Sukaraat Ko Diary

Sukaratko Diary - Socrates' Diary, is Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s sequel to his previous fiction Sukarataka Pailaharu. It is a fiction about fiction and therefore technically a better label would be metafiction or a poimenon. Bhattarai has used a number of post-modern devices to give his thought a concrete shape such as pastiche, intertexuality, authorial intrusion, historiographic metafiction, technoculture, hyperreality, magical realism, farce, melodrama etc. At surface level, Socrates Diary appears to be a narrative of a university professor instructing his student the principles and practices of fiction writing but at deeper level it turns out to be mere play of signs, farcical. Socrates represents fictional Professor Sharma of Nepal who is very conventional and sticks to the realist tradition which ultimately fails to bring about the author inside Ananata, the major character of the novel. Coleridge’s dictum “There is no great art without strangeness” proves true to this artistic. Unlike other novels Socrates’ Diary puzzles the readers with travelogue, poetry, dialogue, diary, exercises, references, appendices, interviews, online conversations and its reviews within the novel. Bhattarai has shown his creative altitude with a stylistically most complicated creation so far. It is not without criticism either. Socrates Diary is perceived as too complex a work which is of course beyond the reach of ordinary readers. The novel is being translated into English.