book review: NOT UNDER A BANYAN TREE

NOT UNDER A BANYAN TREE

NOT UNDER A BANYAN TREE

Poetry, stories, humour and news

By Jan Oscar Hansen

First edition 2011,  pp.63

ISBN: 978-81-8253-242-7

Publishers:  Cyberwit.net,

Price: Rs.200       Euro 13

Jan Oskar Hansen is a Norwegian who has spent most of his life at sea.  In the 1990s he settled down in Portugal. He is fluent in many languages, but writes mainly in English because his most ardent fans know English.Hansen shows a genuine love and respect for all things living. He writes in the first person, conveying the sense that what he writes is autobiographical. In the extremely brief little vignettes – which cannot be encumbered with the definition of ‘short story’ – he gives a precise, objective and telling description of a person (  ‘Not under a Banyan tree’), or a situation (  ‘The Date’), or a political situation  (‘Islamisation of our Europe’). Or even of a place (‘The Emerald Isle’, ‘Limelight’).

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