dovegreyreader scribbles

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts 3 & 4

I have to admit I had one or two nervous moments when I started reading A Suitable Boy, about exactly how would the book stand up to being set aside and picked up again, perhaps with a reading gap.

I was talking to someone about The Luminaries this week and we had ecountered the same problem. A great book, both of us riveted by it, but a reading gap had left us both feeling we needed and owed it to the book and ourselves to start over, even though events so far remained fresh in our minds.

So this month was the big test with A Suitable Boy...

Parts 1 & 2 under my belt, and then a gap. so would I slip back into the flow of the book easily..

Had the characters, so many of them, stayed uppermost in my mind...

Would the sense of place materialise without me having to reread anything.

I really needn't have worried...

Sunday breakfast at Pran's house. Pran the character that, as this early stage, I somehow feel sure is destined to play an interesting and changing part in the book, plays that wonderful April Fool joke on Mrs Rupa Mehra. Lata has eloped with his brother Maan who has phoned from the railway station to tell them...

'Oh my poor daughter, oh my poor daughter,' wept Mrs Rupa Mehra.
    The door opened and Lata walked in.

And I can't have been the only one to have been taken in, and instantly I was back in Brahmpur.

Poor Lata, controlled by others, her free-will limited, her wishes unheard and ignored and serious trouble brewing when she meets and falls in love with Kabir. The hatred between the Hindus and the Muslims now abundantly clear, any union unthinkable.

Meanwhile another potential suitor (I'm starting to make a list) appears in the shape of the rather dapper Haresh. I was back to the family tree to check out the connections and I am intrigued by Vikram Seth's cleverness in making those connections.

Haresh takes the gifted Bhaskar (Pran's nephew) to meet Kabir's professor father.

He glimpses Lata boarding the train to Calcutta under the watchful eye of her mother.

It's like one of those diagrams of overlapping circles and Haresh reveals himself to be an astute observer ...

'The young woman seemed to be determinedly fighting back some sadness that went beyond the normal sadness of parting at a railway platform.'

He was already in my good books for refusing to cut out the middle-man in his shoe buying venture, now I like Haresh even more. Vikram Seth seems able to convey a great deal without me realising it is happening. I am shaping likes and dislikes as if these were real people. 

Reading a 1993 review of the book by Peter Kemp he suggests that it is written in such a way 'allowing instant, unimpeded acess to its people and events' and that feels exactly right. He also suggests that...

'This human abundance, prodigally scattered across India's vastnesses, is unobtrusively arranged into a fiction of meticulous, quiet artistry. Details that might seem merely applied as flecks of local colour subsequently take on deeper hues.'

Quiet artistry indeed.

And couldn't you just smell the stench of the leather tanning and dying...

I am now very excited about A Suitable Boy, this is proving to be a really enjoyable, engaging reading and I can't wait to know what happens next.

For anyone reading this who may have given up on the book, I'd love to know at what point you stopped reading, because there is no way, at page 242, that I could put this book down now.

Over to all of you...

For the diary ::

Saturday November 30th :: Parts 5 & 6 (and for those who have been waiting for the Kindle version, it's out on November 7th... go on, catch us up, you'll love it)  

 

 

A Suitable Boy ~ Vikram Seth :: Parts One & Two

'This novel, so vast and so amiably peopled, is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life... Such writing reminds us that there are secrets beyond technique, beyond even style, which have to do with a quality of soul on the part of the writer, a giving of oneself ...His novel deserves thousands of long marriages and suitable readers...'

James Wood's Guardian review of A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth is the first of the adulatory quotes in my copy of the book, countless others follow, but it was a review by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books  which helped explain why I had enjoyed Parts One and Two of the book so much...but couldn't quite pin down the reason.

John Lanchester is initially cynical about the hype that surrounded publication of A Suitable Boy back in 1993, flagging up the number of journalists dwelling on the size of the book, its weight, and the size of the advance, before doing likewise himself and then moving onto his assessment. There's a whole chunk of the review that I haven't read for fear of spoilers, and so skipping to the end I was holding my breath as his final verdict approached...

'The prose is intended not to distract. The resulting structural clarity is remarkable - you never don't know what's happening, why, where and to whom...'

and he went on to be suitably impressed. It was one of my biggest fears that with a family tree of such magnitude I would have my Chatterjis muddled with my Kapoors, and with so little knowledge of Indian life and customs to fall back on confusion would reign. In fact I have found quite the opposite, and as John Lanchester suggests...

'It's a considerable technical feat which draws no attention to itself... A Suitable Boy breathes...the unfakable, unmistakable breath of life.'

It would seem nigh on impossible for my brain, teeming with Devon and the garden this summer, to find itself completely immersed in Brahmpur life each time I opened the book, but it has been effortless and entirely enjoyable reading. Vikram Seth sets the scene and peoples it with such panache that I did know exactly what was happening and to whom, 'tis true, and having expected to be confused I am pleasantly surprised that I am not.

I am slowly becoming acquainted with the characters too...

Mrs Rupa Mehra, the matriarch who has had any power taken from her by widowhood and a domineering eldest son, yet still capable of fighting her corner with some histrionics when needs be. 

Fiesty Lata Mehra, 'always the difficult one,'  who has benefited from her mother's sacrifices to ensure that both sons and daughters receive a good education following their father's death.

Louch playboy Maan Kapoor and his much more serious brother Pran; Pran married to Lata's sister, and a lecturer at the university.

The vacuous and everso slightly comical Meenakshi, married to Lata's older brutish and bullying brother, Arun.

But I am a naturally inquisitive reader and can see that I have a great deal to learn about Indian everything. I decided not to do any background reading, and though I have bought the BBC radio dramatisation of the book I have no plans to listen to it just yet. I need to get the voices into my head for myself rather than have it done for me too soon.

I just wanted to arrive and be shown around.

So Partition, purdah (what is it actually, I think I know, but do I really know) 

Food... kachauris, barfis, gajak, gulabjamuns...

Customs... Holi..

Drink...Nimbu Pan, 

..and so much more, there is little to be gained by stopping to check things out. I was quite relieved at the mention of 4711 cologne, at least I know what that is. I found some in a shop yesterday and wafted the tester around...can there be a scent that is any more familiar than 4711. However the book flows like the Ganges and I am happy to sail along with it, so much so that I have floated onto Part Three with ease.

I am wondering how you are all finding the book so I don't want to say much more, we can discuss in comments, but I did want to mention the whole notion of arranged marriage. I was startled to discover that I have never really given any thought to the impact of this on the man, I had only ever considered it from a woman's point of view, whilst Vikram Seth is very clear that there can be tensions on both sides. I fully expect to be surprised like this time and again.

But that's enough from me, over to you...

 

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