I opted for my second review for this month, a book from India that was on the Man Asian prize a prize that disappeared ten years ago but for the few years it ran highlighted great Indian literature and from the rest of Asia . This book about mother and a child stuck with me. although not in translation this was only piublished in India and deserved a wider audience I felt.

Rebirth follows Kaberi; she is newly married and now with a child. Her marriage to Ron is on unsteady ground over the course of the book we find Kaberi talking to her unborn child about her marriage but also what sort of father Ron would make . It’s fair to say Kaberi has fairly rose-coloured glasses regarding her husband; one main thing about this book is it is modern India. We talk about her friends Tarun and Preetha at coffee shops, and they wear and talk about sports wear.Her friends and family also see here husbands faults more than she does . Also she is going for doctors check-ups, we see Ron grow into an awful husband over the time we spend with him in the book. We see her childhood as a prelude in some ways to how she ended up where she did  . For me, this is a novel of self-rhetoric as Kaberi talks herself around the fact that her husband isn’t the dream man she had wanted; she even says this and the fact that she idolized him slightly only made things worse.So the title has a duel mean both the birth of the new-born baby but of a  Kaberi as well.I also got a real sense of place this the north-east part of India which the writer is from which gives real credence to the settings as it is the places she grew up in and obviously knows well . Even thou this is an arranged marriage and set in india I feel the main themes of this book are universal worry of marriage, idealizing one’s partner and having a baby are the same all over the world.I did say on twitter the other day and Lisa picked up on this that I felt on one level this is a book females would feel more empathic for than men.I’m struck by what Harold Bloom said

” love tempered by ambivalence ” is a fitting four word quote for this book .

Jahnavi Barua is an Indian writer based in Bangalore. Next Door (Penguin India, 2008), her debut collection of short stories was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her next, a novel called Rebirth (Penguin India, 2010), was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The third, Undertow, a novel, was published by Penguin Random House India (Viking Books) in February 2020. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized and her work is part of several university syllabi. Jahnavi studied medicine at university but is not a practising doctor. She was born in Guwahati and raised between Assam, Meghalaya, Delhi and Manchester.

Stuart Allen

this post by  Stuart Allen. The Blogger behind the blog Winstonsdad , Lover of translated literature and world cinema. Started the #translationthurs hashtag on twitter.