Love, Pray, Eat (dessert): Lucky Everyday by Bapsy Jain

A beautiful twenty-something Indian chartered accountant teaches yoga to prisoners at a New York state penitentiary.

I knew I had to review Bapsy Jain’s Lucky Everyday when I heard the plot outline. The thing that’s always stuck in my craw about chick-lit is the consumerism displayed by the protagonists; the Shopaholic is but the most transparently-named member of her tribe. The idea of yoga (can we say anti-materialism here?) entwined with chick-lit was way too twisted intriguing to pass up.

Lucky Boyce has just emerged from a nasty divorce where her husband killed her successful jewelery export business and her self-esteem. She subsequently moves from Mumbai to New York, the scene of happier days when she was a successful single woman working for a top financial services firm in Manhattan. An old friend persuades Lucky to take her mind off her troubles by teaching yoga to help rehabilitate prisoners. In a Bollywood moment, Lucky wins over the skeptical convicts by performing a single-armed handstand.

But New York isn’t kind to Lucky this time round. A random mugging results in a serious wrist injury. The new firm she’s joined seems to encourage dodgy accounting practices. The nice guy she’d dumped for her former husband is now a married father of two. And when Lucky finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy, possibly facing a prison term, her name looks like a bad joke. But our protagonist sorts out most of her problems with her intelligence, some serious doodling skills, and of course, yoga. I have never practised yoga, and so am not quite sure what to make of a sentence like “Closing her eyes, she focused on a soft blue glow that appeared from the ajna chakra.” Suffice to say that yoga calms and de-stresses Lucky so she can focus on her true priorities. Lucky is aided in her quest for inner peace by the voice of her spiritual guru Shanti (duh, peace in Sanskrit).

The writing is occasionally OTT (as witnessed by the latter instance), but Lucky Everyday’s main weakness is its anemic characterizations. Lucky is nicely drawn, but the secondary characters are an indistinguishable lot–there is no real attempt to explore the impulses or ideologies that shape people’s behaviors. Still, the plot moves along briskly, and readers will definitely cheer Lucky in her fight against the patriarchy. And how bracing to find a protagonist who isn’t a South Asian subaltern finding western feminism (and hence her voice) in North America. Jain gives us a young Indian woman whose independence and self-confidence were forged in India, who is traveling West to find peace. Lucky Boyce is in fact an anti-Elizabeth Gilbert, loving, praying and eating her way to enlightenment in NYC…

Jain also provides much interesting incidental detail in the book, not the least of which is that Lucky is Zoroastrian, and her ex-husband a Hindu. As is often the case, the pressures of a mixed marriage weigh more heavily on the woman, and having a jerk for a husband does not help. While the break-up of Lucky’s marriage wasn’t detailed in any meaningful depth, I was sort of glad that Jain pushed her protagonist beyond standard gender politics. Lucky’s real struggle is to locate herself as a human being in the spiritual world.

If this is chick-lit, bring it on. Please.

(This review appears in Ego Magazine.)

Update: via email from the author, news that there’s a sequel in the works. And there just might be a film too!

Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup

The linchpin of Vikas Swarup’s  Q&A (better known as Slumdog Millionaire) was coincidence — twenty of them, to be exact. The readers, however, were not required to suspend disbelief, for they could share the authorities’ scepticism (about coincidence providing the answers to the protagonist). By making the credibility of the events central to his narrative, Swarup elevated Q&A from thriller to genre-breaker. The novel’s in-your-face ingenuity ensured that the coincidences never dwindled into obvious literary devices.

Six Suspects, Swarup’s much awaited second novel, is again held together by the notion of coincidence. This time around, however, the author expects us to swallow it all with no explanation. But while far less convincing than Q&A, Six Suspects is wildly, shamelessly entertaining. Swarup is the Dan Brown of India, with the advantage of not having to look to history for inspiration; modern-day India, with its gaping social chasms and colorful political landscape, provides ample material to conspiracy theorists.

