Wasteland Mandala

How is existence stitched together, and what worlds reside between its seams? How can individual and collective suffering be redeemed? Can language, shaped by domination and exploitation, be used to transcend ignorance?

Wasteland Mandala is a genre-b(l)ending literary novel that follows a first-person narrator through repetitive cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Each consecutive world explores a specific struggle against ignorance, domination, and cruelty. Weaving together threads of fable, myth, poetry, philosophy, and surrealism, this novel laments the suffering of sentient beings and speculates about their redemption through collective endeavor, while carrying the reader on waves of melancholy, lyrical prose strewn with absurdist, sing-song verse.

Each consecutive world carries its own rapturous integration and laconic disintegration. Throughout, the author plays with and explores the limitations of language, attempting to dissolve its meaning and sentiment into the world in watery ways, sometimes curling around or seeping underneath the narrative structure, rather than wielding it in a traditional way.

Genres
Hybrid writing, Literary fiction, Experimental, Novel-in-verse, Surrealism
Comparison Titles

• The Famished Road by Ben Okri, for its motif of reincarnation and lyrical prose
• The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, for its bizarre, folktale-like style
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, for its odd logic and the sing-song verse
• Collages by Anais Nin, for its surrealist strokes and sensitive voice