"This is a novel of ideas, as well as, at its most elemental, a tangled love story. Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned. Consider the contrivance Desai brazenly concocts to enable a central moment of this story: a chance meeting on an overnight train between the two title characters after they've each rejected their own families' formal attempts to arrange a marriage between them. Dickens, himself, might have blushed."
"Her grandparents, her lifeline back home, are baffled. Here's a sampling of a phone conversation a tearful Sonia has with her grandfather: "[W]hat are you crying for, you lucky girl? Sonia tried to explain. I've ballooned in my own head. I cannot stop thinking about myself and my problems. I'm dreading the winter. In the dark and cold, it will get worse Do some jumping jacks, get your spirits up, and then pick up your books."
A near-700-page novel examines exile and displacement from home, family, culture, and self through interwoven stories set in India, the U.S., Italy, and Mexico. Multiple characters move between Delhi, Goa, Vermont, and Brooklyn, and the plot combines contemporary ideas with a tangled romance. Key scenes rely on contrivance and chance, including an overnight-train encounter after rejected arranged marriages. Central figures include a depressed Vermont student whose generational and cultural miscommunications amplify isolation and vulnerability to a charismatic painter. The prose mixes playfully old-fashioned sensibility with post-modern, post-colonial thematic concerns.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]