As a holy river miraculously returns, seven lives change course, from an ambitious writer with her eye on legacy to a Kenyan archaeologist to a Bollywood stunt double, all of whom are brought together in a rapidly changing India.
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.
