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Seasonal Adjustments

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It's a rare treat to find an English language book that offers Bangladesh cultural insights. In the novel Seasonal Adjustments, Adir Khan introduces us to Iqbal Chaudhary who has been out of the country for 18 years when a personal crises drives him to return to his boyhood home along with his young daughter. This book offers a rewarding story of Mr. Chaudhary's personal growth, and as a side benefit we get to experience Bangladesh culture filtered through the recesses of his memory as well as his new Australian perspective.

It's difficult to leave home, and even harder with the tight bonds of the well-off Chaudhary family. His internal struggles starts there, but add to that the baggage of leaving friends who suffered through the Independence war and its aftermath, and pile on top of that a troubled marriage. He has many things to sort out in his return home. Besides these internal struggles, there are many other difficult things that we experience through his eyes. He is, for example, often torn by his memories of the shaman yet is forced to deal with the same man who his family still relies upon.

As he travels through the area, we experience how poverty drives people to do things that shock him and us. Time and again we get to see him contrast his cultural understanding with his new western outlook. For example, he knows the cultural drivers for how women are treated, yet he can contrast it with how this behavior wouldn't be tolerated in Australia. Seasonal Adjustments presents a fulfilling story of personal anguish and growth and complements it with a sharp eye towards Bangladesh vs western culture.