Will an American girl and her Hindu Brahmin mother-in-law grind the man in the middle into chutney? That's the premise of my multicultural debut novel, Shiva’s Arms, and the first thing that readers want to know is “How much of Shiva’s Arms is autobiographical?”
The short answer is: everything and nothing. The set up, unsuitable American bride marries Hindu NRI, parallels my life. But the characters are fictional, not portraits of people I know. I gave my main character Alice my own long hair and quirky fashion sense, but I am not Alice, although I know her very well. A power struggle between in-laws is a universal conflict. Everyone knows an Amma, right? I never met my own mother-in-law but when an Indian family moved in next door to my husband and me, I had a bird’s eye view of samsara as it played out in their household of three generations. The walls between our townhouses were thin enough so I could even hear what they argued about-- from the conflict between personal independence and family to the divided loyalties that ask the question, “when one belong to two cultures, what part of the self goes and what stays?” I began to imagine a novel built on the swirl of relationships around me. While I was composing, I'd assign tics of people I knew to my characters to help me find a reaction to a made-up situation that would ring true. The little Ganesh on the chain Amma gave to Alice is modeled after the one my own mother-in-law sent to me, for example. In a gesture that meant more to me than I can say, she melted down her marriage bangles for me, the “unsuitable bride,” she had never met. Amma would never have done that! Truth is always stranger than fiction.
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A reader said, “I saw this definition (of a multicultural novel) in the paper a while ago... ‘Postcolonial novels explore the cultural bouillabaisse: characters of various national origins...living in an international capital queasily negotiating...cultural transition.’ Queasily is important, I think--like the main character in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.”
Though the quote refers to a book review by Darryl Wellington in The Washington Post about The Opposite House, by Helen Oyeyemi, our reader is talking about Dinaw Mengestu’s book. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears shows that immigration is more than movement. Speaking about his main character, the author said in a Tavis Smiley interview, “…he also doesn't connect fully to the community around him. He knows that he is almost invading it, to some degree.” A happy ending is not guaranteed. At Rediff.com, Samina Ali talks about her novel, Madras on Rainy Days, in which not only American-raised Muslims are seduced by Western ideals of independence and romantic love; her characters, a bride who is not a virgin and a groom who is gay, must come to an understanding. “Indian writers have been the biggest wave of immigrant literature for some years. Yet each of us is speaking in a distinctive voice whether it is Bengali Brahmins or Bombay Parsis or Kerala Christians. My book is about Hyderabadi Muslims. My tale is simply one of the thousands that make India the dynamic country it is. I hope Indian readers in America recognize and embrace that.” American writers, too--the premise of Mike Stocks’ White Man Falling is that “a white man falls out of the sky into a small south Indian town, causing all kinds of curious ramifications – spiritual, romantic and domestic – in the complicated lives of the main characters and their wider community… (the story) exemplifies how sometimes in life meaningless events can produce meaningful effects.” Order out of chaos? A worthy goal.. In Bombay Trilogy, Ram's brilliant Dalit student Anand is the least likely candidate to bring the Brahmin family together. It's all the more triumphant when he manages just that. In the first novella of Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite, he introduces the Blundens. Already I see them blundering. Should I? What’s in a name anyway, when it comes to naming characters in fiction? I collected some do-and-don'ts to see how the names in Bombay Trilogy stack up: Do: have a name say something about the character's parents. In my characters’ neighborhood, the father’s name and family home is incorporated into the child’s name. So my boy Ramesh, whose father is Sambashivan from Trichur, is called T. Sambashivan Ramesh. Do: choose a name to suit the character's personality, who they are, where they come from or where they are going. Shiva fits the bill here. The matriarch of the family is named for the god of creation and destruction, whose many arms embrace and repel simultaneously. The name underscores the character’s culture shock and her resistance to change, and foreshadows her reconciliation with her daughter-in-law. Do: let a name give clues about your character's background. The Sambashivans are South Indian Brahmins, and the name reflects that. Ask anybody. Don’t: fill your story with names that sound alike or that start with the same letter. Hmmm. We’ve got Ramesh, Alice, Shiva, Nela, and Sam. Ram and Sam do have something in common, sound-wise, but they ARE father and son. I picked the minor characters' names from my mental list of common South Indian names. "We are all named for royalty or gods, " one character reminds another. That simplified things for me -- they are all of the Venkatarajapuramgovindaswamyshankaranarayan variety. Do: alternate lengths of names. Done! See above. When my parents asked my brothers and me whether we wanted a puppy or a new baby, I chose the baby. Janet came along, and so did the puppy. Everyone was happy.
