User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
DNFed at page 95/268.
The end.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020. Maybe I don't care anymore for book awards.
This book is disgusting. The writing pace and style is fine, easy to get into and simple. But it's the haphazard narration that becomes too much in the subsequent chapters that makes the reading go nowhere. And what's with all that focus on descriptions of body secretions and waste, more focus on sexual stuffs (more disgustingly thinking of fking her own father thinking her father may see her mother on her face! And that's when I DNFed the book), more interest in describing excreta and such disgusting details, more interest in describing the dirty places on the road and such places, more interest in talking about rotten things and dying puppies and animals? There's more. And these things are not at all relevant to the story. Random characters are introduced now and then but their roles are quite not defined and somehow always lead to something sexual for no reason. This book is so damn dilusional and problematic.
Characters being weird is one thing. Characters being disgusting is another.
The relationships are so unrealistically represented. I have read and will read many stories about dysfunctional families, marriages and relationships but this one is the worse till date. The characters seem like posters with no personalities. And yes, we don't need to discuss the molecular structures of chemicals that cause Alzheimer's or the 'KREB' (it's Krebs cycle by the way 😒) mechanism to relate the story. That's totally unnecessary and that's not research related to the condition. The causes, the maybe possible ones, or the situations and events are, which are thoroughly lacking in the story.
The narration tends to get high on these things mentioned every other page.
I stopped caring about the characters or the story (whatever there's left!) because I felt like I was really wasting my time reading this book.
Done.
Thank you, next 💁
Rating: really liked it
“Human degeneration halts and sputters but doesn’t reverse.”I suspect I read this at a bad time - when I’m already fairly disgusted with a large portion of the population; dispirited about the lack of humanity in so many people. This rubbed a bit of salt in the wound. I finished reading it nearly a month ago and am just now getting around to writing this review. Looking back at my notes depressed me a little further. I’m going to need some hot cocoa and a fuzzy kitten to cuddle with after I push the “post” button.
“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”What attracted me to this novel in the first place was that I’m always fascinated by mother-daughter relationships. I am a daughter and a mother. My bond with my mother is very complex. That with my daughter is loving and fairly pain-free. Lucky me, as my daughter just happens to be a teenager. This story is about a toxic relationship between a mother and a daughter. Antara, the daughter, has suffered both physically and emotionally at the hands of her mother her entire life. Now, when her mother’s health is deteriorating, she is called upon to become the caretaker that her mother never was for her. A good premise for a novel, but that’s where my appreciation pretty much ends.
The timeline alternates between present day and scenes from Antara’s childhood. The shifts were abrupt. The story is told in the first-person, with Antara as the narrator. She is cold and matter of fact. I never could warm up to her. I wanted to empathize with her pain. After all, there were some (minor) points between mother and daughter I could relate to on some level. Fear of abandonment, the overly critical eye of a mother, the occasional suicidal ‘threats’ that make for a child’s wish to always please at any cost. But I couldn’t muster up any compassion for Antara. Perhaps because I simply could not relate to the adult version she has become.
“When I look back on those days, I wonder did she ever see me as a child she wanted to protect? Did she always see me as a competitor or, rather, an enemy?”There were a few passages that I felt showed some of the potential in the writing here. There is an illuminating section on post-partum depression that I thought was penned with chilling authenticity, but that alone wasn’t enough to inspire me overall. As far as mother-daughter bonds and all their intricacies, please pick up
My Name is Lucy Barton instead. You’ll want to cry on Lucy’s shoulder by the time you’re done. With
Burnt Sugar, you’ll feel much like the piece of haddock I’ve let grow cold on the plate next to me while drafting this review.
“These tales have been passed down from mothers to daughters since women had mouths and stories could be told. They contain some moral message, some rites of passage. But they also transfer that feeling all mothers know before their time is done. Guilt.”
Rating: really liked it
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020.DNFed at 45%.
I cannot go on with this farce so full of caricature like depictions of human relationships, Indians and Western hippies anymore. I cannot read another sentence about the protagonist's terrible mother, her childhood abuse, her meandering thoughts about stray dogs, dogs having sex, sickness, forgetfulness, the filth in India and her insufferable NRI husband.
