Customer Reviews

The Toss of a Lemon

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3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A Toss of a Lemon is an epic spanning 70 years of Indian life, in the Brahmin tradition. While it's fictional, it's unlike typical fiction in which the story builds towards an ultimate conclusion or climax. This story is simply a narrative, a chronicle that seems so lifelike that I would have believed it to be nonfiction.

The language is largely informational, in contrast to dramatic or theatrical storytelling, and it carries the reader along much like a boat on a river. The narrator tells the story of the family matron, Sivakami, beginning at the age of 10, continuing through her marriage, the birth of her children, the death of her husband, her widowhood, her family and extended family, and her religious traditions and Brahmin ways. The author describes in matter-of-fact detail a family and social system ruled by religious observance and superstition that contrasts sharply to modern ways and progressive ideas as the story marches through the decades.

Although I thought, at first, that this would be a dry narrative, I quickly identified with Sivakami as a woman bearing up under the strains of life, fiercely endeavoring to retain her dignity and hold her family together. Her Brahmin practices, complete with caste prejudices, dietary laws and purification ceremonies, make her who she is and are her only real support after the early death of her husband when she is only 18 yrs. old.

The author does not interpret events for the reader, but simply reports the incidents as they occur, from the points of view of the various characters. An ingenious web of familial relationships is woven in which personalities and politics are all made plain without fanfare or needless drama.

I feel that I know more about Indian culture and the politics of the caste system from reading this book of fiction than from any textbook I have ever studied on India and its people. The text is sprinkled with Indian words and phrases, briefly defined and then used repetitively throughout the story. Brahmin worship, beliefs and lifestyle practices are also used throughout and described only briefly or mentioned in passing, although they play a part in so many situations that the reader not only becomes familiar with them, but comes to expect them, even when not mentioned in the text. It is a near total immersion in Brahmin culture. I actually had a craving for lentils and curry.

There is a portion of the book that deals with specific political struggles against the caste system and involving British/Indian relations. My Indian history isn't sharp, so I was lost in a couple of places, but the narrative carries the story along and I found that as I kept reading, a lot of my confusion was cleared up. I know a lot more about India's struggle for independence and the caste system than I ever knew before, as well.

As an American, the caste system sets my teeth on edge, but in this story, it was the basis for the Brahmin's sense of belonging, security and order. Those who opposed the caste system and those who clung to it were portrayed in nearly the same light, neither side being right or wrong, simply opposite sides of an internal struggle.

I loved this book. The characters were vivid and alive, the setting painted in readable detail. The culture came absolutely alive to me as the characters walked in and through it. I highly recommend this book.

I am not sure I can adequately describe just how much I enjoyed this book. The story follows a family of Tamil Brahmins in India from 1896 through the early 1960s, beginning with the marriage at age 10 of Sivakami. We see her through her 10 years of marriage, and then through almost 60 years of orthodox Brahmin widowhood. She rears her own children, and then the children of her daughter, and then many grandchildren. What a remarkable woman! I loved this character. I loved how finely drawn, actually, each and every character was. The novel is so well done that I found myself rejoicing with each child's birth, and weeping with each character's death. I was totally caught up in the sweep of this multigenerational story, and also in the story of the changes that India went through during this time.

In addition to telling a wonderful story, the author also has the great skill to keep this story going without faltering through 616 pages! This is a fantastic book that has passed onto my list of alltime favorites. I can hardly wait till it is formally released so I can get copies to give as gifts for my friends.

How much did I like it? I sat down to read it and finished it in one day's obsessive reading. I couldn't put it down. I recommend this book without reservation.

I was surprised by the Toss of a Lemon in a number of ways. The first was sheer size. In a world of publishing quotas, you don't often see long books anymore - and for a first novel from an author, this is huge. Well over 600 pages. This can be an intimidating read, but I actually adored it. I miss books having heft in my hands. It's a quiet internal joy to know that I won't skim through it in a night or two, but have a nice month-long affair with it.

