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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Home and the World,
By
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This review is from: Days and Nights in Calcutta (A Ruminator Find) (Paperback)
This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics: The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122 Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage. In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part: My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298 But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls. Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Days and Nights in Calcutta,
By Kim Burdick (NEWARK, DE, US) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Days and Nights in Calcutta (A Ruminator Find) (Paperback)
In this early book Bharati Mukherjee and her writer husband, Clark Blaise, recount their individual stories of the aftermath of a personal tragedy that leads them to the safe harbor of Mukherjee's family home in Calcutta. The complexities of adjustment and readjustment to life in Calcutta where one is never alone, and their individual adaptations to the social and cultural norms of an extended Bengali family, are neatly laid out side by side by this husband and wife team. Clark's story is like looking through binoculars trying to identify something far away. He shares his initial wonder and confusion at what he sees, hears, smells and experiences with the reader and as with the clarity that comes from twisting the knobs on binoculars, India comes slowly and clearly into focus. Bharati's tale is more like looking through a microscope at Indian culture. As she steps back into her Indian past after fourteen years in the United States and Canada, she compares and contrasts her shifting cultural expectations in a fascinating, almost analytical way. Although their stories rarely converge in this book, we see how their year in India changes them and eventually draws them closer together. The book is a fine memoir that will strike responsive notes in readers of Mukherjee's novels. Kim Burdick Stanton, Delaware
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Half of Book lacks DIRECTION and INTEREST!!!!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Days and Nights in Calcutta (A Ruminator Find) (Paperback)
In the first half of this documentary of a family's trip to India, Blaise paints an anti-feminist and harsh perpective of his wife's Indian heritage. At first compassionate, Blaise soon loses his readers with his inattention to plot and chronology. His story jumps from his time with his family in Bombay to Calcutta and the present with almost no transitioning explanation while his use of Indian words unknown to his reader are not clarified. If Mukherjee had written this book entirely, readers' interest may not have wandered as far. Bharati's interpretation of their journey is nostalgic and whimsical at the same time, telling of her return to India after a fourteen-year absence. She often visites the idea of what if; for example, what if she'd stayed behind in India and married an Indian? What if she'd led the traditional Indian life?
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