After two twins Mara and Aileen, witness their mother’s suicide their father is wild with grief. He blindfolds both girls so they won’t see the worst in the world, causing Mara to become blind and Aileen ‘s eyesight to be damaged. When a Nova Scotia neighbour discovers what he has done to his children, they are separated from their father and each other and it is not until years later that Aileen discovers where her sister is living. She leaves a broken marriage and heads to Dawson City, but when she arrives she struggles to decipher fact from fiction in the tales Mara’s son, Jason spins. Will she ever learn the truth about what happened to her sister?
A well written tale that because of Jason’s twisting of the truth, the ending couldn’t be fathomed until the very last page.
In 1946 three sisters, Deepa, Priya and Jamini live in a village not far from Calcutta. Their father, a doctor, is bent on helping the poor who cannot afford to pay for his services, forcing the family to live a frugal life. Deepa, the most beautiful and favoured by her mother, convinces her father to take them to Calcutta where they stay in her father’s best friend and neighbour, Somnath’s mansion. Somnath’s son, Amit volunteers to join them so he can be near Priya. But once they arrive in Calcutta riots break out that changes the course of the family’s lives forever.
Reviews from the Guardian and the Times referred to this novel as “often funny” and crediting the story with “tremendous imagination.” I couldn’t disagree more. It appeared as if these reviewers knew nothing about Sri Lankan history because there was nothing funny about thousands of bodies hacked to pieces so they couldn’t be identified and dumped into a Colombo lake. Nor anything imaginative about these facts because that’s what they were—historical facts. What was clever about Karunatalaka’s writing was that Almeida, his main character is killed, and oversees these crimes as a ghost thereby telling the tale from an omnipotent viewpoint.
Uncle Louis is sent with Theo and Pauline from Shanghai by the Deng family to start an antique business in Paris. He plans to arrange his son, Theo’s marriage and set him up in the business so he can return to China. But Theo manages to delay the arranged marriage first by further education, then finally by working as an interpreter for the British during WW1. When Pauline learns her uncle’s first wife is arranging her marriage, she is desperate to find her cousin to help her convince her uncle not to send her back to China. She rushes to Noyelles where Theo has been working with Chinese labourers but is distressed and fearful by what she discovers.
Every Janie Chang book I’ve read has been a five out of five. This one delves into a neglected part of World War1’s history that I had never read about which is seen through the eyes of its main characters—Theo and Pauline Deng and their friend Henri Liu, a Chinese journalist.
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