For a book that has been hailed as "complex", this was just so devoid of what matters the most to me in fiction: a compelling voice. The emotions forced upon me seemed so artificial and caustic, the characters were all anxiety inducing and what's with the casual mentions of the protagonist wanting to fuck her estranged father while her stepmother makes tea? Listen, if I wanted to watch some good incestuous sex, I'd just use Pornhub. This wasn't even good, it was just a pointless digression mentioned in an almost algorithmic tone.
I did my research, okay? I had my doubts about this book even before I started it. Avni Doshi was born in New Jersey, was raised mostly in America, and she currently lives in Dubai with her husband. She barely lived in India, yet the entirety of her story is set here. The India she describes is not the one most of its middle and lower class population live in. It's India as westerners and NRIs see it, it's the India that capitalist, globalization-driven international intellectuals who've never set a foot here envisage.
I have my lovely friend Jen to thank for gifting me copies of this book and The New Wilderness. Special thanks with a bear hug because she remembered that I was looking for a copy of Burnt Sugar and surprised me with it, long after I gave up my search for it. I have been fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of human compassion and kindness for years now, but each time I am left marveling at its nature and scope. Mwah, Jen!
Rating: really liked it
Now longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize.
I read the book following its earlier shortlisting for the 2020 Booker Prize and based on that did not feel the book had the coherency to be a worthy Booker winner. Similarly I would not want to see it win the Women's Prize.
The whites are still bright, some glaring and some almost blue, the white of widows, of mourners and renunciants, holy men and women, monks and nuns, the white of those who no longer belong in the world, who have already put one foot on another plane. The white of the guru and his followers. Maybe Ma saw this white cotton as the means to her truth, a blank slate where she could remake herself and find the path to freedom. For me it was something different, a shroud that covered us like the living dead, a white too stark ever to be acceptable in polite society. A white that marked us as outsiders. To my mother this was the colour of her community, but I knew better: the white clothes were the ones that separated us from our family, our friends and everyone else, that made my life in them a kind of prison.
I read this book (which was originally published in India as “Girl in White Cotton” (*)) due to its longlisting for the 2020 Booker Prize: an intriguing longlist noticeable for (per the Booker website) featuring 9 US based authors, 9 female authors and 8 debutant novelists – with this book representing one of the 4 books at the intersection of that Venn diagram : albeit the US born author of this novel now lives in Dubai.
(*) The author has said that her UK publisher
"felt white cotton had different connotations outside of India, and readers wouldn’t immediately understand the connection to grief and asceticismThe book is narrated in the first person by Antara, who lives in Pune, India with her US born husband but whose defining relationship is with her mother Tara.
When Antara was young, Tara left her husband and for several years lived at an Ashram as the disciple and mistress of the legendary guru – becoming estranged as a result not just from her husband and parents but also from the young Antara, in a breech that never properly healed.
Now years later, Tara, who lives alone, is starting to suffer the early signs of dementia and Antara forced into the role of a carer, a role made harder by her lifelong difficult relationship with her mother. Ironically just as her mother starts to lose her memory and grip on reality, Antara is forced to confront the reality of her own past behaviour and its implications for her marriage. This tension is exacerbated by two other generations: Tara’s own mother (still living independently and whose memory of history does not always align with the story that Antara has told herself) and Antara’s new born daughter (whose arrival simultaneously causes post-partum depression in Antara and further unsettles Tara, who believes the girl to be her own baby i.e. Antara).
A key theme of the book (and one that makes it an interesting companion to the non-dystopian part of “The New Wilderness”) is its investigation of the relationship between mother and daughter and how it evolves for both parties from birth, through early attachment and nourishment to childhood independence, teenage rebellion, the daughter’s own motherhood and then to parental dependency.
Antara (Un-Tara) is deliberately named to be unlike and separated from her mother (
“designated as her undoing”), but in fact entwined for life (
“I often wished she had never been born, knowing this would wipe me out as well – I understood how deeply connected we were, and how her destruction would irrevocably lead to my own”): something that then happens as her mother’s own decline seems to be accompanied by her own uncertainty, then pregnancy to try and save things, and then post-partum depression.
Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.
