Listening Now [Hardcover]

Anjana Appachana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 1998

This beautifully written, lyrical novel of love and deception centers on the intensely personal world of seven marvelously wrought characters. Set in a brilliantly vivid India, the drama nonetheless resonates in all countries and cultures, as each of the characters tells her story and the truth behind the greatest secret at the heart of the novel is revealed Readings in Phoenix. Print ads .

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

India, when you first set foot from the atmospherically controlled airplane into the steamy, redolent, cacophonous whirl of the street, can be an intensely overwhelming experience. Listening Now, on the other hand, takes you on an intimate tour through India's land and culture without your ever having to sidestep a single cow pie. A novel by Anjana Appachana, Listening Now tells the story of Mallika, a romantic and passionate child who recounts and bemoans the tragic tale of her mother Padma as she believes it to be. We then hear the same history related by Padma's sister, mother, and friends, and ultimately by Padma herself. Each retelling casts a fresh view and uncovers some new secrets, guilts, angers, and hurts until the full story of Padma's love is revealed. In the process, the "ordinary" middle-class lives of these Indian women assume a powerful reality.

Appachana has a wonderful ear for dialogue, especially when capturing the back and forth between Mallika and the various adults (mother, aunts, friends) who scold, teach, and love her. Appachana does a remarkable of job weaving the details of Indian life--the smells of the kitchen, the clink of the bracelets, the rhythm of the language--into this engrossing narrative of grief and joy, lies and truth. Reading Listening Now certainly is no substitute for a visit to India, but it's a lovely, peaceful, and moving way to absorb some of the essence of India from the comfort of your living room. --Stephanie Gold

From Publishers Weekly

In India as elsewhere, the closest families often hide the most painful secrets, betrayals and hostilities. Appachana's (Incantations and Other Stories) achievement in this intensely lyrical, if overwritten, first novel is to expose and explore these darker family matters?in their peculiarly Indian incarnations?with insight and candor. A college teacher in New Delhi, careworn Padma tells her sensitive, fantasy-prone daughter, Mallika, that the girl's father died in a car accident just before her birth. The truth?that Mallika is the product of a love affair destroyed by misunderstanding and parental meddling?comes out through flashbacks and the gossip of various characters, including Padma's estranged, widowed mother and unhappily married sister. The return of Padma's lover, after 13 years, to beg forgiveness from her and from the daughter he never knew, gives the story dramatic power. Appachana, who won a NEA fellowship based on an excerpt of this novel, invests nearly all her characters with secrets?abortions, love affairs, wife-beating, sexual molestation, terminal illness, explosive resentments?that gradually come to light through roundabout conversations as believable, in their indirection, as the wounds they lay bare.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 515 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067945215X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679452157
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,168,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pain of loving too much, August 15, 2000

By 

Veena Garyali (MANHASSET, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Listening Now (Paperback)

Once started this book is hard to put down. It is a journey through the psychological terrain of five women, who tell us their way of looking at the world. You begin to see were their pain comes from and at some point their pain became my own. This book is so many things in one or one structure with many distinct facets. It is a love story in an Indian setting; meeting of north and south. It tells you how differently men and woman think and feel. Since all the narrators are only women, you get to know how clueless men are to their feelings and how they adjust. It is the story of Padma, her daughter, sister mother and friends. A single woman with a child and how she copes. The child who senses her mother's pain and suffers with her. The mother who can't disentangle herself from the man who deserted her. The Most gripping aspect of the book is the exquisite details of capturing the most delicate feelings of pain and pleasure. You feel the ecstacy and the heart rending pain. It is truely a pleasure to read such beautiful prose. It is book worth reading and rereading to get the essence of what the writer wants to convey.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too long and oppressive., December 15, 1999

By 

Spy (Philadelphia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Listening Now (Hardcover)

I have to admire the author's style of story-telling. The plot unfolds through the voices of 5 women and one little girl. We are told in the beginning that Padma is the widowed mother of Mallika, who is an unrealistically precocious child. We later learn the truth about what really happened which left Padma so disillusioned with life. Though, the story was beautifully told, the plot itself was too oppressive. Every woman has a sad story to tell, and the tone of the book takes its toll on the reader. Also, the ending where everything was suddenly neatly pieced together was abrupt and inconsistent with the rest of the book. Too many coincidences, too dramatic and too many stereotypes. For example, all husbands are insensitive. I would recommend this book for someone who reads for the style and language, but not the content.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars women beware women, December 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Listening Now (Hardcover)

The essence of this book is as follows: men can never truly understand women, so women must find loving, passionate relationships with other women. This is fine, as far as it goes, but the author's treatment of this theme is heavy-handed and overwrought. The story is made up of the composite narratives of five or six women, all of whom face patriarchal oppression - mothers-in-law from hell, domineering husbands etc. Some of the characters are in truly horrible situations; for example, the sexual relationship of one of the women can best be described as marital rape. However, to a large extent, the characters engineer their own chains; they lapse into sullen servility, or behave like shrieking harpies. Even though they chafe at the preferential treatment that their mothers show to their brothers, they in turn treat their daughters in the same dismissive way. After a while, the reader forgets the names and other characteristics of the women, and simply associates them with their domestic woes. As for the female characters finding redemption in each other's company- if I were the sister or daughter of any of the women depicted in the novel, I would run away from them, rather than attempt to find any transcendent bond with them. As a South Asian woman and a feminist, I don't remember my mother and aunts being so downtrodden, even though some of them lived in very conservative households. The women in my family dealt with patriarchy with grace and dignity, not with idiotic passivity. On the purely literary side, the dialogue at times has the flavour of filmi style melodrama, which lends a ridiculous, overblown portentousness to the narrative. Also, at one point in the narrative, a curse is invoked, with dire effect. This would be ok if the author made use of the magic realism so beloved by contemporary South Asian writers, but it strikes a jarring note in what is basically a socially realistic novel.