthetic in our personal lives but also in our social lives.
–Paul Stasi, author of The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
Like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and their French modernist contemporary Marcel Proust, Kaul’s fiction is animated by epiphanies, those heightened moments of poetic perception or spiritual insight that pulse through and transform daily life. The writing is keenly attuned to the ways in which the present returns echoes or reminders of the close as well as more distantly-lived past. And always, it is a present and a past steeped in literature and the world of ideas.
–Jacqueline Kolosov, author of Modigliani’s Muse and Memory of Blue
A multinational tale set in New York, London, Sydney, Kashmir, Bliss Mountain attends to the full context of place that includes history, architectural movements, and geologic time. Settings range from Manhattan’s modernist skyscrapers sitting atop shifts in the earth’s mantle to the Himalayan mountains standing steady above human drama. This capacious perspective engages the simultaneous largeness and smallness of human experience and offers in fiction what Scott Russell Sanders has described as a hallmark of the essay form: “a record, on paper, of the individual mind at work and play.” The novel is reminiscent of the writings of W.G. Sebald, Carole Maso, and Jeannette Winterson, for whom “character” is often less about individual histories and contexts than about shifting perspectives and tensions between interior and exterior realities. Kaul’s attention to the preoccupations of family, grief, and how we carry loss forward in life offers a pleasurable and moving read.
–Michele Morano, author of Like Love and Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain
94 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2025
3 people want to read
About the author
Aashish Kaul
3 books20 followersAashish Kaul was born in India, and educated in India and Australia. His work has been published in Australia, Britain, India, and North America. His books include A Dream of Horses & Other Stories and the chess-inspired novel The Queen’s Play. He is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the State University of New York, Albany.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 28, 2025
Bliss Mountain was the perfect 'handbag' book for the waiting rooms that occupied my time this week! (My regular (always punctual) doctor has been gadding about on holiday, and the replacement always goes over time). But Bliss Mountain was absorbing reading, and also conducive to pleasurable re-reading...
I liked it for much the same reason that I liked Subhash Jaireth's Spinoza's Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (2020, see my review) because I enjoyed the musings of a traveller across space and time, and the literary allusions e.g. to the Australian poet Les Murray. Kaul's narrator, however, is also preoccupied by the landscape of his surroundings, and in New York, his observations of its architecture are unexpected where new sights crowd out the old.
The narrator comes to New York at an awkward time in his relationship with his wife Rita, who has stayed in London after being made partner in a law firm, while he has abandoned that career. He respected her ambition, her confidence, her practical attitude and her knowledge of the ways of the world but her cool demeanour became at times too vexing to ignore.
As he walks the streets and parks of New York, he is absorbed by memories of walking in London, among smooth Georgian façades with arched doorways and stuccoed lower floors and in the cemetery, the graves of Karl Marx and Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch. But in New York, where the jazz age represented casting off European legacies, it is Art Deco that dominates his meditations.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/06/28/b...
I liked it for much the same reason that I liked Subhash Jaireth's Spinoza's Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets (2020, see my review) because I enjoyed the musings of a traveller across space and time, and the literary allusions e.g. to the Australian poet Les Murray. Kaul's narrator, however, is also preoccupied by the landscape of his surroundings, and in New York, his observations of its architecture are unexpected where new sights crowd out the old.
In a different age, the city's vertical lines thickening out of the morning mist must have quickened the pulse of passengers entering the harbour. With inflamed minds—the tiredness eclipsed for now by the promise of future rewards, felt like a pinprick between breaths—they must have hurriedly climbed ashore, over rocks of mica schist and gneiss a billion years old. Formed in the tectonic drama that had shaped much of the eastern seaboard and that had left new York with one of the longest natural harbours in the world, the strategic significance had not been lost on the first Dutch settlers, the foundations of these modern erections, whose gothic traceries and glittering spires touched the skies with a brash exuberance and doused the crepuscular streets below with untold passions, were in fact layered in deep time.
So a dizzying geological pastness had anchored all this freedom and ambition. (p.3)
The narrator comes to New York at an awkward time in his relationship with his wife Rita, who has stayed in London after being made partner in a law firm, while he has abandoned that career. He respected her ambition, her confidence, her practical attitude and her knowledge of the ways of the world but her cool demeanour became at times too vexing to ignore.
She had both kindness and virtue but was unwilling to extend her imagination to abstract ideals. (p.6)
As he walks the streets and parks of New York, he is absorbed by memories of walking in London, among smooth Georgian façades with arched doorways and stuccoed lower floors and in the cemetery, the graves of Karl Marx and Mary Ann Evans, author of Middlemarch. But in New York, where the jazz age represented casting off European legacies, it is Art Deco that dominates his meditations.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/06/28/b...
Displaying 1 of 1 review