If our conversations were itineraries, they would show us always returning to this vacant cul-de-sac, one we cannot escape from.
Another key character in the novel is Kali Mata (once Eve) and she acts as something of a surrogate maternal figure for the young Antara in the Ashram sections; her name symbolically drawing on both Jewish and Hindu icons of ambiguous motherhood.
Other key ideas, very explicitly addressed in the book are:
- Memories/forgetting: How memories are crafted and built; how as well as being personal they are effectively in common (if disputed) ownership between those who first experience them; what are the implication for this common ownership if one of the owners begins to surrender possession?
He says my mother and I have always shared some version of our objective reality. Without me, her ties to that may have loosened, sad, but true – yet on the other hand, as a caregiver, the distance might be good for me. It is difficult when everything starts to vanish. He says memory is a work in progress. It’s always being reconstructed.
‘Reality is something that is co-authored,’ the woman says. ‘It makes sense that you would begin to find this disturbing. When someone says that something is not what you think of it as, it can cause slight tremors in the brain, variations in brain activity, and subconscious doubts begin to emerge. Why do you think people experience spiritual awakenings? It’s because the people around us are engaged. The frenzy is a charge that’s contagious.’ ‘Are you saying my mother is contagious?’ ‘No, I’m not. Though maybe I am, in a sense. We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories, too, in the image of what other people remember.’ ‘The doctor says my mother has become unreliable.’ ‘We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not.’
Related to this is the concept of who gets to remember and tell a story - and as the book progresses we increasingly realise that Antara's narration is less than reliable and sense the cracks in the picture she presents of her mother and husband.
- Belonging/exclusion. As the opening quote identifies the Ashram gave Tara a sense of community and Antara a sense of exclusion from her previously nascent roots. Antara’s husband as an NRI feels like he does not fully belongs in India (with his Western ideas, snobberies and rather simplistic morals). A photojournalist lover of Tara, fleeing the Mumbai riots, is taken in by a family who he then marries in to, only to find that others later question his motives and the work he produces from it. And Antara/Tara's complex relationship is all about the tension between belonging and exclusion.
This contempt still draws up the moment I feel uncomfortable. I disown so I can never be disowned.
- Obsession – Antara in particular relentlessly catalogues and collects: sleights when she is a child; objects as she grows up; facts as she tries to understand her mother’s condition and does her own research into the links with diabetes and gut bacteria (something which has darker implications later)
- Art history/life. The author was an art critic and exhibition curator and ideas from art permeate both the book’s structure and its narrative. An art project that Antara has carried on for three years (see below) forms a key part of the tension in her relationships. Antara also uses art to try and come to terms with her research into dementia – sketching her research and ideas on papers. It is part of the meta-approach which permeates this novel that of course the author (whose grandmother’s own diagnosis with dementia part way through the writing of this novel gave it its final form) is using her own art form – novel writing – to capture her own research
The other concept that came out strongly to me in my reading of the book was the idea of a palimpsest in its broadest sense – of art or ideas being written on previous attempts.
We see it in the discussion of how memories are created and developed. There are references to the Brazilian 1920s avant-garde concept of “Anthropafagio” – the cannibalization of Western art. There is an exhibit based around artists re-interpreting “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (note this is I based I believe on an exhibit the author herself curated in Mumbai 2012: very much unlike her character “One Hundred Years of Solitude is not “a book I had never heard of, much less read” being in fact one of her favourite high school stories, and the idea of the insomnia plague that hits Macondo drove her initial idea of exploring the loss of memory and the idea of categorisation and labelling). At one stage Antara explores her Mother’s layers of clothes which set out the story of her life (wedding saris, bridal trousseau, Ashram robes). A key location is the Poona club – which the author represents as a key part of post-independence Indian society written over the legacy of colonialism. We see it in Antara’s crucial art project -a three year project to draw the same face each day, based only on copying the previous day’s painting.
And again referring to the very meta nature of this book – what I find interesting is that the novel itself can be seen in these terms. It was written over seven years in around 8 drafts – with different persons (first/third), tenses, narrators, voices and settings. And the author has I understand taken the old manuscripts and formed them into an art project - wrapping them around her husband’s golf balls (his idea as something that needs redoing every day, building on past failures and successes).
