It’s Antara’s internal conflict that forms the novel’s central theme: how do you take care of a mother who once failed to take care of you? Antara examines the question with a self-inspection so unflinching that it makes you catch your breath ... The ashram scenes are, by far, the most intriguing part of the novel, but Doshi, disappointingly, doesn’t allow us to linger here, refusing perhaps to indulge any readerly appetite for exoticism or prurience. What interests her is how, in these squalid circumstances, Tara finds liberation, and how hard it is for Antara to distinguish between her mother’s pursuit of self-determination and acts of selfishness ... Tara is monstrous, but the strength of Doshi’s book is that it resists showing only monstrosity. Her spare and unsentimental writing allows us a glimpse of something more: the suffocation of motherhood and frustrations so powerful she 'would bang her body against the wall and scream silently to herself' ... Dementia, though, is the novel’s real impasse and Doshi handles this thoughtfully ... This is an intelligent debut, deserving of its Booker shortlisting. Burnt Sugar is sorrowful, sceptical and electrifyingly truthful about mothers and daughters.
With a tightly controlled narrative voice and careful use of flashbacks, Doshi presents the result of unpacked generational trauma. Uncertainty, instability, chaos ... The prose is calculated and focused on mundane details and introspection. There is little to no sentimentality and an undercurrent of paranoia which makes for at times a deeply uncomfortable read. Even in the most melodramatic moments, there is a coldness and detachment ... What Doshi presents is no simple mother-daughter conflict. It is a voyeuristic journey into alternative living and religious fervor. It is the emptiness of middle-class existence and perfunctory friendships. It is a marriage void of true intimacy, motherhood brought about for the wrong reasons. It is all of these things and more. This is a layered, descriptive, at times distasteful novel that brings us face to face with our own darker impulses and deep-seated traumas. Antara, though a victim in many ways, abuses others, which can make readers struggle to understand her. Doshi’s novel is a warning of what can arise when the past is not unearthed, not shared, and healing hasn’t begun. This is a book worthy of respect and admiration, and deserving of its place on the Booker Prize shortlist. It can be hard to love a book when the characters are stingy with love and affection and forthcoming with long-held loathing. But as a contained, haunting narrative, the book excels ... Despite the shock and visceral disgust I felt in reaction to some of the book’s twists and turns, I would be lying if I said the misery in this book, particularly experienced by its characters, did not give me a small, twisted pleasure.
...wonderfully striking, direct and confident, and devilishly funny ... The daughter, whose point of view we follow through the novel, is named Antara. Her mother’s name is Tara. This visual and auditory proximity — one name built from the other — is a lovely example of how Doshi works ... Doshi doesn’t have to write out a scene to convey drama; she can do it with a single word ... Avni Doshi isn’t just a talented writer, she is an artist ... A voice this unadorned, and blunt, is so hauntingly stubborn and original, you want to hear from it again and again.
Avni Doshi’s debut novel has cut a slow but inexorable path around the world, dazzling readers in country after country ... And now, trailing clouds of international praise, it has finally arrived in the United States. Burnt Sugar is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication. It is also the world’s worst Mother’s Day present ... This is a novel stained with all manner of fluids, excretions and smells, and the narrator fights an almost constant sense of nausea. But if Burnt Sugar is often as unpleasant as a sinus infection, it’s just as hard to shake off ... 'Burnt Sugar' perfectly captures this story’s complex flavor, the taste of something sweet transformed into something deep and melancholy. I don’t mean to scare you away; only to make sure you know what you’re getting into. This is, among other things, a challenging interrogation of the presumption that a book’s protagonist should be likable. Where can our sympathies find purchase with this woman who is devoted to her mother and yet filled with rage toward her? Our simultaneous revulsion and attraction stems, I suspect, from the nagging suspicion that Antara is dragging us toward a species of candor that’s terrifying.
... an extraordinary confection. Avni Doshi’s debut novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker prize and is an elegantly written family story that sizzles with hatred and is impossible to put down. Sleek and contemporary, it is set in the Indian city of Pune and narrated by an artist, Antara, who watches and crows while her mother’s dominating personality gives way to dementia and decline ... Crisply written, Burnt Sugar is a thrilling ride into hell, where ordinary scenes have a nightmarish quality ... This is not a miserable book, though, but a painfully exhilarating one. Misery is inert and deadening; this novel is alive with pain, fear and insults ... it retains throughout a stylistic freshness. This is an exquisitely written novel at a formal level, highly observant and patterned with fresh details, where even sashimi at a Japanese restaurant 'lies on the plate like a submissive tongue'. So come for the effortlessly stylish writing, stay for the boiling wrath.
... an incredible novel with messages and characters that remain with its reader far beyond the final line. In this sometimes humorous, sometimes dark, always ephemeral piece of literature, Avni Doshi unspools an original take on the theme of inheritance—what we take on willingly and unwillingly ... These intergenerational ties are woven masterfully, highlighting parallels in behavior and appearance, as well as the genesis of wounds and trauma. With biting language and dark humor, Antara slowly reveals the troublesome behavior she undertook while emerging into adulthood, further developing her complex and multi-dimensional character ... she is a heroine many women will identify with. She bears her mother’s imprint and indeed the mark of many generations of women. Under such pressure, who wouldn’t dance on the precipice of madness?
The rapid changes in tone can make Doshi’s writing riveting but, as the novel progresses, she capitulates too frequently to the urge to shock ... There is a distinct lack of hope in Burnt Sugar and the novel can sometimes feel needlessly depressing, as if born from that same urge to shock ... Doshi has not only run with the idea that women can show themselves to be 'unpretty', but that they can also be as corrosively cynical as men – including about motherhood.
Doshi’s language is expansive and fluid, even dreamlike at times, unspooling through serpentine paths and leaving the reader wondering, as Antara does, about the boundaries between reality and an imagined past. Doshi is a talent to watch, and this debut will readily find an audience in readers seeking well-crafted examinations of messy relationships, both internal and external.
... stunning ... Doshi’s portrayal of troubled mother-daughter intimacy is viscerally poetic. This has the heft and expansiveness of a classic 19th-century novel.
... striking ... provocative ... offers a fierce, compelling depiction of the painfully intertwined lives of a mother and daughter ... Antara’s voice is frank, skeptical, even comical while exposing the fragile psychology life has dealt her. Above all, she scrutinizes the unbreakable/unbearable link to a figure who haunts and half subsumes her, a razor’s edge which Doshi captures in simple, effective prose ... A landmark portrait of toxic parenting and its tangled aftermath.
