It’s a good time for Indian writers who write in English. An exotic location (at least to people who don’t live there) mixed with philosophical/social/historical insights, mixed with some poetic substance and the obligatory magic-realism adds up to ching! ching! in the Western book market.

But Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s debut would be a little more stunning if you didn’t feel it had been done before by Arundhati Roy. Love it or hate it, The God of Small Things’s (TGOST) Booker win brought more attention to the genre and you get a feeling of deja vu. (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is on a level of genius so far removed from Roy or Shanghvi, I’m not including it.)

Here’s the story of The Last Song of Dusk: beautiful main character Anuradha Patwardhan gets married to Vardhmaan, a doctor, in what seems to be the perfect marriage. But tragedy strikes when their first child, a prodigy, dies in an accident and plunges their lives into a prolonged poetic depression. Later a wild girl named Nandini stirs up their lives with her antics, and the arrival of another child leads to more poetic feelings and thoughts on love and loss.

Some who read TGOST because of the hype felt the first half was basically a long list of pointlessly creative metaphors, though with a redeeming end. And like TGOST, the Last Song of Dusk’s style is in your face.

In the battle of style vs. substance and the author has to find his own balance, but there is definitely a point when the style can overshadow the substance to the point that it feels the writer wants to show off his writing more than let his characters live. At that point “original writing” becomes just a distraction. Shanghvi walks this line but slips less often than Roy. Most of his metaphors are apt and only a tad distracting. Other facets of his style are evident. He is prone to melodrama (though with a purpose), he is very fond of words like “sartorial” and “nape” (“nape of the neck” is redundant and you realize that Shanghvi, we get it already.) Also, the author wears his gay agenda on his sleeve, and nearly everyone dude in the novel has a set of nice buns.

In addition, mentioning “mercurochrome” and “suitable boys” on the same page is a little mischievous for an author who most certainly has read Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Another time he speaks of a character’s “infinitely beautiful collarbones” which remind a reader of the Roy’s description of “absurdly beautiful collarbones” in TGOST. I’m being anal here, but to readers of the small magic-realism/Indian-West subgenre these things stick out.

Readers of this book, especially Indians, will notice something about it that it has in common with Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things.
The characters always have ties to England or America, mix with whites freely, quote and listen to English authors and Western composers, have more than a bit of American savvy and slang etc. I suspect because the authors themselves have such an East-West hybrid nature they try and insert all the details of their own personal identity crises into their novels.

Would the average small city doctor in 1940’s India waltz and listen to Handel? I’m not sure, but remember these authors are shooting for emotional punch over reality and any distortions in The Last Song of Dusk just add to the hybrid insider/outsider feel that you might have felt if you read Midnight’s Children and TGOST. The Anglicized view of these novelists represents just a few percent of the Indian Experience. There have been only a handful of Indian novels in English (not translations) that capture the other 95%, which India actually is.

Anyways, other stuff happens: a girl walks on water and mates with a panther, artsy parties are held, portraits are unveiled, characters sigh endlessly and ask themselves ‘why’? The cameo by Gandhi is a little goofy, and with the parade of odd characters that stream in nonstop, sometimes you feel the author is trying too hard to cast a freakshow worthy enough for ‘originality’. But there are positives, and they all deal with hallucinatory images and poignant insights. In the end the novel is really about images rather than events, and the love, loss, and sex aplenty is always presented as part of the search for ultimate meaning.

One of the reasons this has to be a dreamlike novel is that if it used straight realism somebody at some point would say “snap out of it” and life would move on. But in Shanghvi’s construction, characters are free to artistically pose at the window, watch the dying sun and whisper ‘it can never be’. When we as readers ask why not, they answer ‘because it can never be…’

Reading The Last Song of Dusk is like eavesdropping on a dream.

You know what I mean: when you wake up from a dream, deeply moved babbling something about bright lights and a purple elephant that loved you, while an observer laughs his head off at your absurdities…Then you come to your senses and eventually laugh off the dream which progressively becomes more and more absurd to you yourself…..

“Capturing the dream’s emotion” is what Shanghvi is best at, but because I’m rating this novel on all factors: plot, sincerity, philosophical content, the final feel or ‘vibe’ etc, etc, I have to average the good and the bad, hence a rating of 3 out of 5. But if I had to rate this on Shanghvi’s emotional sincerity alone, or his attempt to capture the beauty and mystery of love and loss, I would give it 5 out of 5. He clearly feels these things very deeply, and these ideas are just so damn abstract and hard to explain to others that his haunting conveyance of them is remarkable. He is a poet through and through.

Here’s an excerpt from the book: “But even after her words were folded and put to one side, they would continue staring at each other in the knowledge that the endurers of a common fate have an association that outlives calamity and joy, strengthens over time, and deepens into a clarity that allows them to accept that love was nothing but the fragile excuse that enjoined them in the first place, and that after its cessation, after the haunting emptiness of its passing, this silence they were now sharing was, in fact, nothing short of divine eloquence.”

Preach it brother.

Shanghvi is a poet trapped in a novelist’s body. ‘Nuff said.

Did you like this post? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

No related posts.