Contemporary fiction. A young widow in the city of Suryam in India witnesses a beautiful woman having a seizure in a park, and ends up drawn into a relationship with the woman and her husband. I picked up the book because of the unconventional relationship at its core, but it also has some things to say about the different paths that can lead beyond normative convention – for the viewpoint character, that in part is her reading of dead Western philosophers, thinkers, and writers; for the other woman in the relationship, it is her take on Sufi mysticism; for the man in the relationship, it is his connection to the two women. And it is fundamentally, I think, a book about intense, painful loneliness, and the ways that the drive to connect can pull us in transgressive directions, normative directions, or both. Spent much of the book deeply uncertain how I felt about it. It seemed very invested in psychologizing everything, and it felt like it was leaving little space to read the characters’ choices and ways of relating with one another as anything other than pathological – not that the author necessarily meant to do that, but it was certainly how it hit me early in the book. I also was never quite sure what to do with the clear unreliability of the narrator, though I appreciated the effective portrayal of both her grief from the earlier loss of her husband and her searingly intense plunge into need and love during the story. Ultimately, I ended up in the ‘thumbs up’ camp. The way the book concludes is not any sort of simplistic happy ending, but it captures the complexity of their situation and seems to have much more space for not just its dysfunction but also its joy and okay-ness in a way that seems lacking earlier in the book…and in a way that perhaps implicitly explains that earlier lack. Soooo…yeah. Ultimately liked it, but I still feel a certain ambivalence about it.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.