St Suniti and the Dragon
Once she had reconciled herself to the view that a garden snake, however beautiful, was not evil, Suniti decided to set about the matter in a more businesslike way. She put an ad in the paper: ‘Elderly gentlewoman seeks to make a bargain with the devil’.
Where are good and evil to be found? What is the path to sainthood? Is it through poetry or good deeds? St Suniti talks to angels and flowers, dragons, saints and ordinary people in her quest. Suniti Namjoshi has original imagination full of surprises encompassing saints and wolves, Beowulf and Bangladesh, Grendel and Star Trek.
It’s hilarious, witty, elegantly written, hugely inventive, fantastic, energetic, up to the minute, analytic, touching.
1993 | ISBN 9781875559183 | Paperback | 198 x 125 mm | 126 pp
Reviews
‘I can think of plenty of adjectives to describe St. Suniti and the Dragon, but not a noun to go with them. It’s hilarious, witty, elegantly written, hugely inventive, fantastic, energetic... With work as original as this, it's easier to fling words at it than to say what it is or what it does.'
–U.A. Fanthorpe
‘... the feminist poet has eaten Brothers Grimm and reinvents the tropes of fairytale in witty, knowing conundrums. [There is] a subtle sly playfulness which merely grows on re-reading.’
–Diva
‘With harsh lucidity and elegant irony, Namjoshi uses the paradigms of fable to instruct – and reconstruct – our social perceptions.’
–M. Travis Lane
‘A wry, sly and very wise variation on the quest.’
–Daphne Marlatt