Sorry for having upset you. I did not mean that your book is an autobiography. And even if it was (as first books are–Joyce, Sterne, Lawrence–the list is illustrious and long), so what. I was referring to a larger trend that I am observing in SA literature, and having read Roy’s book too many times to count, and having heard from too many budding writers to count, how much they admire her book, I do see how her way of thinking (melodrama) and phrasing things (which ends up as a novel’s language) has subliminally seeped into their works (e.g. doesn’t the “1) the Malay man didn’t really speak Tamil; and 2) she wasn’t anyone’s little sister.” and such lists sound a tad like: Estha thought Two Thoughts). Small point–really, I don’t wish to make a big deal about such similarities, honest.

And even if you are compared to Roy, I would take that as a high compliment. Let’s face it, not even the supposed Dickens of our time (Z. Smith) is original. And a confession: I think your book opens beautifully. I’ve bought a copy (and I never buy new cloth eds) and I can’t wait for it’s language to assail me. You have accomplished a feat. And I am a big fan of “quiet apathy.” I think that is where the future of historical fiction lies (it has been there for quite some time–we just have to let the academia catch up). –Pessimist no longer.

This is Preeta. Since you seem to have assumed, despite my restraint, that I was posting anyway under some other name, I figured why the hell not post for real. I generally have rules about not responding to reviews of my own writing, but if I’m getting accused of responding nevertheless, I feel I should set the record straight. So here I am for real — and rest assured that if I’d posted earlier I would’ve told you it was me, just like I’m doing now.

Amardeep, thank you very much for the review and the publicity. I appreciate it, and the time you took to type in excerpts.

Pessimist: You know nothing about my life, so:

1) Lay off the accusations of autobiography. Too easy, too boring, too quickly proven wrong, and who the hell cares, anyway? 2) If you want to look for plot similarities despite not having read the book, here: a broad opening that attempts to give a sense of place; a defenseless young servant girl; a lot of court cases; an indictment of a very corrupt justice system; a 19th-century narrator who, oh yes, capitalises certain concepts. Ring a bell? Probably not, since it seems from this discussion that Indians only read Indian writers, and therefore have nothing else to compare them to. But I modelled this book very consciously on 2 other novels — they just weren’t by brown people.

I think Revv and Browngirlintherain have both raised an issue — the burden of “representation” — that has been raised many times before, at least when I took postcolonial lit. classes, so I don’t quite see what’s so “absurd” about their questions, Pessimist. I’m guessing Amardeep himself would be open to that discussion.

Finally, and this is a big one:

3) What’s a national narrative, and how can you know if this book is or not when you know nothing about Malaysia? I tried to write a novel about a generation of disappointment and apathy that stemmed from the 1969 riots. That disappointment very directly sets off a chain of events in the novel; if anything, I worried that it was too direct a suggestion of cause and effect, not that it was too apolitical. Quiet apathy is not as sexy as war or genocide. I would argue that it is just as political, but I guess we’ll have to wait until Malaysians have a chance to say something about that to decide.

I do like you correcting the Poco scholar for requiring the novel to be a national narrative, ala Jameson. That’s absurd and goes to show how much poco theory damages its own; ‘Provincializing Europe’ is but a dream (read nightmare) to the Pocos.

Correct me if I’m misreading, but that seemed like the undercurrent in your discussion — that she’s not adequately taking us into “the broader world of Malaysian life”. It’s the sort of critique that would sound really very strange if applied to any novel by, well, a white writer, which is my usual test.

@Pessimist: The excerpts above are almost completely dialogue; are you reacting mostly to the style of speech? That’s more or less complaining about non-US/British English though…. In terms of narrator wordplay, though, certainly Rushdie was doing his own version earlier, or expand your net outside of brown people and you get Dickens plus, well, a lot of authors — not everyone is Hemingway. The narrative voice in Evening is the Whole Day isn’t a mimic of any of these, though… Arundhati Roy uses a lot of short sentences for effect, and has a quieter narrator — putting in some fireworks for intensity/drama, etc., but mostly staying out of the way; this narrator is big & powerful enough to almost be another character in the story. To some degree, it seems modeled after the teacher/narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland (quoted in one of the epigraphs, and an excellent novel), particularly with its preoccupation with the functioning of history. The general approach is a sort-of limited omniscient enfolding of the characters — altering in content based on the characters currently in focus, not imitating their speech, just the perceptions and perspective — this was particularly striking with the children (I have a handful of books I’ve read in my life that have jolted me with memories of my own childhood, “yes I remember this”; there are a number of those kinds of moments in here).

I’m sure it’s partly a matter of taste (if you want spare & terse, these are not the writers for you) as well as author skill: there’s a difference between piled-on redundant cliches and actual fresh, interesting language (with new twists hidden in the profusion).

About the other comment — I suspect it’s obvious that novels involving an unfamiliar locale (separated by distance, by class, by time, etc.), an extended family and some politics weren’t invented by Roy… that’s not even sufficient to label a genre; it’s pervasive in fiction as a whole.

To me, Evening is the Whole Day bubbled with commentary about dynamic macro relationships–colonizer and colonized, Bumiputras and immigrants, priveledged and disposssesed–that were paralleled and dealt with in the equally shifting micro relationships–Appa and Amma, Asha and McDougall’s daughter, Asha and Uma, Uma and Chellam to name just a few. In each of the complex relationships, Samarasan treats the subject of power and possession by layering the familial over the political in a way that offers not only a rivetting story but also a chaotic mass of questions about the nature of causality. Without giving away any more of the plot than I’ve insinuated, I’ll say that to me the novel invites the reader to ask questions, wonder and shiver about about who does what actively or passively to cause what–in a family and in a society that struggles with alienation, cruelty, and the problem of unevenly distributed power.