Review by Susan Avery

On October 15 ^th the New York Times ran yet another story that came out of yet another independent bookstore’s imminent closing. “…when Coliseum Books announced two weeks ago that it would close by year's end, the news revived for many New Yorkers sharply etched memories of hours browsing at bookstores long gone.”  There was real pathos in this news for me.  I grew up in New York City, and a number of the stores mentioned as “stores that live only in the mind” were places where I passed many happy hours and still retain the imprinted memories of acquired books.

 ” The center of Greenwich Village's feverish literary culture in the 1950's and 60's” The Eighth Street Bookshop ''everything from the I Ching to comic books,'' was where during my teenage “beatnik” period I bought Camus, and de Beauvoir while trying to be oh so cool in my black turtleneck, corduroy wraparound skirt and Fred Braun shoes.  If you were there you remember that look…ugh. I blush even further  thinking of the  much thumbed but little understood, Existentialists from Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Kaufmann., bought at the Eighth Street and toted just about everywhere in my Greek tapestry shoulder bag…ugh redux.    “One of the last of the great bookshops on Booksellers' Row -- the stretch of secondhand stores on Fourth Avenue just south of Union Square -- Schulte's…” was where I had my first “date” in December 1962  with the man who was to become my husband, Dean Avery, who was working there at the time.  It was at Schultes “…a huge barn of a store,'' that I was successful in my quest for the University of Chicago edition of The Complete Bible offered at the  student budget busting price of $2.50. Home for the holiday I had been fruitlessly searching the New York bookstores to locate this particular book for a college lit course, the following semester.  I had met Dean at a Christmas party only the night before, and he had assured me that Schulte’s indeed had a copy, and he was right. The long defunct Schulte’s is of course now a part of our family mythology.   And finally, there was the splendid Fifth Avenue doyenne, Scribner's with it’s a grand staircase, 30-foot vaulted ceiling, and Beaux-Arts detail. ''It was a beautiful palace,’’ It was here on their dreamy balcony in April 1964 that I acquired the classy hardcover Oxford Standard Authors edition of The Complete Poetry of Wordsworth as a birthday present for my new husband.  It was also in Scribner’s outstanding children’s section downstairs, that later I began to gradually purchase beautiful books for my then little girls that would become the foundation of a large and treasured collection of illustrated books.  In those days it was beyond my romantic bookish musings that Dean and I  would found and run our own bookstore and that we would be immersed in that undertaking for thirty-four years.  Time ambles on and it is now just one year since we closed Ariel and I thank you dear readers for sharing so many of your memories of that bookstore, now also living “only in the mind”.  So, at last for those of you dedicated fiction readers who are still very much in my heart and thoughts I ‘m back after too long a gap with some recommendations to proffer.

It is with pleasure that I point you in the direction of the young and very gifted novelist, Kiran Desai, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize (see Susan Recommends IV).  The last time this coveted award, now in its 38^th year with its accompanying £50,000 was won by a woman was in 1998 when Margaret Atwood got it for Blind Assassin.  In that same year the young Desai published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.  It is wise and wry and I have continually recommended it.  If you love books that turn the world upside down in order to clarify it, you will love Hullabaloo.  The story of Sampath Chawla, begins with his ironically humorous birth during a time of drought and famine in Shahkot, India.  You may substitute any small town anywhere and be acquainted with members of the comical cast performing some of the delightful absurdities that govern a lot of human behavior. Sampath grows up and his impractical nature sadly leads to failure in school and beyond.  The   final straw comes when as a twenty year old dreamer he  loses a tedious Post Office job where he spent a good deal of his day reading other people’s mail to stave off boredom.  Searching for a quiet undisturbed place to continue his habitual daydreaming he climbs up into a guava tree where his pronouncements include an uncanny familiarity with personal facts about the villagers.  This extraordinary power raises him in their eyes to the status of a holy man. Sampath enjoying his meteoric rise refuses to descend.  His wacky, eccentric but loveable family seizes the opportunity to capitalize on his new found fame camping out in the orchard and turning the whole place into a shrine/amusement park. The semi-sweet satirical story expands from there with delicious energy until the very last page.  

On October 10^th this year, Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss was selected as the winner of the Man Booker Prize. Hermione Lee, chair of the 2006 Booker committee called it “A magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.” — This book deals with another character who wishes to escape from the world to find peace, however this time it is an Anglicized elderly judge, Jemubhai Popatlal, retired from the Indian Civil Service and living in seclusion, alone but for his cook and his dog, Mutt at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas.  Although the embittered old man is a curmudgeonly misanthrope he is forced to take in his orphaned sixteen year old grand daughter Sai Mistry.  The girl encompasses all that the judge either lacks or has lost, a fresh curiosity about herself in the world, an ingenuous nature, and a budding sexual awareness, in short an adolescent’s zest for life. Simultaneously, a parallel plot follows the cook’s son, Biju, a young man who has gone to the United States to make a better life for himself.  Instead he becomes mired in the dull and hopeless routines of a menial illegal, bouncing from one depressing restaurant job to another, and losing all sense of dignity. As  Biju’s situation is deteriorating to its depths so is the peace at the foot of the mountain on the other side of the world.  A Nepalese fundamentalist insurgency unhinges the Popatlal household and forces Sai to reconsider a growing fondness for her Nepali mathematics tutor, Gyan. In The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai confirms her precocious insight into characters, struggling with radically changing attitudes towards class and a rapidly changing culture in troubled post-Colonial India. Here again, exhibiting a confident ease with her subject she innovatively combines humor with pain to present a mature   and richly imagined novel. It is always exciting when a new literary talent is recognized and I am greatly looking forward to the third novel.

This brings me unshakably to the critical question currently gripping the nation-“shaken or stirred?”  My answer is yes both please, I ‘m always on the lookout for fiction that shakes up my preconceptions and that stirs my soul. I hope you are, as well.

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