Vicky Rai, the corrupt son of a corrupt politician, kills a young woman in a fit of rage. Despite the presence of several witnesses during the murder, Vicky is acquitted by the Indian judicial system. When Vicky is shot dead at a party celebrating the verdict, six suspects emerge: a Bollywood actress, a tribal, a petty thief, an American visitor, a bureaucrat and a politician. Each has a motive, each has a gun, and each one’s life is filled with coincidence. The American is named Larry Page (just like the Google guy)! The actress has a doppelganger! The thief is in love with a suspect’s daughter! Each sentence describing these six characters deserves an exclamation!

Sadly, the characters themselves are stereotypes; some more than others. The Bollywood actress is an intellectual; we know this because she quotes Nietzsche (“my Master”) and Sartre in her diary, and mentions Heidegger and Malamud in an interview. More troubling, however, is the intellectually-challenged Texan who works at a Walmart and says things like “Me and Mom are closer than ticks on a hound,” who references the Rose Bowl, Miss Hooters International, and the Starplex Cinema at Waco in his introduction. Swarup is on very thin ice here indeed.

And as for the plot: at times, it seems this frantic tale should be shelved under fantasy –the story lurches about crazily, moving from Kashmir to Chennai to the remote Andaman Islands to New Delhi. But it’s all strangely addictive, and makes for a cracking good read. Questioning Swarup’s style and plot developments while reading is like thinking about kinesiology during sex. Why spoil the fun?

Six Suspects is nothing if not ambitious, seeking to encompass each of modern India’s many issues in four hundred seventy pages. Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and endemic institutional corruption all find a mention. Terrorism in Kashmir: check. The Bhopal gas tragedy: check. A shamefully inadequate safety net for the underprivileged: check. A growing economic divide leading to escalating crime: check. Centrist policies disenfranchising those away from the seats of power: check. If I’ve left out any of India’s manifold woes — well, you’ll find them in this novel. After all, Swarup’s combination of feel-good emotion in the midst of grim Indian reality is a proven winner. It should surprise no-one that the film rights to this novel were snapped up long ago.

(A slightly modified version of this review appears in The Asian Review of Books.)

Seven Wheelchairs by Gary Presley

Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio   by Gary Presley. University of Iowa Press; October 2008)

Even held to the most rigorous of definitions, Gary Presley’s life has been filled with suffering. A faulty Polio inoculation received in 1959, when he was seventeen, resulted in three months in an iron lung (a machine that enables those with loss of muscle control to breathe). Presley left the iron lung for life in a wheelchair. Every day since then, he has experienced physical pain—and sometimes indignity, when the world proves unaccommodating to the disabled.

Somerset Maugham once said that suffering does not ennoble the character—happiness, he claimed, sometimes does that, but suffering only made men petty and vindictive. The first part of Presley’s memoir  would seem to prove Maugham right. Succumbing to self-pity, Presley fought a “strange silent war” with the reality of his disability, challenging his parents with his intransigence and resentment. Unable to look beyond the unreason of his condition, an embittered Presley asked his father, “Do you think God wants me in this wheelchair?” The response was an honest if unhelpful “How should I know?” The tension between religion and reality, an omnipotent God and hapless subject, is one of the central conflicts in this work, and carried through till the surprising resolution near the book’s conclusion.

Over fifty years, Presley gradually travels the arc from rage to acceptance—a journey that I have come to understand (from reading this book) is by no means inevitable for the disabled. He describes his voyage with a salty humor that leavens an often-harrowing story. The danger in this sort of book, at least for me, is that the weighty (and worthy) subject matter might overwhelm the writing, but Presley the prose stylist has as much to offer as Presley the memoirist. Consider:

I had yet to learn that I had been drafted into an army that throughout most of human history had sustained itself by begging…[] I understood then, and still believe it now, that it takes a certain grace to accept charity, a grace I could not find within me during that period…

Presley states that the aim of his book is to “show that a life disabled is a life worth living.” But this work calls to my mind Socrates’ words—that the unexamined life is not worth living. Presley meticulously analyzes every instance where his actions and attitudes fell short of his own (very high) standards. At times, Seven Wheelchairs almost seems like an act of catharsis:

I found comfort in contriving a fantasy that my simple existence proved I had mined a heroic quality from within; I fancied I had survived through an act of will, and act of bravery. That contradictory delusion—heroic, even though dependent—overlooked the fact that I would wither and die in bed [...] if I did not have someone to watch over me.

Stop beating yourself up! I sometimes want to tell Presley. You’ve been through a lot, and you deserve some compassion. Not pity though; no reader would dare pity him, not when his life is filled with such spirit and wry self-awareness. Presley himself shuns the term noble, and I agree with his reasoning: he does not want to be extolled for spending his life in a wheelchair. Rather, all he demands is equal opportunities for the disabled. But in his capacity to find meaning in love and faith and work so his disability is but one facet of his life, in his view of the wheelchair not as constraint but an enabler of independence, in his insistence on his ordinariness, Presley to me is close to noble. Maugham should have remembered that the alchemy of suffering is selective; it takes a certain metal to make gold.

(This review appears in the current edition of Eclectica magazine.)

Poetics of Dissent: The Fourth Canvas by Rana Bose

While reading a thriller, I anticipate — and usually get — a twisty, testosterone-ridden plot. If I’m lucky, there’s a strong female character; really lucky, a good sex scene. What I don’t expect: a theory of socio-political hegemony centered around the idea of dissent. But Rana Bose’s The Fourth Canvas is a novel of ideas as much as a thriller, with enough red herrings to make Agatha Christie proud, and enough progressive ideas to satisfy the most ardent activist.

 Claude Chiragi, a doctoral student at McGill, has just received a birthday present from his girlfriend Clara. To his relief, the large flat package isn’t an Ikea piece in malevolent wait for assembly. Rather, Clara has come up with the goods — a painting by the political philosopher Guillermo Sanchez, who also happens to be the subject of Claude’s research. Sanchez, who died in 1974, was the author of a few articles, and a book on Mexican history — slim pickings for a thesis. The hitherto unknown painting will provide Claude material for his floundering PhD.

The canvas depicts a city landscape full of characters seemingly in fear of an impending calamity. Only one woman seems exempt from the malaise; her face is calm, even eager. Hidden in the painting are the words “Two periods of rise, followed by two periods of decline.”

Apparently, a theory of empire has been painted into the canvas, which seems but one in a series. And if further incentive to explore the canvas’s provenance was needed — the calm-faced woman in the painting seems to be moving. And so Claude and Clara set off on a quest to unearth all of Sanchez’s canvases. First stop: Cuba, where they’ll meet a friend of Sanchez.

In the manner of all good thrillers, the adventure is also a voyage of self-discovery. This being The Fourth Canvas rather than The Fourth Protocol, Claude and Clara don’t realize an unexpected affinity for grenade launchers or a talent for blending into foreign locales. While Claude plunges deep into Sanchez’s intellectual argument, Clara rediscovers her Argentinean roots — her father and brother disappeared during the country’s Dirty War, and Clara had hitherto suppressed these memories in favor of a cool citizen-of-the-world Montrealer persona. As Sanchez’s theory of the role of dissent in the collapse of empires becomes clearer, Claude and Clara are unable to lead their former passive lives. The canvases have changed not just their worldview, but their notions of their own roles in the fight for social justice.

The Fourth Canvas also features several secondary narratives, including that of one Diana McLaren, a professor of political philosophy in Montreal who is Claude’s father’s partner, and another featuring Sanchez’s sister Lydia. Bose gathers these seemingly random threads together by way of an abduction, a misty mountain hop through the Andes, and a case of mistaken identity, through to a satisfyingly dramatic (and devious) denouement.

Rana Bose is an engineer, a magazine editor and playwright, and The Fourth Canvas showcases each one of his métiers. In his acknowledgement, Bose states that his theatre background leads him to “launch torrents of ideas on the stage,” and indeed, The Fourth Canvas at times is all but submerged under expositions on every possible idea or event, from the film Ghost Dog to The Beastie Boys to cricket. Many of these riffs are at best tangentially related to the plot, and often take place on the flimsiest of pretexts; the only reason I forgive the author such self-indulgence is because everything he has to say is so damn interesting. Consider Bose’s description of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris:

“If a cemetery could, however, be accused of name-dropping in a display of turf arrogance, this would be the place…Chopin has a muse weeping, Oscar Wilde has a winged messenger calling him away…[There] lie the graves of Laura Marx, Karl’s daughter, and Paul Lefargue, who committed suicide together in 1911.”

