A review by michaelacabus
Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy
4.0
Perfection until the end.
With the craze of mindfulness and Eastern philosophy in the West (as balm for the more oppressive and stubborn aspects of Christianity, with its entanglements in politics making it impossible to distinguish the two), a novel that treats the Eastern ashram as being just as susceptible to evils may seem shocking.
This novel, though, is really about the imperfection one gets when making sense of the past. Investigations, real world or mentally, tend to leave us only with fragments, in this novel an incomplete documentary the metaphor. I haven't searched for my mother for this reason; I know that any search to find the woman who abandoned me as a child would only present more questions, and what I may be searching for may never be found. Good novel mirror life, resonate with life, and in life there are few tidy endings.
Many modern novels deal with the violence that seems thinly suppressed around us, and this one is no exception. However, too many modern novels rely on this as a vehicle for plot; in this case, it felt that no ready ending presented itself, so a violent act is used to have one come crashing upon the reader. It seemed almost unnecessary in this case; with a novel so strewn with violence throughout, a crescendo of something that would equate to meaning would have been better.
It's worth reading, for the look into how a religious practice we are tending to embrace in the West has significant problems with how it views women. The writing is electric, the story gripping; which made the ending all the more regrettable.
B-
With the craze of mindfulness and Eastern philosophy in the West (as balm for the more oppressive and stubborn aspects of Christianity, with its entanglements in politics making it impossible to distinguish the two), a novel that treats the Eastern ashram as being just as susceptible to evils may seem shocking.
This novel, though, is really about the imperfection one gets when making sense of the past. Investigations, real world or mentally, tend to leave us only with fragments, in this novel an incomplete documentary the metaphor. I haven't searched for my mother for this reason; I know that any search to find the woman who abandoned me as a child would only present more questions, and what I may be searching for may never be found. Good novel mirror life, resonate with life, and in life there are few tidy endings.
Many modern novels deal with the violence that seems thinly suppressed around us, and this one is no exception. However, too many modern novels rely on this as a vehicle for plot; in this case, it felt that no ready ending presented itself, so a violent act is used to have one come crashing upon the reader. It seemed almost unnecessary in this case; with a novel so strewn with violence throughout, a crescendo of something that would equate to meaning would have been better.
It's worth reading, for the look into how a religious practice we are tending to embrace in the West has significant problems with how it views women. The writing is electric, the story gripping; which made the ending all the more regrettable.
B-