This surely is not a skimming sort of book. The detail of the family it highlights, that of Sivakami, is complex and dripping in intricate stories. It's a culture that most people reading it probably aren't familiar with in general - that of post-colonial India, just as the new industrial age began to spread there after British influence. The book is heady with mythology and culture of all sorts, and this can indeed be overwhelming. If you stick with it, you shall be rewarded by more than you can imagine. It may seem daunting to most not accustomed to reading literary books, nevermind cultural references that take time to adapt to and understand.

I will not go into great detail about the story, except to sum it up simply: the novel is about a family. It starts with the progenitors who are a part of the social system in India, the Brahmin caste, specifically, which is one populated by the educated and scholarly. All marriages are arranged, and moreover, matches are investigated by astrology as much as anything else. Sivakami marries an astrologer of note reputed to also be a healer, one Hanumarathnam, who has determined their future fate to be auspicious. This changes during the birth of his son. This is where the title of the book comes from - the midwife is told to throw a lemon from the window (due to purity and caste laws, the husband is not with the wife during birth, or may see her immediately after). With that simple throw, Hanumarathnam's life is forever changed. Time serves as a marker in astrology, and thus he does a reading of his son's charts, learning of a dire portent for his future. Ironically his son does not place much stock in superstition himself - or so he claims. He, too, is human...is Varium. Though diamond-hard like his name, he indulges when it suits him as well.

Some of the cultural aspects are startling. Sivakami's ascent into widowhood for one, and the fact that widows are considered pure, but at the same time carry a strange and bizarre stigma attached to this. The caste system is alien to most people reading this surely, and sometimes the result of it horrifying (one example in the book of when a higher-caste woman had relations with a younger male from a lower caste which ended in a very sad, and rather horrible by western standards). You see the cultural divides defended, even by people who are taken advantage of and suffer by them. Despite having been raised american and very remote from this, I came to sympathize with Sivakami. Though some of the ideas were off-putting to be sure, such as people who were untouchable and impure to the point where if I was a Brahmin they could not even touch my food, I found myself entrenched in the story. It is written so well, you find yourself carried there, whether or not you mean to be, and sympathize with characters and plights that normally you would not.

I'm trying rather hard not to reveal too many plot points, as while the book is endlessly complex, it relies on many for the "whole picture". At the end though it is a story ultimately about family, and how families are made - whether by blood or by association. Muchami was by far my favorite character, I think. In many ways I regret he was not Brahmin - for all the devotion he showed to Sivakami, he was her truest son.

When I started reading this book, all 619 pages of it filled with names I had to clumsily sound out loud to myself before I could visualize the places and persons, I thought "This is going to be too big for me." I am coming to realize that a few decades of getting my information, like so many Americans do--in fast bursts, swiftly flowing plot lines, simple sentences and words, and facile caricatures--has served to atrophy my brain. (Me, who as a ten-year-old, greedily devoured the likes of "A Tale of Two Cities.") A hundred pages into it, I thought, "Oh, no, it will not do to put this book down until I have given it my all. It will not get the best of me!"

The life described in "The Toss of a Lemon" comes across as deliciously alien, the names and relationships unfamiliar, and even the cadences and tense of it all somewhat strange. I can't quite put my finger on why, but the narrative (cast mostly in almost too-present layers of present tense) completely alters one's sense of being and time. For example, consider this observation of the way the widow Sivakami's son's new wife, Vani, fits into and subtly changes the sense of the household:

"Pervasive as Thangam's dust, Vani's music is everywhere there is air, in the house and spilling out onto the street: between two people in a converstion, in all the cooking pots, travelling in through nostrils and out in snores. Sivakami has become accustomed to it, and now, when Vani is not playing, there is silence in all those places where before there was nothing." (p. 242)

This is not your straightforward, mind-numbing television-scripted fare, certainly; but the writing does have a rather hypnotic (or perhaps meditative would be the better word) effect. I have found myself quietly but inexorably drawn into Sivakami's world, an experience that alters my senses as much as it massages my mind, almost as if by vibration. When I surface from the reading of it (one cannot read this book in one sitting), I am at first not sure if it's day or night. It's almost like emerging from a movie theatre after being engrossed in a fantastic movie for hours.