If this doesn’t send you haring off to Wikipedia, nothing will.

But Bose the novelist is perhaps closest to Bose the editor of the alternative webzine Montreal Serai, a publication whose stated aim is to give a voice to people at the margins. As a character in The Fourth Canvas says “Legitimacy is hogged by the mainstream. [But] the people on the periphery are just as legitimate.” Bose’s novel not only reinforces the importance of dissent, but presents a vision for a new wave of popular resistance that co-opts people from the peripheries of every country on the planet. That he’s chosen to convey his ideas in such an accessible literary genre is altogether fitting. Even thrilling.

 

(This review appears in the current issue of rabble.ca.)

February Flowers by Fan Wu

Seventeen-year-old Chen Ming is a studious, violin-playing first-year student at a university in Guangzhou, fresh off a farm into the big city. Miao Yan is worldly and cynical, an at-ease flaunter of boyfriends, and the oldest undergraduate at the university at twenty-four. An unlikely friendship is struck when the two cross paths.

Ming, whose world has hitherto been defined by the classes she attends and the books she reads, is fascinated by Yan’s insouciant familiarity with all things forbidden (which  in Ming’s case include smoking, drinking alcohol, and dating). In turn, Ming’s intellect, her ability to find contentment in her books, and her stable family background are the stuff of envy for Yan. The two girls are soon drawn into a fervent, consuming relationship, engendered at least in part by the hothouse intimacy that closed institutions often foster. (Ming, sharing a room with three other girls in an all-female dorm, with an eleven o’clock curfew and a warden to monitor incoming phone calls, compares her life to existence in an army barrack.)

California-based Fan Wu’s debut novel February Flowers would seem, at the first glance, to conform to every cliche concerning First Novels. There’s the coming-of-age theme, the first-person narrative (Ming’s), the protagonist whose background mirrors the author’s, the confessional tone etc. etc. But the coincidences are superficial; this novel soon reveals itself as a fresh, original work that strikes a fine balance between intimacy and restraint — and shatters several stereotypes along the way.

As narrated by the adult Ming, her younger self was more than a little in love with Yan. But the seventeen-year-old is too innocent to realize what her feelings might mean. Sex education is all but unknown in the China of the early nineties (the period when the novel is set.) One of Ming’s roommates, for instance, believes frequent masturbation leads to an early death. Upon seeing a picture in a porn magazine of two naked women kissing, another roommate decrees that homosexuals “have a mental illness” and guesses the women are American. Forced to admit (from the photographic evidence before her eyes) that the women are indeed Asian, the roommate decides the women must be Japanese, for the Chinese newspapers have informed her that “only capitalist countries have homosexuals.” Little wonder Ming is confused and nervous about her friendship with Yan.

Too often, in first novels, the author seems to have decided to tell all he has to say, or perish in the attempt. Wu, however, chronicles the evolution of the girls’ relationship with a delicate hand; the reader is subtly made aware of Ming’s gradual awakening (sexual and otherwise), and can only guess, even as Ming does, if there’s a lesbian undertone to the relationship between the girls. The characters’ sexual preferences, however, are but one facet of their multi-dimensional relationship. The author’s control of her subject matter is impressive, capturing perfectly the claustrophobia and obsessive passion that youthful friendships can assume without ever rendering Ming’s concerns as self-absorption.

February Flowers does have a few hiccups, the most glaring being a rushed ending that’s very much at odds with the measured pace of the rest of the tale. But the book’s flaws are easily ignored in the face of its many pleasures, including a vivid, insightful picture of the complications and contradictions of China in the nineties. The novel’s ultimate appeal, however, lies in the universality of its themes — the pain and pleasure of growing up, and the discovery of sex and the accompanying wonder and fear; few will not recall their own adolescent pangs while reading these pages.  

****

This review originally appeared in the Asian Review  of Books a while ago. I’m also entering this one for  Color Online’s Color Me Brown Challenge. Color Online is a great blog that  focuses on women writers of color. They have reviews, quizzes and prizes  and  much more…do check them out.

