Small Days and Nights starts off with a simple premise that becomes a shattering study of disaffection and belonging ... a concise novel of staggering depth ... there is incredible physical and emotional violence. In its vivid setting, the novel is not exactly a paean to modern India so much as a piercing Munchian howl of grief ... Each page of this novel bears testament to [Doshi's] skills as inequality, secrecy and unhappiness harden into menace. Through a cycle of visits, returns and memories, [Grace] must weather huge unease and bruising conflicts. Eventually, she finds strength and acceptance in this disturbing, deep and utterly extraordinary novel.
The effect is that the tide’s push and pull settle into a horizon, a plotline that’s both repetitive and linear. Small Days and Nights thrives on these pushes and pulls, allowing opposites to coexist ... Although Small Days and Nights succeeds in its first-person narrative...by the middle of the book Grace’s listlessness and confusion can become tiresome ... What work best are the book’s language and the evocation of South India ... most impressively, her focus never wavers ... Doshi keeps the pendulum swinging until the very last page.
Doshi does not shy away from the more unpleasant features of the Indian everyday, detailing the poverty and savagery of life at the edge ... With whatever family structure she had loosely strung together now gone, Grace belatedly recognizes that the freedom from human connection which she sought was not actually what she wanted or needed ... Her final realization, that 'it’s not about living away from the world but living in it,' is a thought-provoking theory for those experiencing an existential crisis of their own.
Doshi follows up her first novel, Pleasure Seekers, with a beautiful tale of family, love, and acceptance ... In dreamlike writing that overflows with emotion, Doshi investigates culture, caste, politics, and ethics, as Grace struggles to bring some semblance of meaning to her life. Sure to be popular with book clubs and readers who appreciate getting caught up in a work that transports them beyond borders.
... not a comforting book ... Doshi narrows our distance from Grace with a potent voice, present tense, crisp prose, and a limited cast of characters. Grace grapples with a number of internal conflicts, such as loneliness, aging, family relationships, lust, and womanhood. She jumps from one to the next without pause, and the result is a tightly constructed narrative in which her conflicts become our own. She is not likable, but understandable, almost painfully so. I read this book in a constant state of argument, recognizing a kinship with Grace while repudiating many of her choices ... challenges the maudlin perception of disability in popular media, sparing no detail in Grace’s struggles to care for her sister ... it speaks to the strength of the story itself that this setting does not overwhelm the novel and its characters. Rather, the story of Grace and Lucia could have taken place anywhere. Nowhere have the questions surrounding their lives been fully answered anyway ... speaks to those conflicts relatable to young, modern women of any country.
Doshi has dwelt upon womanhood and location before, especially in her collections of poetry, Countries of the Body and Girls are Coming Out of the Woods. Themes that were explored with a sense of urgency and rage in the poems are laid out in considered, melancholic patterns in her new novel ... Unlike the redemptions offered by popular cinema, here characters swim to shore while trapped in a web of big and small abandonments and betrayals, trying to weave friendship into the semblance of an anchor.
Within...concurrent motifs of isolation and identity, the author traces an intriguing story: the past that contours a character, the present that defines one, and the future that is envisioned ... Tishani Doshi’s novel ticks the right boxes. Still, in the end, the story, which is deliberately jarring to make everything within it seem unhinged, has a few loose ends. There are too many themes fighting for attention and too many reflections of society that don’t fit into the larger scheme ...Unlike much of contemporary Indian English fiction, Small Days and Nights is a genuine if confounded piece of literature. Its effect resonates long after the pages run out. That alone is reason to read it.
Doshi...is excellent at conjuring atmosphere, particularly a sense of menace regarding the dangers that confront women in both rural and cosmopolitan India. She needs few words to breathe life into her characters and setting, the stars of the story. Grace can be judgmental and mean, but Doshi has also endowed her with intelligence and sensitivity. All of these qualities make Grace a worthy prism for the profound questions of what it means to belong to a family and a community. This exploration of loneliness is a feat of lyricism.
