Halfway, reading the book, you may feel a li'l bored ( not if you're a literature student) because of the author's eye and attention to details; however, once you've completed say about 200 pages, the story grasps your interest, and with the mastery of her writing, she inspires you to read till the end.The ending leaves you spellbound, waiting to read further, but there are no more pages.
I am but compelled to declare my agreement to the reviews and comments of Salman Rushdie, and other authors...
Gary Shteyngart -- "If god is in the details, Ms. Desai has witten a holy book"
...boy, the spontaneity in her writing, meticulous work, sharp tongue!
Attached are a few quotes you may want to read:
- Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss?
- …love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment.
- Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.
- In her attempt to cancel out one humiliation she had only succeeding in adding another.
- Undignified love, Indian love, stinking, unaesthetic love
- Study—the only skill he could carry from one country to another.
- Pusillanimity and his loneliness had found fertile soil
- …a terrible groan issued from between the whimpers that he was shocked his sadness was so profound.
- Purity of answer was a false quest.
- Nobody could be sure ho much of the truth had fallen between languages, between languages and illiteracy;
- He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie.
- (Love) Before one knew it one could slide into areas of the heart that should be referred to only between social equals.
- A bit of pretense to raise her above her life (social class)
- Oh yes, he (the cook) awaited modernity and knew that if you invested in it, it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.
- One’s involvement in other people’s lives gave one numerous small opportunities for importance.
- …the lightning shamelessly unzipped the sky…
- …how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours. (Sai & Gyan’s romance)
- On the strength of those pushing behind, and with the momentum of those who went before, they melded into a single being.
- …the leaders harnessing the natural irritations and disdain of adolescence for cynical ends;
- Perhaps that’s why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place: the self-consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.
- After all, even on clichéd phrases, you could hoist true emotion.
- What was a country but a idea of it?
- …the way to coax strength as to pretend it existed
- Everyone had to accept imperfection and loss in life.
- How could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn’t believe in anything exactly?
- In this life… you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself.
- A human can be transformed into anything.
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