Overall I feel that this is one of the more ambiguous novels on the longlist.
At times humorous at times intense and almost voyeuristically uncomfortable.
On one level a relatively simple narrative, on the other one which weaves in a series of ideas and concepts - not just to that narrative but to the book's very conception.
It is one with a touch of the Eileen Moshfegh and which shows the literary influence (acknowledged by the author) of Jenny Offill, Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk.
However the author I was most reminded of was Ariana Harwicz and her excellent “Involuntary” trilogy.
Overall I found this a worthwhile and intriguing addition to the longlist.
My thanks to Hamish Hamilton for an ARC via NetGalley.
And even now, when I am without her, when I want to be without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness – that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft, white cotton that has frayed at the edge.
Rating: really liked it
Now Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 Avni Doshi's debut is a feminist novel set in modern-day India that ponders motherhood, memory, and the change of roles from being a daughter to becoming a caregiver for an elderly mother. The main character and narrator is Antara who is faced with the fact that her mother Tara's memory is starting to fail her. While the young woman is trying to figure out whether her career as a visual artist will ever take off and where her marriage is going, she ponders what to do with her mother, a strong-willed, free-spirited and often selfish woman with whom she has always had a strained relationship. When Antara finally gives birth to a daughter of her own, she struggles with post-partum depression...
Doshi has split her book in two alternating storylines, one about the events outlined above and one chronologically re-telling Antara's childhood, especially the time she spent in an ashram after her mother left her father to become the lover of a guru. The author does a great job evoking a particular cultural and social climate, and she cleverly shows a protagonist who suffered under her mother's self-centered version of self-actualization without declaring that a more conservative approach is the solution - in fact, there is no general solution. None of these characters are flawless; I would even claim that none of the characters are particularly likeable (which is not a deficit of the text: It's often the less likeable characters who can be deeply interesting).
Still, the story failed to completely captivate me and about halfway through, the text started to drag. The pacing is uneven, the construction is not particularly elegant (the two storylines simply alternate) and the story relies on a myriad of well-known themes: Classism? Check. Religious tension in India? Check. Beggars and gurus in India? Check. The overbearing mother-in-law? Check. The emotionally stinted husband? Check.
What I really appreciated though was the fearless portrayal of the complicated feelings a caregiver can experience if trying to care for a person they have a difficult relationship with, and the anger and helplessness that stems from the feeling of being inadequate in this role or from being taken for granted while the sick person is showered with understanding and pity (many caregivers start to suffer from depression and exhaustion because their needs tend to get ignored). Also, the portrayal of post-partum depression is effectively harrowing in its directness (unfortunately, the author herself has suffered from this condition).
So all in all, this is a promising and interesting debut and I'm glad that I read it, but I'm not sure whether this should be shortlisted (I haven't read the whole longlist yet) and for me, it's definitely not a Booker winner.
Update: While I was right about the Booker, the novel sold over 150.000 copies worldwide, and the translation rights have been sold to 26 countries (German translation: Bitterer Zucker). Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta is currently working on a movie adaptation.
Rating: really liked it
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Burnt Sugar is one of the worst books I've read in 2020. If you were able to appreciate this novel, I'm glad. This may be one of those 'it's me, not you' cases...or maybe I've read too many stories exploring a complex mother/daughter relationship. To be perfectly frank, I bloody hated this book. It was painfully intent on nauseating the reader. We get it, the human body is base (Julia Kristeva has been there and done that).
Burnt Sugar is ripe with garish descriptions of the abject human body: we have bodily fluids and waste, failing bodies, changing bodies (pregnancies, puberty), body parts compared to food or objects (breasts like dough, buttocks like empty sacks).
The narrator of this novel, someone who was so remarkable I can no longer recall her name, is the classic disaffected woman who is alienated from everyone and everything. A few days before listening to
Burnt Sugar I read
Luster, a novel that features a similar type of character except that there the author manages to make her protagonist into a nuanced human being, one who isn't nice or extremely likeable but is nevertheless realistic and capable of moving the read.
