FICTION

THE GLASSBLOWER’S BREATH by Sunetra Gupta (Grove Press: $20.; 266 pp.) There’s a unique type of frustration that comes from overhearing a conversation where the voices are just loud enough to make out their rise and fall, but too soft to understand a single word. Reading “The Glassblower’s Breath,” is a similar experience.

Writing in the second person, present tense (“You dare not meet his eyes for fear they are opaque with farewell, a lead weight that might crush your own effervescence”), Sunetra Gupta gives a minimum of dialogue and physical description. Instead, she spins out sentences that stretch for an entire page and paragraphs that might go three or four.

The unnamed narrator is a well-heeled, educated woman who, with her husband, is raising an orphan niece. There’s a cousin, Avishek, and a close friend, Jon Sparrow. The narrator seems to be sort of in love with both of them, but sort of not.

Gupta’s heavy, dense prose and continuous switches in time, place and point of view are so overpowering that although it’s clear her voice has enormous depth and insight, what’s not clear are the words themselves.