The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

 The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book  is perhaps best known for its Hashish fudge recipe, but it also includes the lines “[He] came to us through an advertisement that I had in desperation put in the newspaper. It began captivatingly for those days: ‘Two American ladies wish to hire…’” The Book of Salt is the fictional account of the man who answered that advertisement. Binh is the live-in cook at 27 rue de Fleurs—the 1930s Parisian home of Alice B. Toklas and the noted intellectual Gertrude Stein.

Binh is Vietnamese, gay, not fluent in French, not upper-class, not rich, not well-educated; he is the colonized in the land of the colonizer–an outsider in a way that Stein and Toklas, for all their unconventionality, can never quite understand. In Paris, Binh’s identity is reduced to his skin; he is “an Indochinese labourer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same.” The French do not care if he is from Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, for all these countries belong to France, to “the same Monsieur and Madame”. Binh longs to be back in Saigon, where he was, “above all, just a man”, where he would not be perpetually Othered.

 The relationship between colonizer and colonized is perhaps ultimately a story of betrayal. The mother country’s claims of its moral and intellectual superiority justify its right to rule—a justification which proves hollow in the face of its treatment of the colonized. Binh, to me, is emblematic of the relationship between France and Vietnam; the betrayal at the national level is mirrored in the life story of this one Vietnamese man. In Saigon, Binh is abandoned by his French lover, following which he leaves for France to find employment as a cook. France, however, never lets him forget that he is a servant. His employers often fire him when they tire of his “exoticism”; Binh of course has little recourse to justice in such situations. And Stein and Toklas, for all their enlightened ways, are often cruel to him, showing more concern for their beloved dogs’ well-being than Binh’s, calling him their “Little Indo-Chinese”, and much more.

 Yet Binh is not without agency. The intimate act of cooking and serving food gives him a vantage point in the domestic space of the Stein-Toklas household–an access to the couple that their admirers envy. Food is one of the most overused metaphors in immigrant literature, with the pungent ethnic dish inevitably contrasted against decorous white bread sandwiches, but Binh’s position as cook is essential to the novel rather than a convenient peg for hanging up colourful ethnic differences. But that agency too carries seeds of betrayal within itself; there is no refuge for Binh, at least not in France.

 Truong selectively reveals information to construct her complex, whorled tale,   delivering surprise after surprise to the reader in the process. At no point, however, did I feel deliberately manipulated, even though she yanks the rug from under my feet every few pages. The intensity of the protagonist’s voice allows Truong to pull off this authorial chicanery; Binh is so raw and real that we immerse ourselves unquestioningly into his (self-admittedly) unreliable narrative. To apply that overused but admittedly convenient food metaphor, The Book of Salt is a millefeuille of a novel, so intricately layered that it is nothing less than a feat of engineering.

 Truong has stated in an interview that while reading Toklas’s book, she felt “…in the Paris of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, these “Indo-Chinese” cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought. The Book of Salt is that story…”  It has always seemed to me that the Binhs of our world constitute an essential but ignored part of empire-building; they lurk in margins and in footnotes, waiting to undermine the master narrative, waiting for someone to give them a hearing. Truong’s passionate, beautiful novel makes Binh’s story worth the long wait.

 ***

I read this book for the OneShot Southeast Asia challenge, which urges readers to step out of their reading comfort zones.  Well, my comfort zone is South Asian fiction, which is of course miles away from Southeast Asian writing.  Thanks to Lisa for the book recommendation, and to Colleen for setting up this challenge.

The art of war: Pat Barker’s Life Class

Whether it’s about Iwo Jima or orcs and elves, writing on war depresses and bores me. Perhaps my brain lacks the plumbing that’d enable me comprehend, let alone appreciate, details of military manoeuvres? All I know: I finished Cold Mountain in twenty minutes.

Pat Barker’s Life Class, while not quite overhauling my prejudices, has given me much pause. The blurb tells us that the book features a triangle consisting of three art students’ “intriguing” love for each other. The real triangle, however, is the odd geometry created by the intersection of art, medicine and war.