But here, dio mio! The narrator comes across as petulant and myopic, understanding nothing about anything and no one. Readers are clearly not meant to like her but there are various scenes that try to elicit some sort of sympathy (the nuns mistreat her, her mother is mercurial, her 'silly' Indian-American husband is blind to her anguish) on her behalf. Except that I didn't.
The MC goes and on about her mother, but we never gain insight into her actual feelings towards her. The MC is happy detailing all the wrongs she has endured, and seems to insinuate that she has become such a stronza because of her mother. The whole thing is incredibly superficial. Here we have another mother who is 'hysterical' just because 'hysterical' mothers can make for some dramatic scenes.
Indian-Americans are portrayed as foolish and brainwashed. Everybody is nasty and disgusting. Ha-ha! Oh wait, that isn't quite 'caustic wit'. There were a few—and when I say a few, I mean two or three—phrases that under certain circumstances (if you are as high as a kite) may come across as slightly amusing, but for the most part the MC's cutting humour fell flat. Viewing everything as grotesque is hardly funny, and it gets tiring, fast.
I also found the author's treatment and portrayal of postnatal depression and dementia to be highly insensitive. The mother in question becomes 'monstrous', the type of character that one may expect in Victorian literature. Who cares about realism when you can write explicit and 'subversive' things for the sake of shock value?
I think this was an awful novel...and it seems that I'm in the minority. Who cares. If you want to read it or loved it, good for you. I'm glad I was able to return this audiobook and I sincerely doubt I will ever try reading anything by this author.
Books with believably fraught mother/daughter relationships featuring alienated, disaffect, or challenging main characters : You Exist Too Much, The Far Field.
Read more reviews on my blog / / / View all my reviews on Goodreads
Rating: really liked it
2.5 rounded up (Listened to the audiobook)
I was disappointed considering this book was shortlisted for the Booker prize. I found the character unbelievable and unrelatable. So much of it could have been more interesting but fell flat.
Rating: really liked it
Can a child ever really know their mother and can a mother ever really know her child? Though we're made to feel there should be a natural, inextricable bond here it's seldom ever so simple. It certainly isn't for Antara, the narrator of Avni Doshi's heart-aching and intensely thoughtful novel “Burnt Sugar”. As an adult she finds herself in the tricky situation of caring for her mother Tara who is showing signs of dementia. But Antara seldom felt cared for as a child when her mother abandoned her unhappy arranged marriage, joined a religious commune, had a passionate affair with an unpredictable artist and spent some time living as a beggar on the street. Given their turbulent history together, Antara naturally feels ambivalent about being her mother's carer and confesses in the novel's opening line “I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure.” Painful emotions run deep throughout this narrative where Antara is haunted by her past and because of this burden struggles to negotiate her relationships with her husband Dilip, her often absent father and her mother in law. I felt intensely involved in this novel which asks poignant questions about the bonds of family and the nature of memory.
Read my full review of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi on LonesomeReader
Rating: really liked it
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020 - I am quite pleased to see India represented.
Longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for FictionAn intense and sometimes funny study of mother-daughter relationships, mostly set in the Indian city of Pune. The narrator Antara is the child of the wilful and impulsive divorcee Tara, who largely neglected her as a child. As a recently married young artist, Antara finds herself having to cope with a mother struggling with dementia.
As the back story emerges, it becomes clear that it is not just Tara whose memory is unreliable, and Tara's moments of clarity often embarrass her daughter. There is some humour too, though it is dark at times - Tara takes a very young Antara to an ashram, where she largely abandons her to pursue life as the guru's favourite mistress, and Antara spends a disastrous year in a Catholic boarding school. Tara starts an affair with an artist, and (view spoiler)
[ in a key scene she discovers that Antara also slept with him as a young woman in Mumbai (hide spoiler)] .
Neither woman is entirely sympathetic, but the writing is lively and after a slow start I found this an enjoyable read.
Rating: really liked it
“Burnt Sugar” is a work of extraordinary insight, courage and sophistication. It is also the world’s worst Mother’s Day present.
“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” the narrator begins. “The sympathy she elicits in others gives rise to something acrid in me.” This is a family tragedy laced with equal parts wit and strychnine.