"The Toss of a Lemon," I must conclude, is a haunting, masterful work by a writer of substantial skill and talent. Very good.

The Toss of a Lemon will leave little middle ground with readers. Fans of the book will get swept up in the book's epic, yet intimate, scope and be transported to another world by the book's intricate descriptions. The book's detractors will only experience tedium after being exposed to over 600 pages of names and ritual titles.

Which side of the argument do I agree with? While impressed at the effort that it took to write the book, I find myself on the "tedium" side. The main reason why I feel this way is because the story, despite clearly being a very personal tale for the author, has a surprising lack of emotion. The entire story seems stultified by the very social structures that it portrays. Consequently, it is difficult to generate an emotional connection to the characters when those characters spent most of the book repressing their emotions for the sake of their social class.

Family stories set in other cultures can work (see The House of the Spirits). But, those works contain an emotional center to which readers from other cultures can relate. Such a center isn't present in The Toss of a Lemon. Thus, while the book is an impressive achievement, the story itself is not worth the effort needed to read the book.

A married Hindu friend once told me, "I don't mind when my in-laws make demands upon me. I will do whatever they wish, but I do not like when they make demands upon my parents." Another confided that her beloved grandmother (father's mother) beat her mother when she was pregnant.

I found such statements somewhat perplexing, but did not investigate. Having just finished "The Toss of a Lemon", I now understand that these were just the tip of the iceberg with regard to the political intricacies of modern living within the even remotely "caste dictated" Indian family.

Padma Viswanathan's book is a fascinating and (for me) sobering glimpse into a culture about which I had no deep comprehension. I gained insight and an exponentially increased respect for Hindu friends who continue to face similar challenges.

Throughout the book, I kept wishing that Sivakami would be more open. I wanted to watch her grow. I felt that, just as I was getting to know her, part of her disappeared. Her deepest essence was veiled - which is not to diminish her great influence upon her family for generations.

As I pondered these things, I realized that these were things the author wanted me to think and question. She gave me a tangible grasp of how, within the caste system, a woman's entire being can be obscured by "the toss of a lemon".

This is not an easy reading novel. It is a novel that challenged my Western sensibilities and helped me see Eastern sensibilities from a very different perspective.

