When the boy’s there, there’s a wall between particular words and me, between particular events and me, I try my best to reach them but it’s as if they no longer exist.
Not wanting her stepson to find her living in uncharacteristic squalor in the flat she shared with his father, Tara tries to put herself and her home back in order but finds herself dancing for the boy who seems to have been following her for the past three months, then collapsing half dressed. Shocked and concerned, Eli sets about cleaning up as Tara sleeps on the sofa, worried enough by what he finds to make a hospital appointment for her. When he leaves, Tara reflects on the past she withheld from her husband to whom she had told a more acceptable version of the truth, omitting the madness that had overtaken her after the murder of her mother and her dissident father, and the seduction in which she had taken comfort the consequences of which had resulted in judgement and disgrace. Caught up in a devastating natural event, she had been fleeing another terrible grief, waking in hospital severely injured. Beginning a new life in a different country with a new identity, she buries her childhood trauma so deeply she no longer acknowledges it to herself until, grief-stricken again, it begins to reveal itself.
The moonless nights when my parents and I, lying on the grass, looked at the sky full of stars, and we named the constellations. I wanted those nights to last and last.
The novel opens with Tara’s nightmarish present haunted by the boy who appears across the street, in the cinema, the park and now in her living room, seemingly watching her descend into madness, before switching to Vijaya whose story illuminates Tara’s, revealing an idyllic privileged childhood destroyed by violence and years spent in a ‘ruined girls’ refuge stripped of everything including her identity. Appanah’s language is gorgeously poetic, her descriptions of Tara’s childhood when she was Vijaya vividly evocative, the punishment dealt out to the girls in the refuge heart-wrenching. Much is left for readers to infer, always tricky for a translator, I imagine, but Jeffrey Zuckerman manages it beautifully. Weighing in at less than 150 pages, Appanah’s brief, lyrical novella packs a powerful punch.
Maclehose Press: London 9781529422832 144 pages Paperback
Your lyrical review has sold this to me, good and proper!
Job done, then!
Lovely book cover.
Gorgeous, isn’t it? Such a luxuriant green.
Sounds hard to read in the themes it deals with but a beautiful and worthwhile one all the same.
Indeed it is but definitely worthwhile.
This sounds excellent indeed. Some similarities in plot to A Little Luck by Claudia Pineiro, which also has a woman restarting after trauma in another country, bring rescued by a kind man whom she marries.
Oh, thanks for that – I’ll add it to my list. Third book today to head that way…
This author is new to me Susan, but I do like the sound of this,
I’d recomend this one and The Sky Above the Roof, Cathy. Both powerful, beautifully crafted novellas
This sounds so powerful. Such a striking cover too. I’ll look out for this and The Sky Above the Roof.
Both highly recommended.