Reviews
*Starred Review* Six-year-old Aasha sees ghosts, but her unhappy mother seems to look right through her and her funny brother, Suresh, and smart sister, Uma. All Chellam, a much-abused servant, wants is a pair of glasses, while in spite of her cataracts, Paati, the malevolent old matriarch in a family that redefines the term dysfunctional, is as mercilessly watchful as a vulture. Questions of perception abound in this psychologically acute and boldly plotted tale of descendants of immigrants from India living in material comfort and emotional impoverishment in ethnically complex Malaysia. At the root of their misery is Paati's successful lawyer son's decision not to marry one of the worldly women in his circle but, rather, to wed his cruel neighbor's desperate daughter. Instead of the worshipfully grateful wife he envisioned, she turns out to be stone-cold and small-minded. As the story begins, in 1980, Chellam is leaving in disgrace, while Uma has become uncharacteristically uncommunicative. Shocking secrets exert a malevolent force, and all are slowly revealed as Samarasan repeatedly loops back in time. Extraordinarily incisive, Samarasan provocatively links the sorrows of one distraught family to Malaysia's bloody conflicts in a surpassingly wise and beautiful debut novel about the tragic consequences of the inability to love., Deftly switching points of view, and flitting backward and forward in time, Samarasan constructs a narrative that opens outward even as it deepens, revealing the wounds and secrets within each character...even if the seams don't match perfectly, Samarasan's fabric is gorgeous. Her ambitious spiraling plot, her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place, and her psychological acuity are stunning. Readers, responding to the setting, will immediately compare her to Kiran Desai. I think Samarasan's dialogue and description are reminiscent of Eudora Welty, another woman who knew how to write about family and race and class and secrets and heat., Atonement comes to Malaysia in this masterfully constructed tale of the prosperous Rajasekharan family. One unbearably hot September morning, the family's servant girl, Chellam, is sent packing as a result of an unnamed crime. In her wake, she leaves Aasha, a six-year-old girl haunted by ghosts, who has recently suffered two additional losses: the departure of her older sister to college in the United States, and the death of her grandmother. Circling back and forth through time to reveal the history of a family and a land divided, Evening Is the Whole Day tracks the fortunes of one Indian immigrant family, and the secrets and lies that bind them together and force them apart. It also illuminates the span of a life -- a life that acquires weight and momentum and becomes much more than a series of distractions and misfortunes; a life that holds out the possibility that anything can happen.In her first novel, Samarasan displays a prodigious gift for lyrical narration, complex characterization, and dramatic breadth of vision., Set on the outskirts of Ipoh in Malaysia, Samarasan's impressive debut chronicles another bad year in the Big House on Kingfisher Lane. With the death of Paati, the grandmother, and the disgraceful departure of Chellam, the family's servant girl, the wealthy Rajasekharan family is in shambles. Skillfully jumping from one consciousness to another, Samarasan moves back in time to reveal the secrets that have led to the family's unraveling. Father Raju's dreams have been stifled by his unrealized political ambitions, and his home life is no consolation. Vasanthi, his wife, bristles at reminders of her lower-class roots and wouldn't mind seeing Uma, their oldest daughter, "destroyed by an endless string of disappointments." Uma all but disconnects herself from the family in anticipation of escaping to Columbia University, and her six-year-old sister, Aasha, whose desire to recapture Uma's love is a primary focus of the book, must settle for interactions with a ghost only she can see. There's little familial tenderness, and the few instances of compassion displayed (by Raju's visiting brother) are mistaken as perverse. Though the narrative is occasionally unwieldy or claustrophobic, the language bursts with energy, and Samarasan has a sure hand juggling so many distinct characters.
