Inheritance - Hardcover

Ganesan, Indira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679434429 ISBN 13: 9780679434429

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1998

Synopsis

In her first novel since her debut with The Journey, Indira Ganesan gives us the story of Sonil, who at fifteen has come to her adored grandmother's house on a paradisaical island off the coast of India ("a tiny eye, to the teardrop that was Sri Lanka") to mend her shaky health. She has been living on the mainland with her aunts, to whom she was sent by her mother when she was a baby, and she yearns to find out why she was exiled and where her American father might be.
Little by little, her spirits revive, and we see Sonil begin to move out of the magical world of her grandmother's compound into the wider life of the island, until she finds the perfect escape from her mother's reflection in a passionate affair with a young American. It is through her feelings for him that she begins to discover the means to forgive her mother and to look to herself for the answers she will need in the coming years.

About this title

Review:

Remember all those hippies who ran off to India in the 1970s in search of enlightenment? One of the little delights of Indira Ganesan's Inheritance is getting an Indian view of how those truth-seekers fitted into the culture and affected the people around them. A kind of mild feminism guides this unassuming novel of adolescence and self- discovery, set on an island off the Indian coast. The story meanders with its 15-year-old narrator, Sonil, whose chronic poor health has landed her a prolonged break from school at the home of her grandmother. There, time drifts, and events unfold in the flat, unquestioned perspective of youth. Sonil is fatherless, and men appear only fleetingly as silhouettes, sharply outlined but unfathomable. Her relationships with the three generations of women in the household--especially her hostility toward her aloof, eccentric mother--define the girl. But she encounters a young American man, in India to study Ayurvedic medicine, and, for a while, the chaos of Sonil's sensuality focuses on Richard, a passionate but emotionally immature hippie twice her age.

Through her short-lived relationship with him (lots of lovemaking to the music of Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Talking Heads), the wavering line of Sonil's life begins to trace a circle, leading her back to her mother and her unknown father, an American who disappeared from India before she was born. Her inheritance, it seems, is a mandala, full of repeating patterns, which, as the book ends, Sonil is beginning to draw deliberately. Ganesan's prose style has a frank simplicity that is pleasing but evanescent.

Review:

Ganesan's ingenious charms as a social and spiritual observer bejewel the novel. . . . People float in and land fleetingly, like mirages, on the island, which begins to resemble a microcosmic kaleidoscope of the human, the natural, and the magical folded into one-a small, storied panoply of Ganesan's imagination. -"Kirkus Reviews"
"Ganesan describes Sonil's anxieties and ambitions with moving intensity. . . . [She] has created an appealing young heroine whose determination and sensitivity wins us over." -Edward Hower, "New York Times Book Review"

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679434429
• ISBN 13: 9780679434429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 193