 |
|
trade paper $13.95
Harper Perennial
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Niranjana Iyer
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Bodies in Motion by Mary Anne Mohanraj
South Asian fiction tends to be so heavily dominated by Indian writers that I'm on a constant look-out for authors from other parts of the region. MARY ANNE MOHANRAJ caught my attention early on. The Sri Lanka-born and Chicago-based author gained initial renown for her erotic writing -- she is the editor of the anthology Aqua Erotica as well as of the online magazine Clean Sheets.
BODIES IN MOTION, however, features the erotic as plot device rather than central preoccupation. The novel spans a century in the lives of two Sri Lankan families, the Kandiahs and the Vallipurams, who are connected together in myriad ways, the least of which is by formal relationships. Illicit love affairs, pairings of convenience, and a shared history are but some of the bonds that link the characters.
The book is structured as a collection of interlinked stories, all unified by the theme of movement. The characters travel from Sri Lanka to England and to America, and sometimes back to Sri Lanka, and regardless of the direction of their journeys, find adjustment to a new land to be fraught with unforeseen complications. But movement is also implicit in every other facet of their lives. These men and women are pushed and pulled by ambition, by loyalty, and by sexual desire; they lead agitated lives, moving in and out of jobs, relationships, and even states of being. Mohanraj provides finely-calibrated accounts of the clash between convention and passion; that many of her pieces are rich in the details of Sri Lankan cuisine is a decided bonus.
Keeping track of the relationships amongst the numerous characters was sometimes difficult; I was forced to flip to the family trees (provided in the preface) several times over. Each story, however, stands distinct, and Mohanraj gives us glimpses of the same event through convincingly different perspectives -- a literary sleight-of-hand I've always enjoyed. The prose is also noteworthy. Liquid and lush, Mohanraj's writing is the kind which makes you realize, when you close the covers of the book, that the reading lamp should have been switched on an hour ago.
The first law of review-writing is to review the book one has, rather than the book one wishes the author had written, but BODIES IN MOTION tempts me to break this rule; I confess I wished Mohanraj had dug deeper, and gone further, in some stories. In "Challah", for instance, Mohanraj describes a marriage between a gay man and a straight woman by means of a magazine advertisement. The latter in its entirety reads:
Sri Lankan female, straight but not into serious relationships, looking for gay South Asian male for sham marriage. Let's make our parents happy. You know you want to.
Fascinating stuff, but these three lines are all -- and I mean all -- the reader is given about this relationship. The woman does have a back story (provided in a previous chapter), but I longed for more; I wanted to see this couple meet over soy lattes at a free-wireless-internet cafe, to hear them work out the mechanics of their improbable union, to know how they rubbed along once they began living together, and if they successfully hoodwinked their parents. It's perhaps as much recommendation as criticism of Mohanraj's work to guess that the reader, after some stories, might well be left wondering what really happened, and how it all ended...
Niranjana Iyer
23/07/2006
|
Niranjana Iyer is a writer living in Ontario, Canada. She blogs at Brown Paper. |
| |
|
