From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Dawesar's keen, witty third novel opens on an author feeling defensive about the dirty bits of his oeuvre—not sorry they're dirty, but sorry they're not better received: "Even the French repeatedly poked fun at Prem's passage on drinking a lactating woman's milk." Prem Rustum, a Nobel Prize–winning Indian amalgam of Henry Roth (Prem slept with and wrote about his sister, Meher) and Salman Rushdie, is 75, and he's ready to try again at both love and the writing of it. When he searches for his own name on a dating Web site and finds 20-something Maya, whose ad reads "Write like Prem Rustum, think like Prem Rustum... be Prem Rustum," he seizes the chance and follows her from New York to Paris, where she has a writing fellowship. Both of them draw great pleasure and creative power from the long seduction that follows, and over the course of the book Dawesar (
Babyji) shows off her own superior dirty-bit skills in plenty of sex scenes and daydreams. She also firmly entwines readers in Prem and Maya's family lives and creative meditations. The breezy tempo of Dawesar's assured prose belies the gravitas of her subject, conveyed through believable dialogue between people who are serious about art, ideas, reading and writing.
(June 20) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Dawesar's third novel is a contemplative, sensual, and literary melange exploring the ways in which love and sex affect one's artistic muse. Booker and Nobel Prize winner Prem Rustum, 75, believes that he has written his last novel and, "in the absence of women, sex, and further mountains to scale," considers moving back to India. Prem visits an Internet chat room and meets Maya, a grad student obsessed with his novels. When they meet in person, Maya feels "like a very young flower receiving the first rays of the vernal sun." They travel to Paris, Maya on a fellowship to write her novel, and Prem, ostensibly, to visit a writer friend. There Prem flashes back to his most profound and problematic love, his incestuous relationship with his sister, which ended only with her marriage. As his feelings for Maya deepen, he longs for one more relationship of "pure feeling." Dawesar's artistic reflections occasionally lean toward the pedantic, but ultimately she delivers a provocative tale of love and the literature it inspires.
Deborah DonovanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