When i got the book, i resisted reading it at first. I thought, "Is this a woman's book?", since it tells the epic story of Sivakami's life. No, its not a "woman's book", just women IN a book. This is far less a romance novel than Hesse's Sidhartha. TOSS OF A LEMON is however, a quietly philosophical work, with the majestic themes that one rolls out in every attempt to view the why of humanity.
This tossing of a lemon is a signal given at the moment of the birth, of Sivakami's two children, so her astrologer husband can cast very accurate birth charts. Since the husband must not be in the same house, as a woman giving birth, the lemon was tossed outside, to maintain the ritual purity of the Brahmin caste. When Sivakami became engaged to the local astrologer-herbalist at the age of 7, her father making the arrangement with the astrologer was told, that his future son in law had a "bad quadrant" in his birth chart, tho perhaps the birth of a son, would wipe this out. If this didnt happen, he might die "an early death". Anyway, the second child arrives, a son, and sure enough, the lemon tossed outside when the new baby greeted the world, fortold that the Sivakami's husband only had 3 years to live. So right from the outset, we are met with the themes, that seem to be threaded thru this tale. One of the big questions, is Fate verses Self-determination. The Braham caste have many many odd ceremonies, in place for millenia, that seem to keep change from happening. When something unusual or tragic DOES happen, its all got to do with witchcraft, astrology and angry gods. And tho a self respecting Brahman might not say he believes in superstition, in fact, the book starts with very superstituous people on the verge of the 20th century's scientific insights, but not quite there. In many ways, Sivakami is a woman trapped between these two worlds, one world of the ancient Indian customs shaping her thru fate and submission to ones role in society, verses the idea that one MUST make it in the world thru their own self willed stance against outdated, and socially harmful customs. In one small way, Sivakami stands in defiance of custom, so that when her husband dies, she doesnt leave his home. Altho she in every way, wants to be the perfect little housewife, mother of two, and devoted lover to her husband (all this by the time she was 18 years old), it is a great burden, when the "stars" take away your happiness at an early age. Like so many people that have fate rob them of some simple happiness, those singular, small happinesses of life we so often take for granted, Sivakami keeps moving thru this world with the dignity of her social caste, affected by her situation, but not being brought down by it. This is why she is a heroine, of course. She can manage distant in-laws who try to rob her of her inheritance from her late husband with ease. She can see to raising a family as a single mother. (She was not allowed to remarry, Braham custom.) I would like to say more, but it would sacrifice the reading enjoyment.
Altho this is a long book, over 600 pages, its a fast read, without becoming "pulpy". And, like some books from cultures that have very different languages than ours, some of the names, can become a little difficult. But its not even a small hurdle. I would recommend this book, to anyone who loves to learn a bit from even their "light" reading, or who love to travel to exotic, distance lands, even if its all in their imagination. Because above all, this is a book based on truth, even tho it has a fable like quality to it. For me, I could relate to the fetters of life, that keep you locked someplace you would rather not be, and yet, sometimes find yourself. So hopefully you will find it in your karma, as I did, to read this book. Just remember, brew up a little bit of honeyed tea, heap mango chutney on rice crackers, play some Ravi Shankar on the stereo, burn the Nag Champa incense, and enjoy the travel to old India. (No sacred cows or monkeys were harmed in the making of this review.) OM SHANTI

The hot South of India, Tamil Nadu, with the muddy Kaveri river, red, dusty roads, men still wearing dhoti on everyday basis and thali served on banana leaves, is my favorite region of India. It is also strikingly underrepresented in literature, comparing to the other areas of this vast country. Luckily, Padma Viswanathan fills this gap with "The Toss of a Lemon".

The debut novel of the Arizona-based author is a family saga, starting at the turn of a century, in 1896, with the marriage of ten-year old Sivakami to Hanumarathnam, the wise healer. The marriage seems to be auspicious and in accordance with all the complicated rules followed by the Brahmin caste. The only cloud is Hanumarathnam's horoscope, predicting his early death. The marriage is happy, and two children, the Golden Girl Thangam and the Diamond Boy Vairum, are born in quick succession. Unfortunately, Vairum's birth reinforces the death premonition and Hanumarathnam dies when Sivakami is only 18. She becomes a young widow, who has to observe very strict code of Brahmin tradition and her life is changed forever.

The novel follows the life of Sivakami, her children and grandchildren, as well as her faithful servant Muchami, through the decades. Their family affairs, weddings, deaths, births of children, financial difficulties, religious and caste-related problems intertwine with the political turmoil in India at the verge of independence. The masterful rendering of the situation in the country as well as everyday life are a great strengths of Viswanathan's novel. The complex characters come to life on the pages of the book and seem very real - the whole plethora of different attitudes and personalities opens in front of a reader like a beautiful, colorful silk sari. My favorites are Vairum, an intelligent, educated modern skeptic, marked by vitiligo, self-conscious but decisive, Muchami, an ambitious servant, trying to find his place in the society where gay rights do not exist, and Janaki, the lively, imaginative girl. Sivakami, the central character in the novel, is herself very remarkable, loving her difficult life and feeling fulfilled despite numerous difficulties associated with widowhood. Sivakami is an observant Brahmin woman, but she is independent and firm in her path, and she is successful. I feel deep respect for her character. She represents tradition and is presented as an opposite of Vairum, who represents progress, yet both of them are right in their choices and complement each other.

