Amazon.com Review
"As my father told it, Heraclitus believed that the world was always in flux. Everything I knew--the grass and trees, the sky arching overhead, even my own mother and father--was always changing. This was the principle of things that stayed put and things that moved, the stone and the river, home and travel. And out of the strife of opposites, like fire and water, would come a perfect, eternal harmony." In one paragraph, Marina Budhos sets out the central themes of her novel: flux, change, strife, and eventual transformation. The narrator of The Professor of Light is young Meggie Singh, the daughter of a Guyanese-born physicist and his Jewish American wife. Each summer the Singhs travel to England to stay with Singh's sister, Inez, and her British husband, Tom. Within the context of this veritable united nations of a family, Budhas finds wide scope for her "scientific romance." Professor Warren Singh is obsessed with the nature of light, both particle and wave, and his single-minded devotion to the topic is wreaking gradual havoc on his marriage and his sanity--a fact that Meggie doesn't immediately realize. For she is seduced by the Caribbean myths and folktales her father tells her in between work on the book in which he attempts to explain the paradox of light. But what are simply delightful stories to Meggie carry frightening significance for her father. A little science, a lot of myth, and a stiff dose of dysfunctional-family drama make The Professor of Light ideal for philosophical readers. --Margaret Prior
From Publishers Weekly
Adolescent Meggie Singh faces her complex personal history as she struggles under her genius father's demanding tutelage in this luminous second novel by Budhos that chronicles Indo-Caribbean displacement. Eight sections, each concluding with a fantastic and symbolic tale corresponding to Meggie's development, describe successive summers the Singh family spends at Meggie's aunt's house in England. Away from her Queens, N.Y., home, along with her romance-deprived Jewish mother and her Guyanese father, a philosophy professor (an ethnic pairing similar to that of the characters in House of Waiting), Meggie is surrounded by relatives and social strivers who encircle her family seeking money and status. Letters containing desperate pleas from the paternal relations in Guyana emotionally exhaust the already fragile professor ("a dreamer, a storyteller, a thinker"), who has been unable to finish his book on the subject of quantifying light. Meggie is a devoted and invaluable ally: she types her father's notes, engages him in relevant debates and tries to keep him from distractions like his gold-digging "old friends." She is unable to prevent his descent into madness, however; in dangerous symbiosis, Meggie nearly follows her father into mental breakdown. Her lonely mother, meanwhile, finds love with another man, and Meggie grieves over this betrayal as she explores romantic beginnings of her own. Many dualities are depicted in this taut psychological drama: England's stoic lucidity and the dark ancestral superstition of British Guyana, the dual nature of light as both particle and wave, the pull of burgeoning adolescent drives disarming the objectivity required for scientific thought, and the fine line between genius and madness. Budhos skillfully sustains these narrative tensions without waxing melodramatic or maudlin, and reaches a satisfying crescendo in which Meggie must reimagine everything she knows and loves in order to remain herself. (Mar.) FYI: Budhos has received grants/awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Kenyon Review, the Writers Room, Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay Colony and Virginia Center for the Arts.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
