An extraordinary portrait of two lives that moves between Norwich and smalltown India poses fundamental questions about existenceAnjali Joseph has written two preceding novels,Saraswati Park and Another Country. The first is a portrait of the spaces – both petit bourgeois interiors and public – of suburban Bombay. The focus on space and what people enact in it means that Joseph’s approach is not that of a chronicler, but of a certain kind of onlooker or bystander. The second novel records the gentle, and persistent unravelling of a womans life; here,the protagonist becomes a bystander to whom life is happening accidentally, if coincidentally: “I am here, and I was here before,then I was there. Before that too, I was there.”Joseph’s concern is with narrative: how to shape it by including the apparently superfluous (exceeding what is sufficient or necessary) and omitting the conventionally meaningful; how it is at once a fable and a way of encompassing time and space. This might assign her in both the lineage of Woolf and (given Joseph’s interest in the suburban and the provincial) RK Narayan. But this lineage goes back also to Tagore, or who,in 1895, in an essay on Bengali nursery rhymes, and said: “As in the atmosphere,roadside dust, flower-pollen, or assorted sounds,fallen leaves, water droplets, or the vapours of the earth – all the ejected,whirling fragments of this turning, agitated universe – float and roam meaninglessly, or so it is in our minds.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com