It’s not that Doshi has written something no one has ever thought before; it’s that she’s written something no one has ever expressed so exquisitely — and so baldly.
The narrator is an Indian artist named Antara, whose mother is presenting symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The doctors offer only a dose of vague hope; there is no concrete diagnosis and certainly no cure. Hovering in the dusk of competency, Antara’s mother still manages to live alone, but increasingly she wanders, forgets where she is and what she’s doing. As her only child, Antara embraces the responsibility of caring for her with a determination threaded with resentment and even bouts of. . . .
Read the rest of this review in The Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
Rating: really liked it
This book and I failed to find that magic reader: writer chemistry.
I can't say if it was the evil-looking succulent on the lilac cover that did it - I certainly have a visceral dislike to looking at the cover even now. It might also be the intense reliance on olfactory descriptions for everything ( 67 uses of the word smell my search tells me ) it’s fine when that makes some kind of sense but often it was something frustratingly vapid like ;
“The room smells warmer, like my finger when I rub it in my navel “?
It might also be I could blame my lack of enjoyment upon my dyslexia for badly signposted timeline shifts. It does impact reading zen when you spend the first sentence of almost every paragraph determining if characters are now 5 or 35. ( This may be blamed upon a badly formatted e-book version, I will need to flick through a physical copy if I can get past the Evil Aloe )
I am being a little bit mean about this book, I can see its merits. It is a well-done portrait of a complicated mother, daughter relationship. Tara is potentially suffering from early-onset dementia and her daughter Antara reflects back on their life together. The setting of Pune, India is well done.
It is also nothing if not ambitious in the topics it covers. These being not limited to; mental health/caregiving/ ashram living/ boarding school violence / visual art / political riots / postnatal depression / an artists view of the Krebs cycle/ doodles of amyloid plaques/ pondering the islets of Langerhans. Occasionally this reads like someone who has gone down the rabbit hole on some pseudoscience about sugar and Alzheimer's.
Look there
is a good book in here somewhere, but it needed more time in the oven. In the end, I realise my criticisms are entirely a matter of personal taste, but I would have pared this back to the key relationships, taken out the malodorous wadding.
As it stands this ended up being all rather unnecessarily exhausting and a head-scratching inclusion on a Booker list.
Rating: really liked it
“Oh, but you will love them when you have your own”, this is the substandard reply I get when I say I do not want to have children. I will love children once I have my own, like the copy of
The Testaments I was planning on buying. Would I have loved it had I had my own copy? I suspect no. No, because buying a copy will not change the fact that it is poorly written. It will not change the fact that Bernadine Evaristo had to share her Booker Prize with it because the judges had to make appearances (maybe). You see, that is not how this whole thing works. Ownership does not bring love; it might beget pity for that thing because you have spent on it.
This concept of ownership is not exclusively related to not wanting to have kids. Society has found other uses for it. Like being a mother to one’s daughter and giving her all the love you can gather because you are a mother and how can you not do that? Forget that the mother in question is a human being with a past that she cannot shred at all. Avni Doshi’s
Girl in White Cotton is about a mother who competes with her daughter and a daughter who thinks about killing her daughter. I wish it was as simple as I have presented it to be. Then, the author need not have written a 273-pages long book and I would not have to sit in front of my laptop to try and write my thoughts about the book.
Relationships can be damaged without our knowledge. A situation might trigger a part of us whose existence we might have been unaware of. Antara’s mother, Tara, names her daughter after her not because of love. Tara wants her daughter to be her foil, Un-Tara-like. But will naming a baby be enough to make it unlike her mother? Avni Doshi’s sparse writing cleaves through this dense subject matter at hand. The writing never unsettles the reader, as if it is trying to smoothen their journey as much as it can.
Rating: really liked it
2.5, rounded up.
#5 for me in the Booker Marathon, and definitely my least favorite so far - which is doubly disappointing, as I am such a fan of South-Asian literature, and this was the one nominee I was most looking forward to reading. And perhaps if I hadn't just finished the stellar and transcendent Shuggie Bain, which ALSO focusses on mother/child conflict, I might have been more receptive to this.
