Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose! The more things change the more they remain the same. It doesn't matter where you live, how much you earn, what you do. The vacuousness and lack of purpose that can pervade our lives, will do so, irrespective. Neither in excess, nor in deprivation or denial, is there happiness or peace of mind.

The first half of the book deals with life in a small, slow town in India, with rigid parents and well-drafted routines while the other half deals with "rule-less' life in suburban US.

The more detailed, "Indian half" deals with an orthodox family in a small provincial town. A partly successful, proud father, who goes through life, with set patterns and no passion. A mother who goes along with her husband, doing what is supposedly right and expected of her, curbing and killing all her innate desires. Three children. The eldest, Uma, clumsy and "Forrest Gumpish". The middle daughter Aruna, pretty, ambitious and smart, but eventually also a victim of her choices. The last, a son, Arun, on whom the parents put all their dreams and energies. All of them along with members of their extended family go through some form of deprivation - of will, of fun, of passion and of love.

The second half deals with Arun, who finds his way to the US, on a scholarship, having being forced by his father to "mug" his way through school and college. There, he finds solitude to be his best friend. Quirkily, even this desire to be alone, does not get fulfilled to the extent he wants. Unlike life in India, in the US he finds a world of excesses - of food, of body and of non-interference, both parental and otherwise. Through his eyes we see the Patton family - a "barbecuing", disappointed father, a nervous, uncertain, wannabe vegetarian mother, a body-obsessed, jock son and a bulimic, neurotic daughter. All of them go through some form of corruption - of will, of fun, of passion and of love.

Uma is the main character in the first half. She is a clumsy, uncoordinated woman who finds it difficult to succeed in almost everything she does - she fails in school, can't cook, spills food and drink and can't find anyone worthwhile to get married to. Two attempts at getting her married end in disaster - in the first, a family cons her father into giving dowry and then breaks off the engagement, keeping the money. In the second, she actually gets married, but to an already married man - when her father realises this later, he brings her back and gets her divorced. When she has an offer to work in a local hospital (when she is already in her 40s), her parents refuse to let her even consider the offer. Aruna, Uma's younger sister is a pretty and ambitious woman, who eventually gets married to a "prize-catch" and migrates to Bombay, apparently moving up in life. But she too is unhappy, with the need to constantly keep up with appearances and the "Joneses", at the same time, neurotically obsessed with the need to keep her husband and children under her control at all times.

In Anita Desai's world, there is only one winner. The bubbly, next door neighbour who throughout the rule of her evil mother-in-law maintains her sense of humour and eventually when the mom-in-law dies, takes over the house benevolently and raises her children, properly and reasonably happily. Every other character in the book is in trouble.

The problem with the book is its dry, clinical approach in chronicling the lives of its characters. The book is obviously well written with hardly a word or phrase out of sync. Yet the book lacks passion. I was always on the outside, a mildly interested voyeur, looking into the lives of uninteresting people. The book offers no chance of getting involved with the characters - unlike "An Equal Music", it is not a page-turner - you can read the book over ten days without even remotely feeling the compulsion to finish it quickly. But, as happens with such books, it will eventually get a whole bunch of awards and will probably become prescribed reading in university literature courses. And I suppose, it is presumptuous of me to even try and review such books....


What Amazon.com says:

Anita Desai has long proved herself one of the most accomplished and admired chroniclers of middle-class India. Her 1999 novel, Fasting, Feasting, is the tale of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and son of strict and conventional parents. So united are her parents in Uma's mind that she conflates their names. "MamaPapa themselves rarely spoke of a time when they were not one. The few anecdotes they related separately acquired great significance because of their rarity, their singularity." Throughout, Desai perfectly matches form and content: details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and needs given no place. Uma, as daughter and female, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation. Now in her 40s, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, and she is at MamaPapa's beck and call, with only her collection of bracelets and old Christmas cards for consolation.

"Uma flounces off, her grey hair frazzled, her myopic eyes glaring behind her spectacles, muttering under her breath. The parents, momentarily agitated upon their swing by the sudden invasion of ideas--sweets, parcel, letter, sweets--settle back to their slow, rhythmic swinging. They look out upon the shimmering heat of the afternoon as if the tray with tea, with sweets, with fritters, will materialise and come swimming out of it--to their rescue. With increasing impatience, they swing and swing."

