Clamorous, inventive and polyphonic ... Explores a wide range of ideas and locations ... Convinces far more often than not. Grappling with complex ideas, brave in its effort to parse inequality, and principled in its attempts to connect the strands of colonialism, authoritarianism and climate collapse, Saraswati is a welcome shift from the family dramas and autofictions that have tended to dominate literary renderings of India.
Admirable ... The combination of dark turn and early climax (barely seventy pages into a substantial novel) would seem questionable if this were the book’s only strand, but the narrative is made up of linked episodes of novella length, interspersed with shorter passages of family saga, which would, if they ran continuously, come to roughly the same number of pages. This structure is elaborate but not contorted, just as the writing is rich but not dense. It takes real skill to make the material hang together without going closure mad. There’s no shortage of drama, but it’s rarely brought to conventional climaxes, and Johal is unafraid of loose ends.
Saraswati’s unstable blend of realism and allegory ultimately breaks down in the face of its central theme: modern Hindu nationalism ... The very best writers have had difficulty following up a debut collection with a novel ... The disappointments of Saraswati, if anything, reassure for their indication of a willingness to try but fail. Gurnaik Johal is just getting started.
Saraswati feels less like a sweeping state-of-the-nation novel than an intricately patterned portrait of the Punjabi diaspora through which Johal can explore his central themes: continuity and rupture, capture and control, return and renewal. His characters crave a sense of connection to the past and to the land, which, everywhere they look, is being despoiled: trees felled, forests razed, rivers rerouted. In the face of this, their only solace is to be found in relationships – romantic and familial. The author is a keen-eyed observer of both.
Sometimes overreaches, and the sheer abundance of detail – always stylishly delivered – can obscure the underlying themes of capitalism and nationalism and their role in ecological collapse ... But if Saraswati sometimes suffers from an excess of ambition, that’s far more appealing than the alternative.
