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Summary
Summary
From the widely acclaimed author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing , a powerful and triumphantly beautiful novel set in contemporary India, about a young woman forging a new life in the foothills of the Himalayas.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HINDU LITERARY PRIZE FOR BEST FICTION 2011
With her debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy's exquisite storytelling instantly won readers' hearts around the world, and the novel was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and The Seattle Times . Now, Roy has returned with another masterpiece that is already earning international prize attention, an evocative and deeply moving tale of a young woman making a new life for herself amid the foothills of the Himalaya.
Desperate to leave a private tragedy behind, Maya abandons herself to the rhythms of the little village, where people coexist peacefully with nature. But all is not as it seems, and she soon learns that no refuge is remote enough to keep out the modern world. When power-hungry politicians threaten her beloved mountain community, Maya finds herself caught between the life she left behind and the new home she is determined to protect.
Elegiac, witty, and profound by turns, and with a tender love story at its core, The Folded Earth brims with the same genius and love of language that made An Atlas of Impossible Longing an international success and confirms Anuradha Roy as a major literary talent.
Author Notes
Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist who has won the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for her novel Sleeping on Jupiter. Roy's novel was selected from a shortlist of six to win the US$50,000 (A$72,907) prize, which is awarded annually to the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region published in English. Her other novels include An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth. Her previous awards include the Crossword Book Award, the 2015 Man Booker Prize longlist, and the Hindu Literary Prize 2015 shortlist.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After her husband, Michael, dies in a mountain-climbing mishap, Maya flees to the tiny Himalayan town of Ranikhet to escape her past and find peace. While teaching English at a Christian school, she befriends her teenage neighbor and milk delivery girl, Charu, whose lover, Kundan, has recently left the village to work in Delhi. Though he sends Charu letters, she cannot read or write. Maya takes on the role of interlocutor initially, but soon begins teaching Charu so that she can continue the epistolary romance on her own. Meanwhile, Maya finds herself caught up in an unexpected love affair with her landlord's nephew, Veer. Though she has acclimated well to life in the village ("I became a hill person who was only at peace where the earth rose and fell in waves like the sea"), the premature death of her husband still haunts her. Veer seems to be the key to overcoming her grief, but revelations of his past threaten the emotional enclave Maya has fashioned for herself in the lush Indian hills. Similar to the pace of life in the village, Roy's follow-up to An Atlas of Impossible Longing is occasionally slow going but her musical writing and strong imagery compensate, and individual moments sparkle. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
They had been married for only six years when Michael trekked into the Himalayas in search of a remote lake few men had ever seen. When word of his death reaches her, Maya's world implodes, leaving her with no family and nowhere to live. A local priest secures her a teaching position in an isolated mountain village, and Maya slowly begins to find her way into the life of a fractured and challenged community. Maya teachers Charu, an illiterate farm girl, to read and write so she can correspond with her lover, now living in Delhi. A curmudgeonly landlord rents Maya a cottage in return for her help with his manuscript, and, most distressing of all, the old man's nephew, Veer, a wilderness guide, touches Maya's heart in ways she no longer thought possible. Roy, acclaimed for An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2011), evocatively draws on the mystery and allure of India's mountain cultures in this tender examination of a compassionate woman's hard-fought reconciliation with her traumatic past, a tale that abounds with sensory delights.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Late in this quietly mesmerizing novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to brave the cold: "After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth." In the mountains, one of Roy's characters observes, "love must be tested by adversity." It's the inherent conflict in human attraction - the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them - that forms the spine of the novel. In marrying a Christian, the narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in a mountaineering accident. Rather than return to her parents, she seeks refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to inspect its contents. She can't bear to know the details surrounding his death. In Ranikhet, Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison. Roy manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around town. (One, meant to welcome trekkers, is vandalized to read "Streaking route") His crusade, inspired by the Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the persecution of a simpleminded but harmless herder. Of course, a sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the town is disturbed from all sides. An election brings issues of religion to the fore, threatening to stir sectarian violence. Curious military maneuvers prompt rumors of Chinese spies and fears, of a border conflict with Pakistan. Diwan Sahib's nephew, Veer, a mountaineering guide, moves into the elderly man's villa, and Maya finds herself drawn to him, despite the bad habits he encourages in his uncle and, more alarmingly, his tendency to disappear without warning. While there are scenes of tension 'and intrigue - a political goon attacks a young girl, Veer's work in the mountains starts to appear suspicious - the novel's mood remains elegiac rather than fraught, expressed through small tragedies like the burning of a valuable manuscript or the death of a beloved deer. Roy is particularly adept at mining the emotional intricacies of the relationship between Maya and Diwan Sahib, which also serves to symbolize India's uneasy passage from tradition to modernity. The novel's one weakness is its culminating revelation (and its consequences), which feels strangely insignificant, as if Roy couldn't bring herself to commit to the more outrageous implications she has set in motion. "If you told a stranger that there are actually big snow peaks where that sky is," a character notes of a day when the Himalayas are shrouded in clouds, "would he believe you? . . . But you and I know the peaks are there. We are surrounded by things we don't know and can't understand." Perhaps Roy prefers to keep the heights of her story, like those mountaintops, shrouded in mystery. Andrea Thompson is a freelance writer and editor.