Arun, in college in Massachusetts, is none too happily spending the summer with the Pattons in the suburbs: their refrigerator and freezer is packed with meat that no one eats, and Mrs. Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what he most wants is to be ignored, invisible. "Her words make Arun wince. Will she never learn to leave well alone? She does not seem to have his mother's well-developed instincts for survival through evasion. After a bit of pushing about slices of tomatoes and leaves of lettuce--in his time in America he has developed a hearty abhorrence for the raw foods everyone here thinks the natural diet of a vegetarian--he dares to glance at Mr. Patton."

Desai's counterpointing of India and America is a little forced, but her focus on the daily round, whether in the Ganges or in New England, finely delineates the unspoken dramas in both cultures. And her characters, capable of their own small rebellions, give Fasting, Feasting its sharp bite. - Ruth Petrie © Amazon.com

The sequel of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Angela's Ashes, 'Tis is the story of Frank McCourt after he came back to America in 1949. He had dreamed since childhood of returning to New York City. When one of his employers in Limerick, Ireland died, he took some of her money from her dead body and bought passage on a ship. On the voyage to New York, he meets a Catholic priest who urges him to speak to some rich Protestants from Kentucky who are also on board so that they will give him a job. However, young Frank is too shy and passes up the chance to work on their horse farm. However, he is introduced to classic literature as Crime and Punishment by Dostoievsky.

Once Frank lands in America, he gets a job and an apartment with the help of the priest. However, the job is humiliating to Frank (he is houseman at the Biltmore Hotel) because he has to blend in and be invisible to the fancy people and high society college students who socialise in the lobby. He finds this hard with his red, mattery eyes and bad teeth. He longs for the American Dream and wants to be one of those beautiful people attending college and flirting with beautiful girls.

The draft for the Korean War takes Frank out of the Biltmore and into the Army. There, he is talked to like dirt at boot camp and then shipped to Germany to train dogs. However, due to a clerk going on vacation, Frank is pulled from dog duty and thrown into typing class. Through drilling from a superior, Frank develops excellent typing skills and is made supply clerk. In the course of his duties, he visits Dachau Concentration Camp and is saddened by the fate of millions of Jews in Hitler's Germany. Through the GI Bill, Frank attends college as he had always dreamed of doing. He becomes a teacher and has a gruelling career teaching at many different schools. Although teaching is fraught with difficulties, Frank enjoys it and learns how to hold the kids' attention.

This book is an excellent "what happened next" sequel to Angela's Ashes. It traces the progress of the four brothers McCourt from Ireland to their present American homes. The stories of the parents, Angela and Malachy, are also told. However, their stories come to a conclusion while the stories of the brothers and their families continue to the eighties.

Many of the difficulties of teaching such as boredom, troubled behaviour, disobedience, and lack of control by the teacher have been occurring since McCourt started teaching in the 1950's. In the American press today one hears of these problems as something that is recent and this memoir of a teacher shows this to be false. Teachers are often made out to be the scapegoats but the problems seem to more complex than that. Administrators pass down decrees from on high and do not really understand the needs of the students because they did not teach very long themselves. When the students do not perform to standards, the administrators can blame the teachers. There were two schools of thought then as now: authoritarian and permissive. The authoritarians said that the kids should be made to do the lessons or fail, period. The permissive crowd held that their students were individuals and should be convinced that the subject matter was interesting so that they could actually learn it.

Although McCourt grew up poor and wanted the American Dream, he became bored with the middle class set and longed to hang out with more down to earth people. He felt that he could not really relate to stockbrokers and obstetricians and the parties were boring compared to real Irish parties. These people looked down on him, too, because he was "only a teacher" and did not make a lot of money like they did.

McCourt paints a multicultural stew-pot of New York City, where the different ethnic groups tend to "stick to their own kind". Upon arriving, Frank was urged to only date Irish girls and to only trust Irish people. However, he formed many meaningful friendships with many different people and wanted to lose his accent because it placed him in an Irish niche. On the labour jobs, he was picked on for associating with other races but the bonds made it well worth while. These friends were the people who encouraged him to go on with his dream of an education at times when he felt downcast by the low wages and thankless attitudes of the students, administrators, and parents.

Although not as rich in imagery as Angela's Ashes, this book has many parallels to today's situation in education and race relations and is interesting to read. Frank McCourt's style of storytelling keeps the reader enthralled by his version of the American Dream.