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An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy (Quercus)
I'm not too sure how I should be feeling about this book. With all the rage of Slumdog Millionaire, I was hungry for more of India. Anuradha Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing seemed to fit the bill.
Obviously, I was mistaken. Because where Slumdog is a story of finding love, An Atlas is a story about losing love. Or roughly so.
Roy's novel is divided into three distinct sections, each centring on a specific generation and the yearnings of that generation.
The story opens with Amulya's longing for peace away from the bustling Calcutta city. We learn about how he uproots his family to a small, silent town, where he witnesses his wife Kananbala, slowly and patiently losing her mind.
We learn about their English neighbours' marital longings which end in tragedy that echoes into the next generation. We learn of a widower who struggles with his feelings for a cousin; of a daughter who runs wild; of Amulya's secret child, dropped at his door late one night…
We watch how this unknown, casteless orphan becomes the axis around which the novel turns. Roy paints an interesting picture of Indian culture, but she lost me somewhere in her hasty conclusion. I got the gist of her tale which isn't so much a love story, but a story of love.
It's worth a read if you're into poetic writing.
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