Saturday, December 16, 2006
Book Reviews...
Read two books this week. The first one is called "The Sari Shop" by Rupa Bajwa.Set in Amritsar, India, The Sari Shop is the story of Ramchand, a poor shop assistant at the Sevak Sari house. The novel begins with Ramchand stuck in an empty stupor and follows him on special assignment to bring saris to the wealthy Kapoor family. With a renewed sense of possibility, Ramchand embarks on a course towards self-improvement, beginning by learning English. As his perspective broadens, his newfound clarity gives way to painful revelations about how cruelly society functions.
Though the story includes theft, rape, and murder, Bajwa renders these traumas with simplicity.
The Sari Shop is most successful, most tender, when it centers on Ramchand's inner anxieties. Unfortunately, Ramchand is the only character that pauses to see “two sides to every coin.” Other characters in the novel are familiar types; both the poor and the rich function as mouthpieces for particular positions in a moralistic class argument. The wealthy women, for instance, are one-dimensionally materialistic and self-interested.
But, perhaps this panoramic satire of social types highlights the very point Bajwa is after, that characters who live without seeing themselves implicated in the plight of others are living one-dimensionally, are more like types than human beings. The most hope comes from wealthy Rina Kapoor, who allows Ramchand to attend her wedding. Ultimately, she too uses Ramchand only to advance her own agenda, to write a novel about a sari shop assistant.
The Sari Shop calls attention not to colorful aspects of Indian culture that might draw Western audiences but to India on its own terms—problems, pain, and all.
I really enjoyed reading this book, it took you into the lives of other people and how they live and what they go through. Sometimes we fail to realize that behind every person's face is a family and a story. It also touched on a very important social issue like domestic violence and also the struggles of one family when there is no income .
THE SECOND BOOK IS "THE SPACE BETWEEN US" BY THRITY UMRIGAR
Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on. She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Yet despite being separated from each other by blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and shared life experiences.
Sera is an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage. A widow, she devotes herself to her family, spending much of her time caring for her pregnant daughter, Dinaz, a kindhearted, educated professional, and her charming and successful son-in-law, Viraf.
Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. Cursed by fate, she sacrifices all for her beautiful, headstrong granddaughter, Maya, a university student whose education -- paid for by Sera -- will enable them to escape the slums. But when an unwed Maya becomes pregnant by a man whose identity she refuses to reveal, Bhima's dreams of a better life for her granddaughter, as well as for herself, may be shattered forever.
Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India and witnessed through two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture.
I enjoyed reading this book because it captured the lives of two households one of upper class and one of a servant. The dreams and aspirations the servant had for her grand daughter and it also showed how an education can lift one from poverty to middle class. It also touched on AIDS and also how the servant lost her job because she was strong enough to speak up .