Kirkus Review
Gentle comedy, bitter tragedy and grief intertwine in an affectionately delineated portrait of an Indian hill community. While ostensibly offering a leisurely exploration of the town of Ranikhet in the foothills of the Himalayas, Roy (An Atlas of Invisible Longing, 2011) has achieved something larger, a poem to the natural world and its relentless displacement by the developed one. Maya, a young widow whose husband Michael died trekking in the mountains, has come here to be near where his body was found and to teach at a local school. Her landlord, Diwan Sahib, a retired man of influence, is rumored to own a cache of valuable letters between Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru. This secret passion is mirrored in two contemporary romances, Maya's liaison with Diwan's nephew Veer and the love between illiterate hill girl Charu and a cook. Roy pulls politics, society, ecological warning and history into her slow, episodic story, but it's her love for the creatures, landscapes and eternal beauty of this place that inspire it. Finally events gather speed after an act of petty spite against a neighbor and his pet, culminating in death, a terrible discovery and an act of shattering revenge. Despite an occasional sense of drift, this understated, finely observed book expresses a haunting vision. A writer to watch.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
one The girl came at the same hour, summer or winter. Every morning, I heard her approach. Plastic slippers, the clink of steel on stone. And then her footsteps, receding. That morning she was earlier. The whistling thrushes had barely cleared their throats, and the rifle range across the valley had not yet sounded its bugles. And, unlike every other day, I did not hear her leave after she had set down my daily canister of milk. She did not knock or call out. She was waiting. All went quiet in the blueness before sunlight. Then the soothing early morning mutterings of the neighborhood began: axes struck wood, dogs tried out their voices, a rooster crowed, wood-smoke crept in through my open window. My eyelids dipped again and I burrowed deeper into my blanket. I woke only when I heard the General walking his dog, reproaching it for its habitual disobedience, as if after all these years it still baffled him. "What is the reason, Bozo?" he said, in his loud voice. "Bozo, what is the reason?" He went past every morning at about six thirty, which meant that I was going to be late unless I ran all the way. I scrabbled around, trying to organize myself--make coffee, ?nd the clothes I would wear to work, gather the account books I needed to take with me--and the milk for my coffee billowed and foamed out of the pan and over the stove before I could reach it. The mess would have to wait. I picked up things, gulping my coffee in between. It was only when I was lacing my shoes, crouched one-legged by the front door, that I saw her out of the corner of an eye: Charu, waiting for me still, drawing circles at the foot of the steps with a bare toe. Charu, a village girl just over seventeen, lived next door. She had every hill person's high cheekbones and skin, glazed pink with sunburn. She would forget to comb her hair till late in the day, letting it hang down her shoulders in two disheveled braids. Like most hill people, she was not tall, and from the back she could be mistaken for a child, thin and small-boned. She wore hand-me-down salwar kameezes too big for her, and in place of a diamond she had a tiny silver stud in her nose. All the same, she exuded the reserve and beauty of a princess of Nepal--even if it took her only a second to slide back into the awkward teenager I knew. Now, when she saw I was about to come out, she stood up in a hurry, stubbing her toe against a brick. She tried to smile through the pain as she mouthed an inaudible "namaste" to me. I realized then why she had waited so long for me. I ran back upstairs and picked up a letter that had come yesterday. It was addressed to me, but when I opened it, I had found it was for Charu. I stuffed it into my pocket and stepped out of the front door. My garden was just an unkempt patch of hillside, but it rippled with wild?owers on this blue and gold morning. Teacup-sized lilies charged out of rocks and drifting scraps of paper turned into white butter?ies when they came closer. Everything smelled damp, cool, and fresh from the light rain that had fallen at dawn, the ?rst after many hot days. I felt myself slowing down, the hurry draining away. I was late anyway. What difference did a few more minutes make? I picked a plum and ate it, I admired the butter?ies, I chatted of this and that with Charu. I said nothing of the letter. I felt a perverse curiosity about how she would tell me what she wanted. More than once, I heard her draw breath to speak, but she either thought better of it or came up with, "It has rained after three weeks dry." And then, "The monkeys ate all the peaches on our tree." I took pity on her and produced the letter from my pocket. It had my address and name, written in Hindi in a large, childish hand. "Do you want me to read it for you?" I said. "Yes, alright," she said. She began to fiddle with a rose, as if the letter were not important, yet darted glances in its direction when she thought I was not looking. Her face was transformed by relief and happiness. "My friend Charu," the letter said: How are you? How is your family? I hope all are well. I am well. Today is my tenth day in Delhi. From the first day I looked for a post office to buy an inland letter. It is hard to find places here. It is a very big city. It has many cars, autorickshaws, buses. Sometimes there are elephants on the street. This city is so crowded that my eyes cannot go beyond the next house. I feel as if I cannot breathe. It smells bad. I remember the smells of the hills. Like when the grass is cut. You cannot hear any birds here, or cows or goats. But the room Sahib has given me is good. It is above the garage for the car. It faces the street. When I am alone at the end of the day's cooking, I can look out at everything. I get more money now. I am saving for my sister's dowry and to pay off my father's loan. Then I can do my heart's desire. Send me a print of your palm in reply. That will be enough for me. I will write again. Your friend. "Who is it from?" I asked Charu. "Do you know someone in Delhi, or is this a mistake?" "It's from a friend," she said. She would not meet my eyes. "A girl. Her name is Sunita." She hesitated before adding: "I told her to send my letters to you because--the postman knows your house better." She turned away. She must have known how transparent was her lie. I handed her the letter. She snatched it and was halfway up the slope leading from my house to hers before I had closed my fist. "I thought I taught you to say thank you," I called after her. She paused. The breeze ?uttered through her dupatta as she stood there, irresolute, then ran down the slope back to me. She spoke so quickly her words ran into each other: "If I bring you extra milk every day . . . will you teach me how to read and write?" Excerpted from The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
