Softly Dies a Lake

Softly Dies a Lake is at once memory, history, tribute, lament, apology and penance; to a childhood, to a lake, to a people, to a vital but lost way of life

I thought I would redirect the Kolleru that flooded my brain into yours and flood your thoughts. This novel is about my childhood. All the people in it are real. That village is real. Kolleru is real. An elegy to Kolleru, one of India s largest freshwater lakes located in Andhra Pradesh, Akkineni Kutumbarao s novel Kolleti Jadalu vividly brings alive the villages and people whose lives are woven inseparably with the lake. Swamped by water, this is the precarious life-world of a people in a constant struggle to survive in an environment that is nurturing and bountiful, yet unpredictable and hostile. The story of the lake and the people whose lives and hopes, joys and sorrows depend on it is told through the eyes of five-year-old Seenu. With dry humour, gentle irony and profound human empathy, Kutumbarao details a little-known and rich world, brutally destroyed as the market ultimately triumphs over nature.