I immediately tried to read to my new sister. I was not quite four, but I had memorized some of the poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses. I pretended to read it, holding the book to show her the mysterious hieroglyphics splashed across the pages. Our father was the one who opened me to poetry. After dinner, while still at the table, he’d pull out his dog-eared copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or The Canterbury Tales and read aloud. I was mesmerized by the sound and rhythm as, one by one, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop were all brought to life by his voice. From time to time, I’d glance at Janet, sitting on Mother’s lap at the other end of the table, to see if she was paying attention. She must have been, since she soon began to read Dr. Suess. All of it. Later, she read the Black Beauty series while I lived with Louisa May Alcott’s March family. Our tastes, as they were developing, dovetailed and diverged. I remember summer days much like this one, each of us pulling out a book from our beach bags and reading while other children splashed in the community pool, their shrieks and the drone of insects background music to the worlds that books evoked. Alice in Wonderland. Catch 22. Siddhartha. The Magic Mountain. How and when did we go from being readers swapping books to collaborators on our own book projects? It was much later. Janet had developed into a serious fine artist and I had published quite a few poems in the lit ’zines. We had always shown our work to one another for reaction and comment and we saw that we were exploring many of the same themes. Our sensibilities, shard sense of melancholy, and interests overlapped and merged in much the same way as the sound of siblings who sing. The notion struck us--if we combined our arts, would it make for a richer utterance? You must be the judge of that. As for us, the making our library is the primary pleasure. Writers, when you're developing a character with sensibilities foreign to your own, does the creative process itself promote empathy?
My character Amma in Bombay Trilogy was modeled on a traditional Hindu mother-in-law of an American “unsuitable bride.” At first, I had only an incomplete understanding of the attitudes with which I used to construct her, but as I learned how to illuminate and animate her, I began to inhabit her -- and develop empathy for her. A character incorporates its creator, at least a blurred and altered version. It’s paradoxical, isn’t it, that for a writer to disappear into her character, she sometimes has to go far away from that self. In order to think through the character and its demands, it’s important to succumb to that “estranging kinship,” to use Richard Powers' phrase. Psychological distancing was a useful tool in re-framing Amma's true desires -- one aspect of empathy. What did she really want? The reader must discover what she thought she needed and the consequences of that. Liking her seems largely beside the point. My unlikeable character had convictions so strong that she was willing to sacrifice everything for them. This comment sparked the following response, which I thought I'd share with you: Empathy - A much abused word, I feel, these days - used in a fairly superficial context and almost interchangeable with 'sympathy'. Our empathy is not the sole preserve of those to whom we are closest and those we love best. Occasionally, our empathy is even deeper with those towards whom we have a (natural?)antipathy. We can read them in more accurate detail. And it can be unnerving to contemplate how this reflects upon us. You have a lot of grace towards your MIL character, but I wonder if part of your instinct in defending her so staunchly is that of an author - a creator - confronting criticism that doesn't belong to the context of the work. We all like a heartwarming story that carries us away, but serious fiction cannot be dealing with the wholly likeable. We need a discomfiture that restores us to ourselves. We need to trespass into alien mindsets. The virtue is not necessarily in the resolution of the story, but of the reader saying thankfully:"There but for the grace of God, go I," and breathing a sigh of relief. 1-A critic has said that one important measure of a superior work of literature is its ability to produce in the reader a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude. What are some of the sources of the "pleasure and disquietude" in Shiva’s Arms?
