The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay

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“I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” It’s a great first sentence and resonates throughout the book, taking on new shades of meaning as Shalini tells us the story of what happened when she was twenty-four.

A privileged young woman, she lives in Bangalore in southern India. Her father is a successful businessman, freeing her to lead a life without purpose: drinking and clubbing, occasionally volunteering.

Like a few of my recent reads, this novel is set in motion by the death of the protagonist’s mother. Chapters alternate between what happens next, as Shalini sets out on a journey to politically unstable Kashmir, and flashbacks to her childhood growing up with her larger-than-life mother.

Shalini’s mother never went to the U.S. like her father, and still prays to the Brahmin idols that he’s abandoned. Sarcastic, rude, and uninhibited, her mother wields her anger like a cudgel to get her own way with shopkeepers, family, and everyone else. Only Stella, their servant, remains imperturbable in the face of the tornado. Shalini calls her mother “incandescent” and “vicious.”

Then a traveling salesman comes to the door selling clothing from Kashmir. Shalini is shocked when her mother invites Bashir Ahmed in and even more so when he treats her mother’s insults and barbs with humor. A teller of magical stories that enchant both mother and daughter, he becomes a regular visitor, the only regular visitor to the house.

However, at the time of her mother’s death, they hadn’t heard from him for ten years. Floundering without her mother’s strong presence, Shalini sets out to find the charming and mysterious Bashir Ahmed.

Some people in my book club believed that Shalini hoped to discover exactly what the relationship was between Bashir and her mother, but I thought she believed that in him she would find again the comfort and certainty she’d lost when her mother died.

The writing is gorgeous, and seduced me from the start. Vijay’s descriptions and unusual images are stunning.

. . . below us was the river. I’d learned its name as a child in school, and that it was one of the five mighty rivers of the north, but I had not been prepared for such a vital, living, thing. The water was gray in places, slate blue in others, and, farther off, a tawny green. The roar was so loud it seemed to dampen the sun’s glare, so that it felt momentarily as if we were standing in shadow.

As she steps out onto the swaying bridge, at first she watches her feet but then looks up.

I could see miles and miles up and down the river, mountains looming dark on both sides, all that tall blue sky held between. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and a sound—a laugh of delight or moan of fear, I couldn’t tell—escaped me, torn away in an instant by the gale that funneled through the valley.

There is much else to like about this story. I welcomed learning more about Kashmir and Bangalore. The political divisions in Kashmir emerge organically in this story. And I’ve never before run across Bangalore as a setting in the Indian novels I’ve read.

However, I found some of the plot hard to believe. Without giving anything away, the generous assistance Shalini encounters on her journey seemed designed to advance the plot rather than how people would realistically behave, even in a culture that honors hospitality.

Several people in my book club disliked Shalini to the point where it kept them from enjoying the book. However, I found her credible. It’s not surprising that an immature, very privileged girl would be self-centered and unable to understand how to behave with the very poor people she encounters in Kashmir.

The story is a fascinating look at the clash between the wealthy urban culture of Bangalore and that of an impoverished and politically unstable village in the Kashmiri mountains.

Have you read a novel set in Kashmir?

The Association of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan

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The winner of several awards and places on best books of the year lists, this second novel from Mahajan examines the results of a bombing. Not some large, well-publicised terrorist attack, the event that starts the novel is a small bomb set off in a marketplace in New Delhi, killing—among others—two brothers and seriously injuring their friend.

The story examines the repercussions of this event on the parents of the two boys, the friend, and the terrorists themselves, including one who is drawn into their orbit later. By adopting this structure, Mahajan sets himself a serious challenge.

In my opinion and despite the fervent praise heaped on this book, he fails to meet this challenge. Confining the different stories to separate and clearly defined sections keeps the reader from getting confused. However, the lack of a single protagonist leaves the book empty at its core. As soon as we start to get interested in a character, the father for example or the bomb maker, his story is dropped entirely. It may be picked up again a hundred pages later or it may not.

As a result, the novel is interesting and informative, but not engaging. Contrary to the frenzied reviews, the book is neither thrilling nor urgent. Most of the people in one of my new book groups found it boring and had to force themselves to read on. Contributing to their malaise was the trajectory of the characters: they start off miserable and go downhill from there.

Of course, it is possible that the author intended for the book to be empty at its core, as though the center had exploded and destroyed everything, including our notions of narrative.

There are also some continuity problems that an editor should have picked up, a few inconsistencies that are jarring. And the ending is disappointing. Like too many books these days, it felt as though the author got tired of writing but didn’t know how to end it, so we get a series of brief this-is-what-happened capsules for the major characters.

It’s a shame because the novel brings to light an important subject. While we hear in the news about shocking terrorist attacks, I for one had no idea that so many of these small events were happening. Since 1970 there have been nearly 10,000 in India alone. In the single month of May, 2016, there were 207 terrorist incidents around the world, in countries in the news such as Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in places like Yemen, Egypt, Burundi, Tanzania, and the Philippines.

Mahajan does a great service by bringing these to light and demonstrating that, despite their smaller scale, their impact is no less tragic. My book group wondered what purpose could be achieved with this barrage of terror. Of the three terrorists in this book, one was said to be motivated by nationalist concerns (Kashmiri independence), one by religious discrimination, and one by rage at a politician.

Yet, as we have seen, such actions do not convert anyone to their cause and are too small to be remarked upon in the media or remembered by those not immediately affected. Some wondered if a deeper cause might lie in the mix of rage and fear and powerlessness that in the U.S. leads single white men and boys to pick up a gun and shoot up a restaurant or concert or school. There is no logical plan to achieve anything. Rather it is an explosive desire to be seen and heard. One person compared it to a toddler’s tantrum.

I urge people to read this book because it is important subject that most of us know little about. Don’t look for what you might normally expect in a novel, though the settings are beautifully described, both the places and the communities. Look instead for new insights into one of our greatest challenges: how to live together in peace.

Did you know about the number of terrorist incidents occurring every day around the world?