What You Call Winter: Stories [Hardcover]

Nalini Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2007

With this collection of beautifully written, interconnected stories, Nalini Jones establishes herself as a strong, new voice in contemporary fiction. Home to her characters is a Catholic town in India—an India unfamiliar to most American readers—but the tales of their relationships, ambitions, and concerns are altogether universal, capturing the miscommunication, expectations, joys, and losses experienced by families everywhere.

A mother pours her religious fervor out in letters to her son whom she has sent away to seminary. Years after his father’s sudden death in a movie theater, an older man begins to see his long-dead parent riding a bicycle around town. A brash, eccentric aunt speaks her mind and leaves home without a trace, but not without haunting her godson. Returning home to tend to her mother’s cataract surgery, a daughter wonders how much she should reveal of her new life in the United States. American childhoods, Indian childhoods; love abroad, love at home—the worlds of these characters mirror and refract one another in a play of revelation and secret.

Gracefully and with deep emotional intelligence, Jones vividly evokes the ebb and flow of life across several generations and continents. What You Call Winter is a resonant, beguiling fiction debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her auspicious debut, Jones reveals the hopes and disappointments of young children, mothers and old men living in Santa Clara, a mostly Catholic suburb of Mumbai, India. It covers all the ground between six-year-old Jude Almeida, who in the story The Crow and the Monkeywitnesses his godmother's wild antics at the New Year party, and 77-year old Roddy D'Souza, who in the title story is haunted by visions of his dead father. The opening story, In the Garden, is a gem: at home alone on the verge of her 10th birthday, Marian Almeida discovers and tries on the dress that is intended to be her gift. Simply plotted, the story evokes the weight of expectations of a girl about to enter adolescence. Similar themes are fleshed out in This Is Your Home Also and the devastating We Think of You Every Day, both of which also explore childhood vulnerabilities. Adulthood, however, offers a wider perspective; in The Bold and the Beautiful and Home for a Short Time, characters reconcile themselves with their decisions—one leaves her mother behind for a new life in the United States, while another stays in India. Jones displays impressive scope and depth of sympathy in her first collection. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

In these interconnected stories, Jones transports readers to a Catholic town in India and presents an especially accomplished debut that brings to mind first collections by Chitra Divakaruni, Nell Freudenberger, and Julie Orringer. Encapsulated here are poignant, revelatory moments, setting off aftershocks that are seen in subsequent tales. In one, a young girl fakes poor eyesight in order to get glasses like an envied girl at school, straining her family's finances. In another, a retired university professor is haunted by an apparition that resembles his stern, long-dead father. But like any high-quality fiction, describing plot does nothing to convey the deft authority of the prose. Depicting mothers young and old, servants, dutiful daughters, bachelors, siblings, and unhappy schoolboys, Jones is concerned with families, both nuclear and extended, and moments that bring often painful but necessary clarity to life. Evenly paced, masterfully rendered, this collection dives to the very core of family life and brings India, with its papaya trees, cricket matches, rich flavors, and lush landscapes, to magnificent life. Cook, Emily

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042763
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042760
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,689,705 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable debut, September 3, 2007

By 

Sandra Scofield (Missoula, MT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What You Call Winter: Stories (Hardcover)

Nalina Jones' intertwined stories are, first of all, about something interesting: the lives of an extended family in an Indian town where Catholicism is the dominant religion. Secondly, she "connects" stories in beautifully natural, organic ways, rather than simply trying to make a collection collect. Thirdly, her stories trace the ways that small actions and traits of character affect family members, and shape children. Indeed, her treatment of children is superlative: she respects their seriousness even as they make childish mistakes, and they bear serious consequences. I smiled often as I read these stories, because the portraits are tender and quixotic, but I also often caught my breath when I recognized where a story was going.
Writers could learn a lot just by studying Jones' epert use of scenes. She is so skilled at manipulating point of view, psychic distance, and pace, you don't notice how often she is tweaking the "rules" of contemporary fiction (especially the idea that you can't switch POV, which she does beautifully). Above all, these are stories of character, of flawed, loving, intelligent people navigating changes in their society and even movements to the U.S. Readers who like Indian literature will love this book, but so will people who just plain love good stories about sympathetic characters caught up in their own "small" lives.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jones does a Jhumpa Lahiri for Bombay catholics, January 8, 2008

By 

Anand S. Pai "Anand Pai" (Durham, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What You Call Winter: Stories (Hardcover)

Like Lahiri did with displaced Bengali families, Jones does with Catholics in Santa Clara (read Santa Cruz) in bombay. Through many tiny but deep and loosely interconnected stories, Jones draws the lives of a people for many generations. How she has achieved the kind of insight into the tiniest of details i do not know, but i was struck by the nuances that only a person with keen observation would notice. A fascinating read for anyone, particularly Indians abroad.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read, October 1, 2007

By 

S. S. Luk (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What You Call Winter: Stories (Hardcover)

This is a book of very beautifully written stories that happened in an unfamiliar place. The stories are very personally, yet very restraint. I picked up the book without any expectation, but found myself completely absorbed in these short journeys.
I highly recommend the book. I look forward to Nalini's next stories.