A Space in My Mind: Where Memory, Place and Impermanence Meet

What remains when a place, its people and its stories slowly disappear? In S. G. Sreejith’s debut novel, A Space in My Mind, this question unfolds through memory, metafiction and the evocative landscape of Butter Valley.

A Journey into Butter Valley

Prof. R. Sudarshan, Dean, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University, describes reading the novel as an immersive experience: “Reading it transported me to Butter Valley, its stone bench and its denizens.” His response to the characters is equally intimate: “I can fall in love with Sunshine.”

Butter Valley emerges not merely as a setting but as a world shaped by people, memories and the traces of lives lived there.

When Fiction Questions Its Own Boundaries

At the heart of the novel is its metafictional quality, where the author enters the narrative and engages directly with his creation. Prof. Sudarshan places the novel within “the metafictional tradition, in which an author steps into the narrative and speaks directly to a character created by the novelist.”

This recalls Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla, or Mist, in which the fictional character Augusto Pérez confronts his author, challenging the boundaries between creator and creation. The author similarly uses metafiction to explore the relationship between author, character and the worlds created through storytelling.

The Landscape of Loss

The novel reaches beyond literary experimentation in its treatment of disappearance and memory. Prof. Sudarshan singles out Death Turns Spaces Empty and ‘Nothing’ is the Truth as “powerful chapters that will haunt me often.” They also took him back to his childhood in Kolar Gold Fields, once known as “Little England” and now a ghost town.

He describes these sections as an “elegiac topography, an aftermath narrative.” What distinguishes them is not simply the emptiness of a place but the way that emptiness is rendered, with “a strange beauty in this truth.” The abandoned landscape becomes a memento mori for civilisations, reminding us that even seemingly permanent worlds can disappear.

Listening to Silence

Prof. Sudarshan calls the novel “acutely auditory,” observing that Butter Valley is marked by “unnerving silences or the wrong kind of noises.” The landscape therefore becomes more than a physical setting. It becomes a layered archive of memory, absence and the lives that once animated it.

A Literary Tradition of Vanished Worlds

His reflections place the author alongside writers such as Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Bruce Chatwin, whose works evoke landscapes transformed by time. Their vanished worlds provide a wider literary context for Butter Valley and its afterlife.

Impermanence as the Ultimate Subject

Ultimately, Prof. Sudarshan identifies the novel’s central theme: “Your ultimate subject is impermanence, not mid-life crisis.”

That insight captures the distinctive appeal of A Space in My Mind. It is a novel about places that disappear, memories that endure and stories that give vanished worlds another life. Through Butter Valley, the author transforms personal memory into a wider meditation on what remains—and what inevitably passes away.

Discover A Space in My Mind and enter the unforgettable world of Butter Valley.

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