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Overview
"Don't we all have to pay, no matter what we choose?" a young woman asks in "The Love of a Good Man," one of the remarkable stories in Chitra Divakaruni's beautifully crafted exploration of the tensions between new lives and old. In tales set in India and the United States, Divakaruni illuminates the transformations of personal landscapes, real and imagined, brought about by the choices men and women make at every stage of their lives.
"The Love of a Good Man" tells of an Indian woman happily settled in the United States who must confront the past when her long-estranged father begs to meet his only grandson. In "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1999 and short-listed for a 1999 O. Henry Award, a widow, inadvertently eavesdropping, discovers that her cherished, old-fashioned ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law. A young American woman joins a pilgrimage of women in Kashmir and, in the land of her ancestors, comes to view herself and her family in a new light in "The Lives of Strangers," Two women, uprooted from their native land by violence and deception, find unexpected comfort and hope in each other in "The Blooming Season for Cacti." And in the title story, a young woman turns to her painting and the wisdom of her grandmother for the strength to accept ther fiance's past when it arrives on her doorstep.
Whether Divakaruni is writing about the adjustments of immigrants to a foreign land or the accommodations families make to the disruptive differences between generations, she poignantly portrays the eternal struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the alluring promise of change.
Synopsis
From acclaimed and beloved author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni comes a new collection of moving stories about family, culture, and the seduction of memory.
Publishers Weekly
The female protagonists of eight of the nine stories in Divakaruni's sensuously evocative new collection are caught between the beliefs and traditions of their Indian heritage and those of their, or their children's, new homeland, America. Nowhere is this dichotomy of cultures so well evoked as in the title story, in which Divakaruni's gift for writing image-filled prose illuminates Berkeley resident Ruchira's gift for painting mythic figures from Indian legends, and poignantly underscores a very contemporary marriage dilemma, which Ruchira solves by intuiting her dead grandmother's advice. Equally excellent is "The Names of Stars in Bengali," the beautifully nuanced story of a San Francisco wife and mother who returns to her native village in India to visit her mother, in which each understands afresh the emotional dislocation caused by stepping into "a time machine called immigration" that subjects them to "the alien habits of a world they had imagined imperfectly." One misses a similar level of sophistication in such stories as "The Blooming Season for Cacti," "The Love of a Good Man" and "The Lives of Strangers," all of which seem contrived, overwrought and predictable. Yet at her best, as in "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter" and "The Intelligence of Wild Things,'' Divakaruni writes intensely touching tales of lapsed communication, inarticulate love and redemptive memories. This is a mixed collection, then, but one worth reading for the predominance of narratives that ring true as they illuminate the difficult adjustments of women in whom memory and duty must coexist with a new, often painful and disorienting set of standards. Starting with her first novel, The Mistress of Spices, India-born San Francisco resident Divakaruni has acquired a receptive audience, which undoubtedly will greet this new work with enthusiasm. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Apr. 17) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.