Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just read the Booker nominee Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi in which the narrator describes her fraught love-hate relationship with her mother who is sliding into dementia, and retraces the mother's neglect of her daughter growing up in an ashram in Pune, and the lover the two shared after the daughter grew up. The girl's American-born husband, Dilip, "was handsome and tall in a way that let everyone know he'd grown up abroad. Baseball caps, good manners and years of consuming American dairy," struggles to accommodate her foibles, her inexplicable repetitive art, her relationships with her family. The writing is lively and interesting. Much attention is devoted to smells (the bakery, the smoking rickshaw engine, fried cumin and garlic, armpits, food (dal, pakoras, samosas, koftas), memories and anger, and time in the book is askew. I read it with interest, occasional amusement, and a longing to revisit India. The character of the daughter is not sympathetic, but she is not dull and her reactions and thoughts are insightful as she struggles to do her duty by her mother.
"The habit of waiting has already been instilled...deeply ingrained. I wonder if, when I'm old and frail and can see the shape of my end in front of me, I will still be waiting for the future to roll in."

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A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion


I read A Crooked Tree last night. The writing is good, and even better is her characterizations of teens. Told by a fifteen-year-old, one of five siblings growing up outside of Philadelphia in the Seventies, the tale is authentic and each of the kids is distinct. The widowed mother is not responsible as a parent, engaged in an affair, working too much, and letting her anger get the best of her so Libby is forced to make her own decisions. An evil character has them all cowed in fear, but they are reluctant to share info with parental or civic authorities. The suspense accelerates and the last quarter of the book is an unputdownable mystery after some slowness in the middle.

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A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Ghost in the Throat stunned me with the beauty of its writing and its passion. The author/narrator is a young wife with four children under the age of six consumed by her exploration of an 18C Irish Gaelic poet named Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. The book is a paean to research as she scours the archives for information almost impossible to find on women of that era, on the "female text." She has to look at the men around Eibhlín Dubh to imagine what was happening with the poet as she tragically faced the murder of her husband. Much of the book is Ní Ghríofa's fantasies of the poet's life alternating with her own memoir of the last decade, another female text composed while sleepless, nursing and performing innumerable chores, "a dirge and a drudge-song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn."
"O my belovèd, steadfast and true!
The day I first saw you
by the market's thatched roof,
how my eye took a shine to you,
how my heart took delight in you,
I fled my companions with you,
to soar far from home with you.
And never did I regret it..."

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Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intimacies is narrated by an interpreter working in the Court at The Hague. She tells us more of the back stories of her friends and lover than her somewhat mysterious self and the "strange intimacy" of her encounter with the accused former president of an unnamed African country in his cell or in the conference room with his lawyers. She translates from the French not his native Arabic, but he "sees" her in a way that frightens her as she ponders the power of language.
Another compelling thread of the book is her lover, Adriaan, who leaves her alone in his apartment for weeks while he goes to resolve his divorce with his wife in Lisbon. When will he return, or will he? Troubled by the adulterous affair of her friend Eline's bookseller brother who she espies in a restaurant, our unnamed heroine is uncertain of her own affair. She also questions her affinities with other people recently met in her move to Holland.
The book is well written in spare language and readable in short eventful chapters. I gobbled it up even though not entirely at ease with the ending.
Read Ron Charles review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...

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Secrets of Happiness by Jean Silber

Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Who knew where happiness came from? Well, actually, there were theories. In the Buddhism my father sometimes followed you heard arguments on the vanity of grasping for happiness. Whatever you ran after and clung to was destined to slip out of your hands, melt like snow, dissolve into thin air. What could be more obvious? The truth of impermanence was somehow a cheering idea to my father...he believed in freedom, my father." p. 218

The book is divided into seven chapters each focused on one character in this tale of two Manhattan families and their extended lovers and friends, told in the first person each time. Occasionally, I would forget who my character was but always enjoyed reading about them. The tension is good, the writing is clear and competent, and I would race to continue each night enjoying the through line of Cambodia or Thailand or elsewhere in Asia visited by the characters.

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Undocumented Americans

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Portraits of the thousands of people who deliver our sustenance (waiters, delivery people, day laborers, farmworkers) and pay into the American Social Security System but realize nothing from it as they age and must keep working at bottom-rung wages. The author focused on people like her family (she's a DACA participant who graduated from Harvard), visiting key cities in the U.S. and giving voices to those who were not afraid to talk with her about their journey. The book is a well written and documented justification for her righteous anger. It is a slim, compelling volume which puts faces to headlines. Read it.

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Migration

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I stayed up all night reading Migrations by Australian Charlotte McConaghy.
An absorbing futurist tale of species extinction and the last Arctic terns chased by a hungry herring fishing boat. The crew and their boat end up scattered to Antarctica sought by authorities. Guided by a troubled but determined young woman who's tagged a couple of the birds and traces them on her laptop, we learn though flashbacks of her peripatetic background and sketchy history. The tale kept me up way too late and while not my usual fare, I was completely taken with the writing and the story.

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