Book description
A tremendous first novel from an exciting young author.
Feted for its electric chaos, the city of Bombay also accommodates
pockets of calm. In one such enclave, Mohan, a middle-aged letter writer
- the last of a dying profession - sits under a banyan tree in Fort,
furnishing missives for village migrants, disenchanted lovers, and when
pickings are slim, filling in money order forms. But Mohan's true
passion is collecting second-hand books; he's particularly attached to
novels with marginal annotations. So when the pavement booksellers of
Fort are summarily evicted, Mohan's life starts to lose some of its
animating lustre. At this tenuous moment Mohan - and his wife, Lakshmi -
are joined in Saraswati Park, a suburban housing colony, by their
nephew, Ashish, a diffident, sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to
repeat his final year in college.
As Saraswati Park unfolds, the lives of each of the three characters
are thrown into sharp relief by the comical frustrations of family life:
annoying relatives, unspoken yearnings and unheard grievances. When
Lakshmi loses her only brother, she leaves Bombay for a relative's home
to mourn not only the death of a sibling but also the vital force of her
marriage. Ashish, meanwhile, embarks on an affair with a much richer boy
in his college; it ends abruptly. Not long afterwards, he succumbs to
the overtures of his English tutor, Narayan.
As Mohan scribbles away in the sort of books he secretly hopes to write
one day, he worries about whether his wife will return, what will become
of Ashish's life, and if he himself will ever find his own voice to
write from the margins about the centre of which he will never be a
part. Elliptical and enigmatic, but beautifully rendered and wonderfully
involving, Saraswati Park is a book about love and loss and the noise in
our heads - and how, in spite of everything, life, both lived and
imagined, continues. 'Here is the suburban, petit bourgeois world of
Bombay, seldom written about before, and with such acuity, delicacy, and
intelligence, illuminated at different times of day by flashes of
reflected light. This is the best debut novel I've read for a long time:
admirable in its masterful ease, moving in its constant surrender to
compassion and wonder.' Amit Chaudhuri
'A wry and delicate portrait of domestic life, brimful of secret
longings.' Giles Foden
"A first novel of great poise, full of understated drama."
Tash Aw
'A beautiful novel that personifies the new India from the inside out.'
Literary Review Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read
English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the
Sorbonne, written for the Times of India in Bombay and been a
Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in
Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2008, and lives in
London and Bombay. Saraswati Park is her first novel.