Barker writes about the First World War on an intensely personal level; you’d think she’d been floundering in a mucky trench ducking enemy fire even as she recorded the moment on her Handycam. Since there is no omniscient narrator reciting historical details that rightfully belong in a Wikipedia entry, I wasn’t tempted to skip a single paragraph, not even the one about severed limbs and gas gangrene smells. It helps that Barker’s prose never deviates from the scrupulously elegant. It’s as though this author wields an emery board instead of a pen—there isn’t a single rough edge to be found in her writing. Really.

Life Class opens with a superb scene at the Slade School of Art in 1914. Barker introduces the real-life figure of Henry Tonks, the surgeon and professor of anatomy who taught students how to draw the human body. The writing is vivid and exciting, bringing alive the steamy room with its coal stove and plumes of smoke, the scathing, brilliant teacher and his tremulous students. Among those students are Neville, a wealthy Londoner, Elinor, daughter of a prosperous doctor, and Paul, a working-class youth from Yorkshire, whose grandmother’s legacy has enabled his education. The class tensions steam off the page even as Paul and Neville compete in a discreet, playing-fields-of-Eton way for the beautiful Elinor’s attentions.

Should art transcend daily life, question it, or objectively record it? An old question, but one that takes on an urgent significance during wartime, and Barker’s characters embody the different dimensions art assumes at moments of crisis. Paul joins the Belgian Red Cross as an orderly and is pitchforked into the thick of the things at Ypres. Elinor, however, remains at the Slade. Believing that the proper subject for art is the things she chooses to love, she resolutely draws landscapes and attends parties as part of the Bloomsbury crowd. Neville, however, travels to the war-front with the express intent of painting battle scenes, and his art is a huge success in London.

Barker explores the role of art during war-time with precision and depth—her sweep includes the propaganda British posters that show women raped, and their breasts being hacked off by enemy soldiers. As one of the characters remarks “…it’s difficult to persuade young men to lay down their lives to preserve the balance of power in Europe. Some other cause had to be found… Pretty young girls with their blouses ripped off did the trick nicely.”

Apart from a brief mention, however, Barker does not revisit the character of Tonks in the story—an unfortunate omission, for Tonks is probably the most interesting figure in the book. The author does inform us in the afterword that the professor went back to medicine during the war, drawing portraits of facially mutilated patients to aid in reconstructive surgery, but those scant facts hardly do justice to his story.

And what of the ballad of Paul and Elinor and Neville? That brings me to my chief grouse with the book. The love triangle breaks down rather perfunctorily into “two twigs being swept along on a fast current”; the third twig has long deteriorated into mush. This ending felt so abrupt and unsatisfactory that I checked whether my review copy was missing a couple of pages (nix). I was left wondering if Barker plans a sequel, in which case all is well with my literary world. But if there’s no sequel—well then, Barker, you’ve made me swear off war novels forever.

 (This review appears in the current issue of Eclectica.)

The resentful mother: Kate Pullinger’s A Little Stranger

In A Little Stranger, Kate Pullinger has our noses pressed against the window of a home where a young mother abandons her toddler son and husband for a one-way trip to Vegas.

On the face of it, there seems little redemption for Fran. She’s young, good-looking, and in possession of all her limbs and faculties. She lives in London, in her own flat. Her son Louis is a miracle when he’s well-behaved and an advertisement for contraception when throwing a tantrum—i.e., a normal toddler. Fran’s husband Nick is supportive and understanding despite his demanding job as a restaurant manager.

Fran loves her child, but finds she’s teetering between anger and resentment every moment when Louis isn’t asleep. She was once valued in her workplace and had taken pride in her career; motherhood, with its leaden heft of thanklessness and isolation, has led to a profound erosion of self-esteem. Fran feels she has lost herself to “nappies and boredom and rage and somedays it’s all [she] can do to walk down the street, to smile at Louis, to get up, get dressed, to breathe.”

Fran starts with small abandonments. She leaves Louis in at a grocery shop, and almost takes a bus home before turning back to get her son. She leaves Louis asleep in her apartment and goes for a walk; he’s still sleeping peacefully when she returns. But things fall apart when Fran reaches Heathrow with her passport and credit card. Whether she returns home from Vegas or not provides the suspense to this story.