There are lots of sources of pleasure: sensory details, such as food, used to reveal national character, is one. Disquietude is shown in the culture clash itself, and all its sub-clashes, as when Amma ‘accidentally’ breaks Alice’s dishes and sends her running for the refuge of the art museum. And, of course, we feel disquietude when Alice breaks down. 2-Many plays and novels use contrasting places to represent opposed forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work. In Shiva’s Arms, how do the two contrasting places differ in what each place represents? America, as represented by Alice, is shown to be open-hearted and hospitable, willing to be changed by new elements. India, as embodied by Amma, wants to keep the ancient traditions intact at all costs. Ramesh has a foot in both worlds and represents both the success and failures in assimilation. Sam’s presence in the book demonstrates the push-back from his father’s choices. He allies himself with his grandmother’s heritage – a dramatization of the reactionary vs. the modern. Nela is perhaps a wild card. Her desire to live an authentic life prevents her from being as subversive, or submissive, as another daughter might have been. She chooses to live in exile. 3-One definition of madness is "mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it." But Emily Dickinson wrote Much madness is divinest Sense- To a discerning Eye- Novelists and playwrights have often seen madness with a "discerning Eye." What does Alice’s eccentric behavior consist of and how might it be judged reasonable? Between “in-law invasions,” Alice feels free in her house. An insomniac, she roams from room to room at night, watching her many VCRs, or going into the kitchen to make fudge. She knows that once Amma arrives, she will have to accommodate her, and her nocturnal habits could be seen as a way of reminding herself that her home actually belongs to her. Another behavior that seems eccentric but has its own inner logic is the fact that when the ongoing animosities with Amma flare up, Alice seeks help from the ostracized Nela, hatching schemes to right the balance of power. She sees Nela as a kindred spirit and an ally against the woman who has rejected them both. A woman with no chemical imbalance might resort to a little one-upmanship with an over-bearing MIL , but Alice can only fight back in a subversive, unclear way that reflects her thinking disorder. Her behavior is reasonable if one considers the underlying disease. The way she finally steps back from her feelings about Amma and enlists Nela’s assistance in order to give the old woman the help she needs is a rational and altruistic act. 4-Morally ambiguous characters -- characters whose behavior discourages readers from identifying them as purely evil or purely good -- are at the heart of many works of literature. Can Amma be viewed as morally ambiguous and why is her moral ambiguity significant to the work as a whole? Amma’s behavior and beliefs reflect the divided loyalties inherent in a collision of cultures. She believes fiercely that her protectiveness toward her heritage is necessary and admirable. The fact that she hurts her beloved son by rejecting his wife is a price she is willing to pay to uphold an ideal of cultural purity. She educates her grandson in the old ways, also, not just to pass on that ideal, but to redeem her son’s sin. The fact that she drums her daughter out of the family for a romantic infraction, burns evidence of her existence, and demands that her family consider her dead, is a defensible stance in her mind, for the same reasons. And, of course, there is the ambiguity of Lord Shiva himself, Amma’s namesake, and the household god of both Creation and Destruction. 5-Often in literature, a character's success in achieving goals depends on keeping a secret and divulging it only at the right moment, if at all. In Shiva’s Arms, the family keeps a secret from Sam. How does the secret affect the plot? The plot turns on it. Alice’s muddled revenge – evidence that she, at least, does not obey Amma – is pre-empted by Nigel’s revelation that Nela is not only alive, but flourishing in a romantic relationship with him. Amma’s cruelty and the family’s collusion horrify Sam, whose reaction sets the climax in motion. 6- Nela becomes cut off from “home” and her experience is both alienating and enriching. How does this ambiguity illuminate the meaning of the novel as a whole? It has been said that you can leave home all you want, but the idea of home stays with you. It colors your new beginnings. It’s wrenching, to decide what part of a divided heart goes, and what stays. The physical dislocation Nela experiences reflects the modern phenomenon of spiritual dislocation. For VS Naipaul, "finding the centre" was paramount. For Nela, it’s the threshold that holds the most fascination. The complexity at the heart of the momentous act of immigration becomes a theme in her life, positioned as she is in the archway - a good place from which to observe and to have a conversation with one’s own divided heart. 7-The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events -- a marriage or a last minute rescue from death -- but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death." How is the "spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation" evident in the ending of the book significant to the structure of the novel? Introducing the Christian theme of reconciliation connects to the Hindu belief system of endless birth and re-birth, exploring yet another duality. When Alice puts aside her history with Amma, she opens a future for them that reassesses the meaning of family in an unpredictable world. Q-A critic has said that one important measure of a superior work of literature is its ability to produce in the reader a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude. What are some of the sources of the "pleasure and disquietude" in Bombay Trilogy?
