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.
The narrator begins her journey as a daughter of the washer-women, but finds that she is strange among them, driven as they are by their urgency for silver. Grandfather Time grants her an enormous word that she cannot uncover or even approach, for its power is nauseating and befuddling. She is reborn into a society intent upon burning everything in order to keep the engine running that prevents them from understanding reality. This society's downfall comes about when their own tools and objects become sentient and rebel against them. Tentatively, matter decides to reorganize itself, but soon monoliths arise and the cycle resumes.
The narrator traverses the lurid city of abandoned hopes, the slum that houses the banished memories of the oppressed, the decadent carnival, the dogmatic suburbs, a village besieged by civil war, a corrupt nunnery, the shamans' mountain, a port city quivering with labor agitation, a society of conformist cyborgs, an extractive colony, a mall-church pyramid scheme, a war between the forest fairies and a real estate magnate, and other uncanny realms punctuated by intermediary spiritual states.
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.
