Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... The Folded Earthby Anuradha Roy
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Nice story, nice writing. I loved reading about rural small-town India. ( ) Set in the northern hill country, this is the story of a young widow who flies from the city to teach in this remote location, hoping to escape her unresolved grief concerning the death of her young husband in a trekking accident. But she finds that we cannot escape the past by moving. Beautifully written, this book drew me in. As many reviewers have noted, the basic story is very sad, but, as with all stories of grief, there is hope for healing and for new young lovers to have a better life. This was such a pleasant surprise - Roy is a wonderful writer and I am ready to move to Ranikhet, a fictionalized version of where the author lives - it reminded me of Narayan's Malgudi. a kind of down-to-earth scale and while there is politics and danger and modern technology, there is also a kind of good-tempered contentment and humanity. There is a plot here but I found it less interesting than the creation of place and character. Also, one of my favorite Bollywood songs - Dum Maro Dum - is a plot point. This book took you on a journey that was rich with nuances of complexity and emotional intelligence. The setting and characters are so vivid and well developed, all the elements of a great story are here! I enjoyed the way the author weaved so many characters together and told the story in a deeply intelligent and sophisticated way. Bravo!
It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them — that forms the spine of the novel...Roy is particularly adept at mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolize India’s uneasy passage from tradition to modernity. The novel’s one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn’t bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set in motion. it is an index of Anuradha Roy's undoubted talent that The Folded Earth manages to rise from nostalgia to nuance. Roy manages to make a fresh and appetising dish from the usual ingredients....Roy's talent lies in her ability to infuse hard bits of social and political reality into a narrative that would otherwise have assumed the soft tinctures of light reading. It also lies in her ability to create memorable characters...This is a worthy successor to Anuradha Roy's first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing.
In a remote town in the Himalaya, Maya tries to put behind her a time of great sorrow. By day she teaches in a school and at night she types up drafts of a magnum opus by her landlord, a relic of princely India known to all as Diwan Sahib. Her bond with this eccentric, and her friendship with a peasant girl, Charu, give her the sense that she might be able to forge a new existence away from the devastation of her past. As Maya finds out, no place is remote enough or small enough. The world she has come to love, where people are connected with nature, is endangered by the town's new administration. The impending elections are hijacked by powerful outsiders who divide people and threaten the future of her school. Charu begins to behave strangely, and soon Maya understands that a new boy in the neighbourhood may be responsible. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |