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Summary
Summary
Following his spectacular debut, The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri returns with a mesmerizing story of modern India, richly layered with themes from Hindu mythology. The Age of Shiva is at once a powerful story of a country in turmoil and an extraordinary portrait of maternal love. Meera, the narrator, is seventeen years old when she catches her first glimpse of Dev, performing a song so infused with passion that it arouses in her the first flush of erotic longing. She wonders if she can steal him away from Roopa, her older, more beautiful sister, who has brought her along to see him. When Meera's reverie comes true, it does not lead to the fairy-tale marriage she imagined. She escapes her overbearing father only to find herself thrust into the male-dominated landscape of India after independence. Dev's family is orthodox and domineering, his physical demands oppressive. His brother Arya lusts after her with the same intensity that fuels his right-wing politics. Although Meera develops an unexpected affinity with her sister-in-law Sandhya, the tenderness they share is as heartbreaking as it is fleeting. It is only when her son is born that Meera begins to imagine a life of fulfillment. She engulfs him with a love so deep, so overpowering, that she must fear its consequences. Meera's unforgettable story, embodying Shiva as a symbol of religious upheaval, places The Age of Shiva among the most compelling novels to emerge from contemporary India.
Author Notes
Manil Suri was born in Bombay. He is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The second novel from Suri (The Death of Vishnu) follows Meera Sawhney from her unhappy 1950s marriage to aspiring singer Dev Arora through to her own son's coming-of-age. After an impulsive act forces Meera's marriage at 17, her complex, controlling father decries her tying herself (and, by extension, her family) to the provincial, lower-class Aroras. Meera soon finds herself pulled in different directions by her in-laws' religious orthodoxy, her father's progressivism (which doesn't run deep), her husband's self-pitying alcoholism and her own resentment. She finds salvation in the birth of a son, Ashvin; mother love, which Suri describes in intensely physical terms, gives her life passion and purpose, and overwhelms her adult relationships. But as India modernizes, Meera senses that Ashvin, and she herself, must live their own lives. Suri renders Meera's perspective marvelously, especially in small particulars (such as Meera's deliberations around the cutting of Ashvin's hair) and in the perils and conflicts Meera faces in her relationships with men. He also takes a close look at Hindu practices and charts the rise of religious nationalism in the years following Gandhi's death. Suri's vivid portrait of a woman in post-independence India engages timeless themes of self-determination. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Suri follows his exceptional debut, The Death of Vishnu (2001), with an unflinchingly honest portrait of Meera, a vibrant young Indian woman who in 1955 marries Dev, an aspiring singer her family views as socially beneath them. Her contentious marriage, an abortion forced on her by Dev and her father, her struggle to get an education, and her eventual fulfillment as a mother are framed by India's political upheavals, increasing tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and the 1971 India-Pakistan war. The two families are in different political camps, one led by Meera's father, who is enamored of Indira Gandhi, and the other by Dev's brother, who becomes heavily involved with a right-wing group touting the return of Hindu values in a new age of Shiva. Dev's family is more traditional in their religious practices, and the narrative is replete with Hindu customs designed to either ward off curses or attract good fortune. An enlightening family saga set in modern India, but intricately interwoven with the ancient rites and myths that are integral to the subcontinent's tumultuous history.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WE all live in the shadow of history, and the play of its lights and shades over individual lives is the stuff of historical fiction. In his sweepingly ambitious, captivating second novel, "The Age of Shiva," Manil Suri creates a woman who is never an actor in the great events of India's post-independence decades but cannot escape their power to shape her. The heroine, Meera, is smart, yet all too willing to subjugate herself. Her adulthood begins in Delhi in 1955 at a fifth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the Indian republic, when the fireworks and excitement encourage her to fall disastrously in love. Her story goes on for the next 25 years. As she moves to Bombay and becomes an obsessively loving mother, the novel occasionally flashes back to her girlhood, when her prosperous Hindu family fled the Muslim-controlled city of Rawalpindi, in what would soon become Pakistan. But while she floats through a society in which women's roles are rapidly changing, Meera and her era are variables in a more basic, almost mathematical formula: Scarlett O'Hara + the Civil War = "Gone With the Wind." Equations must come naturally to Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. That day job seemed startling when his exquisite first novel, "The Death of Vishnu," appeared seven years ago. Shimmering with ambiguity and allusions to Hindu myths, its depiction of a poor servant who lay dying in the hall of an apartment building is as far from numerical precision as writing can get. "The Age of Shiva" is more literary than "Gone With the Wind," yet less graceful than "The Death of Vishnu." The intersections of Meera's life with larger events are sometimes handled clumsily, and as narrator she tends to spell out her feelings. But the novel's strengths far outweigh these problems. Suri, who was born in Bombay and moved to the United States when he was 20, is fearless in imagining a passionate, confused and not always admirable woman. That striking creation, and his refusal to give in to any hint of the didactic or the predictable, affirms his position as a writer worth serious attention. Meera is 17 when she sees a handsome young man named Dev performing at a local talent competition. "Will you light the fire of your heart," he sings, a line that echoes through the book. As Meera and Dev lie together on the floor of an abandoned shrine during a fleeting encounter, a local boy spots them. Although they haven't had sex, the scandal is ruinous. Stubbornly, Meera decides to marry Dev, even as her infatuation fades. But, in one of the novel's many sly reversals, no one forces her into that marriage. Her father, perhaps the book's most intriguing character, is both enlightened in preaching the equality of women to his daughters and patriarchal in his attempt to control Meera by manipulating the purse strings. A successful publisher, he had accepted an arranged marriage to an illiterate woman. When Meera reverses that class pattern by marrying down and moving into Dev's family house, little more than a hovel, the old ways and the new seem equally bad. While Meera's own father cultivated Muslim friends, Dev's family is unregenerately bigoted against them. And where Meera's family had an easy passage across the border to India, Dev's family opens her eyes to the horrors of what others suffered, especially her sister-in-law, who barely escaped with her sanity. These flashbacks and set pieces display Suri's impressive storytelling, even as they propel the novel to a higher dramatic level. In one scene, Meera's father forbids her to perform a traditional Hindu ceremony that calls for a wife to kiss her husband's feet, bribing her with the promise of money so the couple can move to Bombay, where Dev can follow his misbegotten dream of becoming a recording star. Meera's father is more concerned about his daughter's future, more aware of the possibilities opening for women, than she is herself. Meera's narrative is often addressed to her son, Ashvin, her only child, and the book begins with a rapturous account of breast-feeding him. The prose here seems overwrought, but Suri is setting up Meera's uncomfortably close relationship with Ashvin. The novel doesn't shy away from the near-incestuous feelings that surface between them when the boy is 15. Suri doesn't avoid Meera's occasional lies and cruelties either. She calls Dev a drunken failure in front of their child, willfully inflicting pain. Yet we never lose interest in her story, which comes to include abortion and near-rape, never lose sympathy for this imperfect woman. "The Age of Shiva" is painted in broad, colorful strokes that sometimes evoke the melodramatic movies so beloved in India Shiva, the god of destruction, hovers over the novel, embodied by Meera's father, her husband and her husband's lecherous brother, Arya, who leads a right-wing militia and wants to reclaim India as a purely Hindu country in what he calls a new age "not of Nehrus or Gandhis, but of Ram and Shiva." Meera explicitly sees herself as Shiva's wife, Parvati, so betrayed and lonely she created a son out of "sandalwood paste and bath oil and flakes from her own body" and "soon forgot all about Shiva, as she frolicked through the days in her son's company." Throughout her emotional upheavals, politics touch Meera glancingly. Sometimes the intrusion is serendipitous: on a night in 1971, when the conflict that led to the creation of Bangladesh seems to have reached her Bombay neighborhood, panic in the streets contributes to a tragedy that has nothing to do with the war. At other times, the connection is more direct: Meera's father becomes a minor hangeron of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Arya is held as a political prisoner during one of Gandhi's states of emergency. Oddly, though, the historical canvas is often reduced to a minor reference point. Meera writes a crucial letter shortly before a state of emergency is declared, and says, "I mailed it just in time - a few days later, on the 26th of June, 1975, to be exact, the whole country came to a standstill." With her narrow domestic focus, Meera has no strong political point of view (although even her illiterate mother becomes, improbably and late in life, an activist opposing Indira Gandhi). When the political landscape becomes a contrivance, it hardly seems worth mentioning. The novel would have been richer if Suri had infused it more deeply with the world-shaping changes that surround his heroine. He is not writing that kind of politicized fiction, though, and doesn't need to. In "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie has already created what may be the definitive - and is certainly the most richly imagined - novel of the Indian partition. Suri's contribution is to have invented a woman so vivid and individual that she reminds us, in her meandering connection to history, that no two people ever respond to its pull in the same way. Suri's devoted mother floats through an Indian society in which women's roles are rapidly changing. Caryn James is critic at large for The Times and the author of the novels "Glorie" and "What Caroline Knew."
Kirkus Review
A complex parable of unification and division, based on the myth of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, is subtly constructed in this ambitious successor to Suri's fine first novel, The Death of Vishnu(2001). Suri tells the story of a woman's life in modern India after independence from Great Britain. She is Meera Sawhney, who grows up in a well-to-do family dominated by her imperious father (who owns a prosperous publishing company), and finds her liberation in marriage to handsome, self-indulgent pop singer Dev Arora. But Meera's freedom is no more stable than that of her country, which she, and we, experience in the wake of partition from Pakistan, through food riots and continuing outbreaks of Hindu vs. Muslim violence, the embattled careers of Mohandas Gandhi and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (who becomes India's political leader, following the path trod by her father Jawaharlal Nehru)--into the early 1980s, with the shadow of ongoing conflict and anarchy expanding. Meera's identification with India is predictable, but the novel gains impressive force from its searching characterizations: of ever hopeful, continually underachieving Dev; his brother Arya, an intolerant Hindu extremist whose hatred of Muslims is no less inflammatory than are his sexual attentions to Meera; her demanding father ("Paji"), neither as loving nor as much a liberal intellectual as he pretends and yearns to be; and the sisterhood of friends and family who share Meera's struggles, bond with her and complicate her marriage and motherhood. But the story's core is Meera's smothering, heated, virtually erotic love for her only child, Ashvin, the beloved son whose name evokes those of the deities Shiva and Vishnu, and whose need for her embraces provokes Meera to envision a "parallel universe." In it, rather than be bound by protective constraints of family relationship, they will be free to "be one." Like India's dream of unity, this cannot be, and Meera pays the price for her overreaching. A finely conceived, absorbing and powerful book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Meera escapes her oppressive father by marrying an oppressive husband, finding comfort-and maybe danger-in her love for her son. With a 14-city tour; reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