A-There are lots of sources of pleasure: sensory details, such as food, used to reveal national character, is one. Disquietude is shown in the culture clash itself, and all its sub-clashes, as when Amma ‘accidentally’ breaks Alice’s dishes and sends her running for the refuge of the art museum. And, of course, we feel disquietude when Alice breaks down, the sacrifices that Nela makes for her chose family, and Ram's pull toward and against his culture. Q-Many plays and novels use contrasting places to represent opposed forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work. In Bombay Trilogy how do the two contrasting places differ in what each place represents? Q-America, as represented by Alice, is shown to be open-hearted and hospitable, willing to be changed by new elements. India, as embodied by Amma, wants to keep the ancient traditions intact at all costs. Ramesh has a foot in both worlds and represents both the success and failures in assimilation. Sam’s presence in the book demonstrates the push-back from his father’s choices. He allies himself with his grandmother’s heritage – a dramatization of the reactionary vs. the modern. Nela is perhaps a wild card. Her desire to live an authentic life prevents her from being as subversive, or submissive, as another daughter might have been. She chooses to live in exile and becomes the most successful in generations of the family. Q-One definition of madness is "mental delusion or the eccentric behavior arising from it." But Emily Dickinson wrote Much madness is divinest Sense- To a discerning Eye- Novelists and playwrights have often seen madness with a "discerning Eye." What does Alice’s eccentric behavior consist of and how might it be judged reasonable? A-Between “in-law invasions,” Alice feels free in her house. An insomniac, she roams from room to room at night, watching her many VCRs, or going into the kitchen to make fudge. She knows that once Amma arrives, she will have to accommodate her, and her nocturnal habits could be seen as a way of reminding herself that her home actually belongs to her. Another behavior that seems eccentric but has its own inner logic is the fact that when the ongoing animosities with Amma flare up, Alice seeks help from the ostracized Nela, hatching schemes to right the balance of power. She sees Nela as a kindred spirit and an ally against the woman who has rejected them both. A woman with no chemical imbalance might resort to a little oneupmanship with an over-bearing MIL , but Alice can only fight back in a subversive, unclear way that reflects her thinking disorder. Her behavior is reasonable if one considers the underlying disease. The way she finally steps back from her feelings about Amma and enlists Nela’s assistance in order to give the old woman the help she needs is a rational and altruistic act. Q-Morally ambiguous characters -- characters whose behavior discourages readers from identifying them as purely evil or purely good -- are at the heart of many works of literature. Can Amma be viewed as morally ambiguous and why is her moral ambiguity significant to the work as a whole? A-Amma’s behavior and beliefs reflect the divided loyalties inherent in a collision of cultures. She believes fiercely that her protectiveness toward her heritage is necessary and admirable. The fact that she hurts her beloved son by rejecting his wife is a price she is willing to pay to uphold an ideal of cultural purity. She educates her grandson in the old ways, also, not just to pass on that ideal, but to redeem her son’s sin. The fact that she drums her daughter out of the family for a romantic infraction, burns evidence of her existence, and demands that her family consider her dead, is a defensible stance in her mind, for the same reasons. And, of course, there is the ambiguity of Lord Shiva himself, Amma’s namesake, and the household god of both Creation and Destruction. Q-Often in literature, a character's success in achieving goals depends on keeping a secret and divulging it only at the right moment, if at all. In the book, the family keeps a secret, the first in a sequence affecting different characters, from Sam. How does the secret affect the plot? A-The plot turns on it. Alice’s muddled revenge – evidence that she, at least, does not obey Amma – is pre-empted by Nigel’s revelation that Nela is not only alive, but flourishing in a romantic relationship with him. Amma’s cruelty and the family’s collusion horrify Sam, whose reaction sets the climax in motion. Q- Nela becomes cut off from “home” and her experience is both alienating and enriching. How does this ambiguity illuminate the meaning of the novel as a whole? A-It has been said that you can leave home all you want, but the idea of home stays with. It colors your new beginnings. It’s wrenching, to decide what part of a divided heart goes, and what stays. The physical dislocation Nela experiences reflects the modern phenomenon of spiritual dislocation. For VS Naipaul, "finding the centre" was paramount. For Nela, it’s the threshold that holds the most fascination. The complexity at the heart of the momentous act of immigration becomes a theme in her life, positioned as she is in the archway - a good place from which to observe and to have a conversation with one’s own divided