Dancing with Shadows

Scientific determinism, Tarot cards, Cinema, Music, Love, and Quantum Physics. The narrator negotiates love, murder, and war in this captivating philosophical journey. Pradhan is exceptional in showing the narrator’s holistic approach to understanding.

Quantum physics and love. A united theory of everything? It is an idealistic adolescent goal, and this is what makes Dancing with Shadows so interesting. This is a coming of age story of a young man in East Africa whose intuition tells him that these things are all connected. In his growing self-awareness and world weariness, he is obsessed with connecting the dots of his life in order to reveal some profound significance (i. e. the “music of God”). Who hasn’t pondered such questions? How is my life unique or significant? How much more would life mean to me if I understood, say, the music of God…and what is the music of God?

Although he is a young man continually preoccupied with sex and love, he is essentially a philosopher. He wants to understand things such as the life application of a quantum wave collapse or the difference between sex and love. This story is a Hamlet-esque self-portrait in his constant questioning. It echoes the uncertain and awkward, yet outwardly confident manner of Holden Caulfield. But above all, this story made me think of the kind quest for mystical self-importance that I recall from Joyce’s narrator in “Araby.”