A story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity.
Not so much a novel as a marvel ... Here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time ... Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? ... One of the many miracles of Desai’s writing is the attention she gives to secondary and even minor characters ... Among those most rarefied books: better company than real-life people. Feel the tingle.
Desai is masterful at excavating the layers of motivation beneath action, demonstrating how things are often not as they seem, how the forces of history repeat, oceanic and inescapable, affecting individuals in ways that evade their own awareness ... The narrative is punctuated with nuanced, frequently devastating insights into the knottiness of race and representation, the legacy of orientalism, and the complexities of interracial and intercultural relationships ... This novel floats upon itself, a gazing eye, a voice, a thought, a magnificent vision.
Desai's characters inhabit a complex post-modern, post-colonial world and, yet, her own sensibility as a novelist is playfully old-fashioned ... Desai has come close to achieving [the] ideal. This is a spectacular novel...to savor, ruminate over, and, yes, even reread.