Two things prevented me from really enjoying this - the (tired) structure of the two alternating time-lines always confuses me, and I had difficulty keeping everything straight. It probably didn't help that there are no chapter breaks, and the formatting on Kindle is such that I couldn't really tell when time frames were switched.
Secondly, the 'plot' (for lack of a better term, since there really isn't much of one) itself is not terribly innovative, interesting or involving - a series of 'hot topics' including feminist artists, infidelity, dementia, post-partum depression, Catholic boarding school hazing, ashram communal living, mother/daughter conflict, caregiver fatigue, etc. are all just thrown together higgledy-piggledy - all of which have been done before (and better), and none of which takes center stage for very long.
At about the 2/3 mark, reader fatigue set in, the story seemed particularly inert and I just wanted it to be over with. The ending did pick up a bit, but since I have little to no interest in reading about adjusting to motherhood, I was bored. To be fair, some of the earlier set-pieces were intermittently amusing, and the prose ranged from intriguing ("My vagina resembles a crime scene') to merely competent. All in all a major disappointment, and I'd be terribly surprised if it made the short list (... although my track record of my least liked nominees eventually winning the Booker should cheer up the author and the book's champions!)
PS the novel's original title of 'Girl in White Cotton' is very much more suited to the book - I am not even sure what the new title refers to, although there are some oblique references to the fact that sugar might be exacerbating the mother's dementia.
Rating: really liked it
Hallucinations, inhabiting the past, an archaic sense of self, a deep feeling of isolation. The present is seen for what it is, a fleck always slipping through the sieve.Burnt Sugar opens with the striking line:
I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure. And goes on:
But now, I can’t even the tally between us. The reason is simple: my mother is forgetting, and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt.which immediately sets up two of the book’s main themes, difficult mother-daughter relationships and the unreliability of memory (whether Alzheimer’s induced, or selective).
The book was first published in India in 2019 under the title "Girl in White Cotton", the change for the UK edition, per the author, "a collaborative decision came after hearing my UK editor Hermione Thompson’s concerns about whether the original title would translate in the same way for a UK audience,” which was interesting, as the book generally had a flavour of being written for an international not local market, with a lot of description of the setting in Pune.
This is a debut novel, which had been through many iterations, and the author cites one key influence on the final version as a non-fiction piece she wrote for Harper’s Bazaar, “worked as a kind of spark for this draft of the novel– it offered me an entry point into my character.”
The piece (https://www.avnidoshi.com/a-feast-of-...) includes this anecdote about the author’s own grandmother:
Nani is smiling, happy. I wish I could be happy, but I want too badly to remember all the flavours my grandmother has fed me, every dish that has come out of her kitchen, the ideal season for each vegetable. Our family comes together around my grandmother's kindness and her meals. From far away places, we make yearly pilgrimages to marvel that something can still taste so good. We share stories, hurl insults, we fight, and make up. Every bite is a memory.
But we knew something was wrong the day Nani couldn't remember a recipe. A simple Sindhi pickle, made with cauliflower, carrot, mustard, and rye. She used to know it like the back of her hand. The doctor says this is just the beginning, that eventually she will forget my name.
We are losing a little bit of her everyday. I tell my shrink my heart is breaking but the truth is I feel it most in my stomach, in the watery unease of my gut.
In this novel, Antara, the first person narrator, shares with her grandmother the burden of her mother’s amnesia, including mis-remembering recipes, which she tries to stimulate by leaving notes in her house of significant moments in their life. But sometimes Antara’s own memories are flawed.
Nani is holding a crumpled piece of paper in her claw.
‘I was leaving notes for Ma around the house. So she can find them and read them. Maybe it will help her memory.’
Nani smiles. ‘You’re a good girl. Read it to me.’
I hesitate and press the scrap against my palm. In a few weeks, it has begun to look like ancient parchment. ‘The time you added chilli to Antara’s khichdi,’ I read.
Nani laughs, and coughs when I finish reading. ‘When was that?’
‘She wanted me to learn to eat spicy food, I guess. She wouldn’t stop, even though I developed a bad case of the hiccups.’
Nani shakes her head. ‘Your mother didn’t add the chilli to your khichdi. I added ginger to it because you had a very bad cold.’
‘That’s not true,’ I say. I was sure I remembered it, the taste of pain in my mouth.