I savored the detailed descriptions of Hindu festivals and religious traditions, and the attitudes of different protagonists to the traditional life (the siddhas, apperaring from time to time, are very intriguing). I was also very interested in the political discussions initiated by the Minister's circle, the Dravidian separatist movement (alive to this day, as long as I know) and in the social with cast details. I liked the Tamil words appearing (with explanations, of course) every now and then, the magical realism introducing the fairy-tale aura (Thangam's golden dust as the great example, immediately bringing to mind Garcia-Marquez, Llosa and other South American writers) and the fantastically rich language. There are also echoes of Salman Rushdie - the comparisons with "Midnight's Children" seem inevitable, although, all in all, "The Toss of a Lemon" is a very different book - very feminine in some respects as much as Rushdie's novels are masculine... But definitely Padma Viswanathan has read the masters and with the base in the great literature created a voice of her own.


This monumental family saga is a delicious morsel (or rather a whole feast, considering the volume) not only for the those who love India, but for all the readers who like to read fiction - it is a very satisfactory debut which undoubtedly will be a success and we will hear more of Padma Viswanathan.

When I began this book I expected it to be a catalog of the miseries of child marriage and the treatment of widows in India. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was much more than that.
Sivakami is a Child Bride and she is a teenage widow. Left with the upbringing of two children, and now living in her parents' home ,she contracts a disastrous child marriage for her daughter. But when it comes to the education of her son she balks at holding back his obviously brilliant mind just to keep him close to her. She returns to her village, sends him to university and sets in motion a disintegration of all the rules of caste and family that she has believed in for so long.
The book chronicles a period in Indian history where the centuries old Caste system was being questioned. Segregation by caste had been an unwritten law for ages and, while the British rule had tried to change some things, it had little influence on the social heirarchies within Indian lives. The Brahmin caste (to which Sivakami and her family belong) were considered superior to the other castes and their rules of purity excluded interaction with any other caste.
What I found surprising in this book was Sivakami's complete conviction of the social necessity of the rules that make a widow sequester herself from society and even from human touch. She does not question not being able to touch her children from sunup to sundown or being unable to show herself out of doors.It makes sense, of course, that such a system could only exist with the buy in of those persecuted by it.
With the aid of a lowercaste servant (who also believes whole heartedly in the caste system) she manages her husband's lands and her life with efficiency. She relies on the help of her Brahmin neighbors and this servant for most of her contact with the outside world. She copes with her daughter's unhappy marriage with the fatalistic belief that one's destiny is written in the stars at the moment of ones birth (Hence the title - a lemon tossed through the birthroom window was an indicator of the exact moment of her children's births so that their father could make their astrological charts of their destinies)
So our heroine is fatalistic, superstitous and accepting of the miseries heaped on her head. But Sivakami shows the reader how the caste system had survived for so long without internal rebellion. In understanding her acceptance of her widowhood, and in the acceptance of his social status by the servant Muchami, we see how the members of the caste system may have supported the system by their complete belief in the rightness of their roles - both superior and inferior.
When the new generation (embodied by Sivakami's son Vairum) begins to question the old beliefs in caste and astrology Sivakami is horrified. A distaste for a system that secluded his own mother from him soon changes in Vairum to become a distaste for his own mother, who while persecuted by the system, refuses to abandon its rules.
This is a marvellous book and one I will probably return to and recommend to others. Many books have been written on the evils of the caste system but few criticise so subtly, or show how such a system existed with even the support of those who it persecuted. Many books have been written condemning the caste system and cataloging the miseries of those who are supressed by it. I have read of the miseries of widows, considered unclean, bad omens and such but never of a widow who saw her role as one of supporting the system that opressed her.
Sivakami and her family comes alive to the reader in this book and I was sorry to have it end.
For other works on the Indian Caste system I recommend Mulk Raj Anand's "The Untouchable" and Arundhati Roy's book "The God of Small Things."

Viewed from the cloistered world of a traditional Brahmin widow in a rural Indian village, the tumultuous changes of the 20th century seem bewildering, alarming and even offensive.

