Shobhit Pal
I do believe that I can give it a better rating but there are some things which are holding me back from doing so -
a.) Out of the three parts this book was divided in, the first one is a complete slog to get through. There are some beautiful paragraphs in it but those alone aren't enough to redeem this part for me. Nothing happened, and I hate that. That leads to me the second point -
b.) The stream of consciousness narrative which I felt didn't do anything for the story at most parts. It detracted from the plot, of which admittedly there isn't much. It has three parts to it, just like the book, and only the last one is done so well that it manages to redeem the whole book and the mess which came before it.
Now don't get me wrong on the fact that I didn't enjoy that mess - there are some spectacular passages in it on the nature of things done using personification, and a lot stream-of-consciousness writing which employes a wide variety of figures of speech. I absolutely loved how the last part of the book is written. It's so well done that at the end of the book I felt as if I'm gonna miss this meandering fluid style of writing Geetanjali Shree has for this book.
Since, I was reading it in translation I'm curious about how fluid the original is. All of the characters in this book are written well, and they are recognisable to anybody intimate with a Desi family. I love the fact that Ma, our octogenarian heroine, is the crux of the story. I couldn't have thought of anyone else carrying such a tale of an Indian family other than the Grandmother.
There are some heavy issues ( Women's identity and role, Transgender identity and role in the Indian society, Partition, etc) covered in a feminist mode of writing which was reflected in how the paragraph was written (onomatopoeia) . The plot gets lost in these, as they are so many instances of such discussions, for most part of the book.
Still this is one of those books which made me believe in the power of literature, and how all encompassing it can be. How it allows the author to experiment and let those experiments flourish. There's a paragraph from the book on literature which I totally agree with and will serve as the end of this review-
“Sometimes when we read literature as literature, we realise that stories and tales and lore don't always seek to blend themselves with the world. Sometimes they march to their own blend. They don't have to be contemporary or complementary or congruent or connubial with the real world. Literature has a scent, a soup fon, a je ne sais quoi, all its own. And that is its style. But this is the world, it never lets up. The world is in dire need of literature because literature is a source of hope and life.
So the world finds a way to dissolve into literature via harum-scarum hidden-open paths. It quietly ends up soaked in the stuff. It tiptoes into literature. It seeks to erase its despair by revelling in unique ways of freeing itself from the world that literature employs.”
