My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”
----Dr. Seuss
Anjali Joseph, an award-winning Indian author, pens her new novel, The Living, that unfolds the story of two characters' daily lives, their past mistakes, their shortcomings and their daily mundane routine, set in two different continents of the world. The story is unique yet it could have been much more better with lots of character and plot development.
Synopsis:
There is a certain number of breaths each of us has to take, and no amount of care or carelessness can alter that.
This is the story of two lives. Claire is a young single mother working in one of England’s last surviving shoe factories, her adult life formed by a teenage relationship. Is she ready to move on from memory and the routine of her days? Arun, an older man in a western Indian town, makes hand-sewn chappals at home. A recovered alcoholic, now a grandfather, he negotiates the new found indignities of old age while returning in thought to the extramarital affair he had years earlier.
These lives are woven through with the ongoing discipline of work and the responsibility and tedium of family life. Lives laced with the joys of old friendship, the pleasure of sex, and the redemptive kindness of one’s own children. This is the story of the living.
Claire and Arun are the two protagonists of this story. Claire is a mid-aged single mother, working in the last standing shoe factory in England and is in a constant denial that her life could never be any better. But one day when she meets a man in a bar, she could not shake him off her mind quite easily and gradually felt pulled towards his charm. Unfortunately her happy ending didn't last long and her mundane lifestyle of taking care of a teenage boy whom she gave birth when she herself was a teenager, regrets everything in her life.
Arun, on the other hand, is a old grandfather who used to make hand-made chappals for a living in a village in a India, and is constantly reminiscing about his extra-marital affair with a young woman ages ago. He too is constantly in denial about the fact that his life could be better and that he should have done things differently and could have been a better husband and a father.
The author mainly focuses on the two lives and their daily lifestyle. While reading if you try to connect these two protagonists in any way, then I must remind you, do not waste your time in thinking about a possible connection between Claire and Arun, hence just try to enjoy the story and the details of these two lives. I think the readers always happen to expect too much from a character, thinking there might be something different from our lives that make them stand apart and that we can take a lesson or so from them. But when the characters follow our lifestyles then it becomes boring and the readers are not able to find that escapism that they were looking forward to through the character's lives.
Anyways, something similar happened with these books, after reading so many negative reviews on Goodreads as well as on other blogs, I believe the author must have done wrong by not portraying her characters with some sort of closure. And as a reader, I too expect that from the author's protagonists. Anyways, still I would like to hats off to the author for taking a different and kind of innovative approach to portray the lives of the characters so dully. Because normal and everyday human lives are dull unless you are not a celebrity or a politician or someone famous.
The writing style of the author is good, but not strong. There is no dynamics in the narrative style of even in the pacing or in the plot. The story does not even evoke any emotions as it is very plain and simple and fails to engage the readers with a sense of feelings for the story or for the characters.
The characters are good and they had lot of room to evolve in their skin, but the author just let them floe freely in their bland and regretful demeanor. Claire has done a great job in taking care of her son, but her pain is so deep that she is constantly on the horizon to explore her sexual adventures. Arun has delved deeper into the past mistakes when he had an extra-marital affair and now he is on the threshold to make things better. The supporting characters are also quite well drawn.
Overall, this is not so much of an engrossing read yet it is quite interesting enough with two different stories but with same manner of work life and how the stories are so realistic and simple.
Verdict: You can definitely turn away your head from this book.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Anjali Joseph's publicist, for giving me an opportunity to read and review this novel.
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Author Info:
Anjali Joseph was born in Bombay in 1978. She read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught English at the Sorbonne. More recently she has written for the Times of India in Bombay and been a Commissioning Editor for ELLE (India). She graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia with distinction in 2008. Saraswati Park is her first novel.
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