Based on the life of Canadian playwright and short story author Viswanathan's Brahmin grandmother, this intimate, yet sweeping debut novel opens with Sivakami's traditional arranged marriage to a healer and astrologer at age 10 in 1896. The tone is light, bright and wryly droll.

Hanumarathnam warns Sivakami's family that there is a faint disposition to early death in his horoscope. " `But, as that prediction is contained in the weakest quadrant, it holds no weight, as you know, though ignorant people let it scare them.'

The men do not know but are not ignorant enough to say so..."

At age 13 Sivakami comes of age and moves in with her young husband, a man in his early 20s. "Sivakami's terrors and sorrows in the early months of her marriage are much the same as any new bride's. It hardly seems worth troubling the imagination to find pity for her, so common are her woes."

The tone changes as life grows more serious - a child, a daughter named Thangam for her golden color, is her father's delight, but a son, Vairum, brings dark tidings.

The title of the novel comes from Hanumarathnam's habit of asking the midwife to toss a lemon from the window at the first appearance of the baby's head. From this he draws the child's horoscope. And despairs. "The discus of the little boy's stars will cut Hanumarathnam's lifeline within three years."

Although Hanumarathnam shuns his intelligent, needy son, he does not leave his family unprepared for his death. Studying the village youth, he chooses the one boy, Muchami, who is uninterested in girls. As an added bonus Muchami is sharp and loyal and will grow more so over the years. Hanumarathnam also teaches his wife the intricate workings of his estate and its tenants, so that, although she cannot walk the fields, she can follow Muchami's reports in her mind's eye.

By age 18 Sivakami is a widow. Obeying the dictates of caste she shaves her head, wears only coarse white saris and avoids the pollution of human touch in all the daylight hours, including the touch of her children. Dutifully traditional, she closes her husband's home and moves in with her parents and brothers, where she will stay until her brothers try to limit Vairum's future by sending him to a traditional Brahmin school. Then she will commit her only act of rebellion, moving her family back to the village where her son was so unhappy, so she can take provide a future with more choices.

Within the strictures of caste, the servant Muchami and the widow Sivakami become friends and dependents. Muchami's natural diplomacy and perceptiveness provides her with a view of the outside world. But over time, Muchami's advice sometimes misses the mark and Sivakami's adherence to tradition gives rise to misunderstandings. The world's pace is accelerating.

Meanwhile, Thangam, a placid girl with an aura that enthralls all who meet her, but whose only fierceness is her love for her little brother, reaches an age to be married. Unfortunately her horoscope predicts an early death for her husband. A man can only counter this with a stronger horoscope predicting the death of his wife. Such a man, a useless ne'er do well from a declining, debt-ridden family, is found, accepted, and produces a shower of gold dust from his young bride.

Though others treasure Thangam's trails of gold dust as holy ash, Sivakami sees it as the golden heart of her slowly leaking away. With each of her ten children, Thangam becomes a bit less of herself. She sheds gold with her husband's every swindle, abandonment and new posting. Trying to help her, Sivakami takes on her older children, incorporating more into her household every year.

The growing household only increases Vairum's alienation. Denied his father's love and his mother's touch, he repudiated his wife's horoscope and married her despite the prediction of childlessness. Now, bereft of children, his bitterness leads him to further acts of rebellion as the country plunges into political turmoil.

But only faintly, shockingly, do the arguments against caste and for independence reach the quiet compound in Cholapatti where Sivakami passes along strict traditions of Brahmin observance to her grandchildren.

With unobtrusive tendrils of magic realism, which seem to fit right in among the horoscopes, religious pujas and reverent traditions, Viswanathan weaves a rich tapestry of daily Indian life as the modern world intrudes on centuries of established society. While the epic feel leaves a little distance between the characters and the reader, Viswanathan's skill bridges the gap with sympathy, mystery and glimpses of their structured and questing inner lives.

A moving, poetic novel of culture, family, tradition and history.