Is motherhood really all that grueling, ask the unbelievers. Surely it is natural and instinctive for a mother to love her child. And how hard is it to slap on a diaper? To thrust a bottle into a puling mouth?

As anyone who’s been there knows, it is incredibly hard work—especially if there is no network of family and friends to cut the mother some slack. Nick and Fran have no family help, for Fran’s people live in Canada, while Nick’s parents are dead. Their friends are either busy with their own families or “childless and uncomprehending.”

This book should be declared mandatory reading for those planning to embark on parenthood without a regiment of babyminders. For the first-time parent, the baby often arrives with the force of a bomb, turning order into chaos overnight. Suddenly, the mother must perform a series of never-ending chores just as her sleep-deprived body is recovering from the trauma of childbirth—all with little recognition or acknowledgement. Pullinger’s intimate and utterly convincing account details it all—the physical pain of labor, childbirth, and nursing followed by the “special tedium” of caring for a small child, as well as the societal expectations that cast these tasks as desirable and natural while brooking no other vision of motherhood.

While this novel clearly focuses upon the grimmer aspects of parenting, Pullinger is quick to acknowledge the joys of being a mother—and the mothers who find the experience unconditionally rewarding. The key to A Little Stranger’s excellence lies in such fine balances; it is impossible to decide if Fran is more to be pitied or blamed. In another instance of Pullinger’s meticulous even-handedness, Fran befriends Leslie, a mother who’s lost her four-year-old daughter in a horrible, senseless accident. No other plot device could have diminished Fran’s troubles as effectively; that we still want to lead Fran to the nearest day-care centre rather than prison is testament to Pullinger’s skill at character development and her sympathetic treatment of motherhood.

But Fran’s issues, we learn, are deeper than they seem. Fran’s mother Ireni is an alcoholic who abandoned her own children. Ireni has her own tragic reasons for her addiction. It’s a situation where everything is wrong and no one is to blame.

These narrative developments left me somewhat unsatisfied. Perhaps Pullinger felt Fran’s actions required a compelling backstory if the book wasn’t to alienate its readers, but now that the metaphorical scales have been tipped in Fran’s favour, the balance that informs this discussion of motherhood is lost. I felt almost as though Pullinger was ducking the real issue—that being a mother, on its own terms, is challenging enough to drive some women to recklessness and self-destruction. It’s been described as society’s last taboo: the assumption that every woman will place her baby’s unending needs ahead of her own. A Little Stranger, for all its profound insights into motherhood, leaves this taboo stirred but not shaken.

(This review appears in the current issue of Eclectica.)

Then Again by Elyse Friedman

Seldom, I believe, has a writer been as poorly served by her book covers as Elyse Friedman. Waking Beauty, a darkly thoughtful exploration of the unfair advantage beauty bestows upon the (unworthy) recipient, had a pink-and-white and-blonde-and-sparkly cover, thus dooming chick-lit fans to chagrin even as readers of literary fiction averted their eyes. 

Then Again, with a smart, punchy title that can be interpreted in at least two different ways in the context of the  plot, written with a precision that would make a watchmaker glow, features a split image of a pallid, glowering girl on its cover. Everything about it–the girl’s faintly repellent gaze, the gimmicky shot , the shiny stiff paper of the cover– begs that the book be tossed aside. Which I would have undoubtedly done had I not LOVED Waking Beauty.

Tom Robbins once famously said, “It’s never to late to have a happy childhood”.  What if someone took that to heart–a someone with the wealth and connections of a successful Hollywood screenwriter–and decided to relive his childhood for an entire weekend, literally? The reluctant participants in the scheme include the screenwriter’s sisters Michelle (the novel’s narrator), and Marla.  The trio’s parents are dead (natch), but Joel the screenwriter has arranged for a faux mom and faux dad. The Toronto house the siblings grew up in twenty years ago is recreated down to the avocado green carpet and the struggling tree out front.

What a setup. And Friedman has the prose skills and the sheer balls to carry it off.  The narrator’s voice alternates between syrupy sentimentality and hard-edged observation, and this pairing works beautifully with the theme of revisited adolesence. The novel’s pacing is impeccable, skittering between past and present till the two fuse in an explosive climax. The delight of such a book lies as much in the big idea as in the tiny details; I was reminded on more than one occasion of the film Goodbye Lenin .

