An Atlas of Impossible Longing - Softcover

Roy, Anuradha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847244785 ISBN 13: 9781847244789

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2008

Synopsis

The story is of three generations of an Indian family, brilliantly told, in which a sensitive and intelligent foundling boy orphan who is casteless and without religion and Bakul, the motherless granddaughter of the house, grow up together. The boy, Mukunda, spends his time as a servant in the house or reading the books of Mrs Barnum, an Anglo-Englishwoman whose life was saved long ago by Bakul's grandmother, by now demented by loneliness. Mrs Barnum gives Mukunda the run of her house, but as he and Bakul grow, they become aware that their intense closeness is becoming something else, and Bakul's father is warned to separate them. He banishes Mukunda to a school in Calcutta, where in the years after Partition he prospers, and whence in time he will return to rediscover all that he has lost. The novel begins in 1907 with the founding of a factory in Songarh, a small provincial town where narrow attitudes prevail. Amulya and Kananbala have two sons and as their family grows, and the house and their garden too, a microcosm of a society develops. It is scholarly, eccentric, hide-bound, fraught with drama, destined to self-destruct. The many strands of this intensely-fashioned narrative converge when Mukunda, by now a successful businessman, returns to Songarh years after he has been exiled from the only home he knew, to resolve the family's destiny.

About this title

Review:

"Roy's prose does not hit a single wrong note: its restrained beauty sings off the page." --Neel Mukherjee, "Time Magazine"

From the Back Cover:

"He scrutinised my palm for long minutes, and I looked with him, as if I had never seen it before. It was creased, untidy, crowded with crosses and wild strokes slashing it in two. I have seen palms that have scarcely any lines. Mine was not one of them, far from it. I waited as if for a verdict.
`A veritable atlas,' he said, his fingers tracing the longer lines on my palm. `What rivers of desire, what mountains of ambition!'
`I wanted to... I mean I was hoping...'
`Want, want, hope, hope,' the astrologer parroted, `this is what your palm says too, moshai, your palm is nothing but an atlas of impossible longings.' He poked my lifeline and said, `Nothing but longing.'"
This is a love story - as passionate as it is poignant - about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else.

About this edition

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1847244785
• ISBN 13: 9781847244789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320