heart. Q-The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings. "The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events -- a marriage or a last minute rescue from death -- but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death." How is the "spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation" evident in the ending of the book significant to the structure of the novel? A-Introducing the Christian theme of reconciliation connects to the Hindu belief system of endless birth and re-birth, exploring yet another duality. When Alice puts aside her history with Amma, she opens a future for them that reassesses the meaning of family in an unpredictable world. As does Ramesh, years later, when he accepts as family a student of his who has been mauled by fate. After the obvious—caffeine— I can offer a few personal techniques that keep me writing:
1. Don’t vamp for time: there is no perfect clutch of hours in which to write. Establish a schedule and stick to it. "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work," Flaubert told us. A corollary to this might be, “Don’t wait around for inspiration to strike. It’ll only hit you when you’re at your desk.” 2. If I didn’t believe that writer’s block was a hoax, I’d break it by switching genres. When I was composing my novel Shiva’s Arms, I’d work on it until I stalled, then switch to Samsara, the poetry collection I was making at the same time. Similar themes (cultural identity, the meaning of home, metaphysical conflations of mortal and immortal) in both works made the overlap easy, and added a layered richness to each. And I never suffered whiplash. 3. Read widely and deeply. If you can take classes or workshops that are slightly over your head, do so. If not, when you read a novel, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, for example, also read criticism on the same book. In this case, I’d choose Pierre Bourdieu’s Rules of Art. 4. Stay connected to your work. I carry a small notepad with me everywhere and let my mind wander to my work-in-progress while I’m doing other things. Joyce Carol Oates once said that housework helped her concentrate. Repetitive movement loosens thinking. Remember how your little nephew would spill all the family business the moment you put him on a swing? Resting my case… 5. Let your routines and rituals assist you. As soon as they stop helping, change them. Fickleness is its own reward! When I was younger I’d write after the house had been put to bed, when everything was quiet. I insisted I could think better surrounded by the dark. Now I do better with shorter writing stints throughout the day, the sunnier the better. 6. Utilize psychological distance. When you change your way of thinking about a character in concrete terms to abstract ones, new connections occur. You might develop empathy for an unlikeable character, and drive your story in a new direction, for instance. This happened to me with the mother-in-law, Amma, in Shiva’s Arms. 7. At the end of the day, leave yourself hanging. If I stop writing in mid-sentence, I’m encouraged to plunge in at that spot the following day. No checking e-mail or fiddling with the lamp. Just me and the words, wrestling again. My ninety year old mother broke her hip one spring. She is a modest woman, but one day she wanted to show me her scar. Why would she do that? And how could I describe it? How much history should I include - for instance, should I let the reader know she has Alzheimer's? I decided to open with the moment itself:
I'm taking everything off/ she announces, clawing at her clothes/ The verbs point to her loosened inhibitions and the quality of her thinking. This is no stripper. There is no playfulness in her act. Moving to a description (a new scar gleams on her mended hip) that is stark and unsparing, the poem finds its identity in this line: Where did this come from, where is it going? I needed to make clear the loss of memory here, the shock that recurs each time a patient is confronted with what she has already grieved over. The reader's attention now focuses on the scar, described with the brusque-sounding "cross-hatched" and its location on the ruins of the body. A cross-hatched seam in the center of a body's landslide. A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing. The reader follows as the old woman touches her scar like a blind person, and when the raised pattern of the scar is likened to "A railroad crossing pocked with stop-signs./A fire escape going down.// the poem demands the reader not flinch from the images of exit. Ninety I'm taking everything off she announces, clawing at her clothes. A new scar gleams on her mended hip. Where did this come from, where is it going? A cross-hatched seam in the center of a body's landslide. A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing. She begins brailing her fingertip down the red raised tracks. It's not what she expected. A railroad crossing pocked with stopsigns. A fire escape going down. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, perhaps months crafting your short story. You’ve shaped a narrative of plot, setting, conflict, point of view, character, and theme, and taken it through three or more revisions. You’ve received critical feedback from at least one trusted reader, and read your story aloud, at least to yourself in the mirror.