I leave you with this image from the novel. “…Canadian movies, publicly funded and carefully crafted–like chilled white pie crusts, pinched and perfect…”  I’m going to tear off the miserable front cover of Then Again  and replace it with a gilded portrait of Friedman.  

This review-ish piece is my contribution to John’s Read a Canadian Book Month challenge.

An Outline of the Republic by Siddhartha Deb

The republic of India is often imagined in the shape of a diamond, with Kashmir and Kerala marking the north and south, and Bombay and Calcutta defining the western and eastern regions respectively. Such a map, however, would be incomplete; north of Calcutta lies a fragile strip of land (no more than twenty miles wide) that connects the Indian ‘mainland’ to the seven hill states of the north-east. Bounded by Burma, China, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, these states form one of the least-explored regions of the world, and are the setting and subject of Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic.

Amrit Singh is a Delhi-educated journalist who works for a sleepy Calcutta newspaper named (inappropriately enough) the Sentinel. Going through the newspaper files, he chances upon a photograph of a young woman being held at gunpoint by two masked men. A note states that the woman is a porn actress killed by a north-eastern rebel group named MORLS, as a warning to those engaging in “corrupt activities.” Posted to the region on a routine assignment for the Sentinel, Amrit decides to privately investigate the photograph, partly out of curiosity and partly because a German acquaintance hints that his magazine in Tubingen will pay well for an article on the picture. The story, Amrit is instructed, must portray “the mystery and sorrow of India through the story of the woman in the photograph.”

North-eastern India, the reader learns, is rich in oil; the locals, however, have not benefited from the oil wells constructed by the Delhi government. Rebel groups are hence numerous, and have long been fomenting minor trouble, so as to convey their frustration and resentment to the central government. Deb introduces into this real-life scenario the rebel group MORLS (Movement Organized to Resuscitate the Liberation Struggle), which casts itself as a guardian of morality. MORLS’s activities include ordering women to dress modestly, forcing prostitutes to give up their trade, and threatening drug users with violence unless they kick the habit.

An isolated event in a remote location is thus revealed to be no less than a microcosm of the global conflicts of our age. Boundaries and borders—both physical and imagined—are fragile; nothing is one-sided in this novel. The German magazine is guilty of desiring to reduce India to a snappy sound-bite, but Amrit Singh, in search of an easy-to-market story that might grant him financial freedom, is no less culpable. The Delhi government may have suffered under the rule of imperial Britain not long ago, but is now quite content to take advantage of a far-away people in a far-away place.

As Amrit travels to the state of Manipur, and then across the border to Burma in search of his story, reality and illusion begin to blur. The woman in the photograph might not have been a porn actress. She might not be dead. The photograph might have been staged, either by the Indian government to discredit the rebels, or by the rebels themselves, as a warning to the local population. As Amrit goes deep into the region, the difference between the center and the periphery too becomes shadowy—Delhi is no longer the locus, but an unreal and increasingly irrelevant place.

Shades of Heart of Darkness indeed; in fact, An Outline of the Republic is prefaced by a quotation from Conrad “Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” Amrit is always searching for an objective truth, the real story under the layers of narrative, and the novel never veers from the viewpoint of a dispassionate observer.

This self-consciously journalistic tone, however, sometimes leads to the prose taking on an “explaining” note. Manipur is described as having “the highest rate of educated unemployment in the region, rampant drug use, promiscuity, AIDS, and regular violence with government forces as well as ethnic clashes.” Describing the diversity of passengers on a bus, Deb writes that it “felt like a microcosm of the region, indeed of the nation.” At its best, however, the novel is a clear-eyed declaration that nothing less than the truth should do—however complicated and elusive that truth might be. A subtle exploration of identity and conflict, without a whiff of exoticism, An Outline of the Republic is a timely addition not just to writings on India, but to the literature of the peripheries of the world, making the reader question whether ‘far-away’ is perhaps closer than previously imagined.

(This review was one of my earliest published pieces, and appeared in RainTaxi Review of Books. )