‘I’m telling you,’ she said. ‘Have you asked her? She will tell you.’
I had read that one to Ma and she had looked at me vacantly before I stuffed it into the sofa for her to find again. ‘Even if I ask her,’ I say to Nani, ‘she doesn’t remember.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t remember because it never happened.’ The author has mentioned the influence on her writing of Levy, Offill, Cusk and Heti, of Lispector and Jaeggy, but also Marias and, notably, Garcia Marquez.
As I was researching, I couldn’t help but return to One Hundred Years of Solitude where throughout the book you get a sense that a contagion of amnesia is taking over the village, generation by generation. It’s fantastical in the novel, but is remarkably like the experience of being with someone with Alzheimer’s.
This was a novel that left with me mixed feeling. Antara herself is a complex and fascinating character, and her relationship with her mother, and their different memories of the past made for an excellent read, and it was linked neatly with Antara’s own artwork (based on the author’s own).
However, as often with debut novels, the author has tried to pack a lot of themes in. Unlike some of that ilk, the resulting novel is admirably compact in page count terms (c240 pages) but that means many of the themes and characters – the city of Pune, the ashram to which her mother decamped for several years when Antara was a young child to become the lover of the guru (based on the real-life Rajneesh), the women in the ashram who became a sort of surrogate mother, both women’s relationship with another artist, Antara’s husband and his aspirations to return overseas, even (a theme which was clearly key for the author) Antara’s own experience of motherhood – end up as fleeting themes; for example the last of these appears only in the last 10% of the novel. At times it felt like this would have worked better as a much shorter novel (with some themes left for future books) or the opposite i.e. a much longer work.
Nevertheless, a worthy inclusion on the Booker longlist and a striking debut. 3.5 stars rounded to 4.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
Interviews with the author:
https://fivedials.com/interviews/we-h...
https://thesoup.website/interviews/pa...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.badformreview.com/post/so...
https://elle.in/article/avni-doshi/
https://web.archive.org/web/201912080...
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/20...
Rating: really liked it
This is the book i came across due to its inclusion into Booker 2020 longlist. I am very interested in all aspects of India and its culture. So i was very happy to see the author with South Asian heritage and the story set in India in the list. Overall, my initial impression of this year's list was more positive than the usual as I did not know more than a half of the names there. I've made a list of the books I was interested in. Since then, my enthusiasm has cooled down somewhat as I realised that quite a few of these books were the type of confessional writing often based on the author's life. I do not mind it general, but after reading Real Life, i think i have enough for a while of the the sub-genre.
This book is confessional as well. It is also hyper-realistic and detailed. But the difference is that Avni has actually created a fictional story and fully developed a fictional character! That seems to be quite an achievement in the recent literary climate.
Though the story is fictional, the style is totally modern auto-fiction. Antara, the main character and the voice of the novel is dealing with her past and her mum who seems to be succumbing to the early dementia. The novel set in Puna, India. Antara is an artist. But her childhood was tricky. Her mum has ran to an ashram from her husband and her family taking 3 year old Antara. It has resulted in a childhood trauma for a little girl multiplied by a year in a dreadful catholic convent later. My understanding is her mum has had her quite young as well. All in all, their relationship never was easy. It was in the past, and even in the present it is very competitive, critical and easily moving from love to hate. At present, it is exacerbated by her mum's state. The book jumps backwards and forwards from Antara's childhood to the present moment.
There is a supportive cast of characters. But none of them are very strong, in my view. However, Antara's super-frank, unsentimental voice and her reflections, often angry, about herself or her mum have won me over.
Her similes sometimes made me wince: occasionally too much physiology for the sake of it (salivas, periods, perspiration being described and more). But the social commentary was interesting. And the ideas were quite profound in a way. It made me think how many of us, daughters, are starting our lives thinking that we will be everything opposite to our mums. But then, somehow notwithstanding, ending up more similar to them than different.
I did not think the last few chapters when Antara gave birth to her own daughter added much. It was very clearly inspired by Rachel Cask's Motherhood memories and they were not more insightful or new for that. Also it was one dark twist too many at the end for my liking. But overall, I enjoyed the energy of this.
