Just finished reading Bharati Kirchener’s “Sharmila’s book”, and its OK, just OK. The story is off-beat in that an American born Desi female goes back to India for an arranged marriage, and steps right into our patriarchial Bharat, complete with cliched (although true – you really meet people like that) characters. The main reason I didn’t like it as much as I could have, were the language, and the flow of the book. The story was stilted, and sort of moved from point to point in a very “jerky” manner. Didn’t have pause or presence, or wholesomeness to prose. It reminded me of Bapsi Sidhwa’s “American Brat” which I thought was pretty awful. It was all the more dissapointing because I read “American Brat” after reading “Cracking India”. And “Cracking India” was nothing less than a masterpiece.
And then there is Kavita Daswani’s “For Matrimonial purposes” which is bad, bad, bad. Lack-lustre , shallow sounding prose coupled with lack-of-depth, and badly etched characters made the book-reading seem like an endless, black tunnel. Also Anju (the protagonist) was pretty annoying and seemed to lack a spine (ALL she wants to do is be married). Her character seemed dithering and unable to make up her mind. On one hand she’s this modern, independent woman from New York (dropping designer label names like crazy) and on the other she’s wanting to be oh-so-traditional, and striving toward her goal, which (I’m guessing) is to be barefoot and pregnant.
Read Chitra Divakaruni’s novels a couple of years back. And although I do like her writing, her books are a sure-shot way of getting depressed, because although compassionate, they are oh-so-sad (“Sister of my heart”, “Vine of desire”). So,I’ve sort of laid off them for a while (a very long while) and am busy reading “funny” chick-lit.