You tell yourself, “All systems GO” but before you send your freshly printed out, spell-checked and proofread story to the literary magazine you’ve carefully researched for type of content and style, and whose submission guidelines you’ve followed to the letter, check it against this list: • Have you “opened strong?” The first sentence should draw the reader in and contain the germ of the story. • Did you use more dialogue than narration? Beware the long and the windy. • Did you use descriptive nouns and verbs? Eliminate the vague and imprecise. • Edit out as many adjectives and adverbs as possible. Words ending in …ly weaken the work. • Did you choose past tense over past participle whenever possible? It provides immediacy, much like first person and present tense. • Language that calls attention to itself wakes the reader from his fictional dream. Don’t show off. • Did you involve all five senses when imagining your story? If you did, your reader will experience it with all of his. • Use natural speech when writing dialogue, even when you’re using dialect. • Cut it back or cut it out. Think Hemingway, not Proust. Now, lick that stamp! When is a Transition not a Transition?
It’s a slippery one, that term. Noun or verb, it conjures the world's first IMAX film in 3D or modulation in a musical passage or a passage that connects a topic to one that follows. It can represent an event that results in a transformation, a change from one person, place, or thing to another; it can mean “to cause to convert or undergo a transition.” For writers, transitions mark relationships between ideas --examples, exceptions. They serve as clues to interpretation for the reader. So when several of my critics complained they found the transitions in my novel confusing, I was the one left scratching her head. I tried to get to the bottom of it. What in the world did they mean when they said they didn’t always know where the action was taking place? I thought I made that clear. "One minute you're in India and the next minute you're in America," they said. I looked at my book again, searching out the abrupt, the jagged. I had always admired Alice Munroe’s seamless transitions and taken them as my model. Maybe they were talking about the fact that the same information came from several characters with their separate points-of-view. The theme of divided loyalties and questions of belonging is complex; perhaps I had made a mosaic that didn’t come together smoothly enough for their tastes. One reader gave me a clue. “Most books stick asterisks in when the characters go someplace. You can keep track of them better that way.” Could she be talking about scene changes? Some editors do indeed want to include a blank line or two at the end of scenes, while others think that everything in a chapter should be tightly contained therein --if you need a separation, you need a new chapter, is the thinking. When I described what a transition meant to me as a writer, the lady with the clue was surprised. ”I didn't mean that type of transition,” she said. “Transition was the best word I could come up with. I meant when the setting or whatever you want to call them, changes. The writing was fine.” Mystery solved. Jeff Eugenides (of Middlesex fame) famously disputed the vitality of multicultural novels a few years ago in a Slate interview. “What's the great subject of the novel?” he asked. “Marriage, of course. In the West, we've lost that subject. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can't have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.”
I think that, although a subject like marriage was thoroughly examined in 19th century England, a writer can offer something new by way of structure or language or viewpoint. Whether I set them in the larger world or not, I want characters authentic in their milieu, who will tell the truth with a broader perspective. To be original and clear, to use sentiment without sentimentality, to provide readers with an undisturbed fictional dream—these were some of the things I kept in mind while writing Bombay Trilogy. The clamor of contemporary noise-- iPods and iPads, phones with internet, faster and faster computers, traffic—can drown out any such sustained effort, but at the end, there is a refuge unlike any other in the pages of a book of any genre. What's your definition of a multicultural novel? Are there "cobwebs between the sentences"? Do "Entire paragraphs smell like mothballs"? Was Gilbert Sorrentino right when he said,"These books don't exist. I mean, they exist. But they don't EXIST!" |
AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
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