Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Review of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
“Human degeneration halts and sputters but doesn’t reverse.”
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (2020). Published by Hamish Hamilton.
This novel was a time to read and frustrated me so, so much. I originally heard about it when the longlist for the Man Booker Prize came out and was intrigued by the cover and the basic premise. Then, when it made the shortlist,I was even more interested because then it must’ve seemed to have its merits if it made the Man Booker Prize, right? And so the other day when I was wandering inside my library, I finally spotted it on the shelves of the new section and knew I had to pick it up for myself. At 240 pages, I comfortably read it within three hours and man I had some thoughts about it.
As a writer and aa researcher myself, something that always fascinated me was the relationships between people and the way we interact with others, especially those we deem ourselves estranged with. As our main character’s mother slow succumbs to mental degeneration due to what presumably is dementia or Alzheimer’s, we explore Indian family dynamics as we as her relationship to her American-born husband. That’s where we, as readers, begin to be exposed at how this narrator isn’t exactly the best.
With that preamble over, let’s dig deeper into the text in this review.
Book Blurb
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds two women together, making and unmaking them endlessly.
Content
Narrative-wise, this book tends to flip-flop around in time sequences, which confused the hell out of me as a reader. One second we’re in the present moment dealing with her husband Dilip, and then the next we’re thrown into the childhood of the narrator, Antara. It is through this we explore her difficult and complex relationship with her mother, who had divorced her father and took Antara away so she could become a discipline of a spiritual guru.
This is a feminist novel, that’s for sure. We see how it focuses largely on the women of the story, and how the men are often pushed to the side. Which is okay, because they don’t really serve as much as a purpose as we need them to. Dilip occasionally makes an appearance, but he’s largely irrelevant outside of pushing the theme of being an outsider in Pune, as he was born and raised in the Midwest.
Writing-wise, I found the pacing to be a little lackluster. About seventy pages in I started to get a little bored, and so I found it more difficult to read than continue onwards. My problem I noticed almost immediately was that the sentence structures seemed way too similar (e.g. short, choppy, blunt) and that threw me off. I need variety in the books I’m reading or I start to go a little nuts because my inner-writer is protesting. There’s also some kind of crude details that I thought were unnecessary (why did we need to randomly know that during sex Dilip says Antara’s labia smells like nothing? Or why do we need to know the chemistry behind Alzheimer’s? Seems like filler to me.) and detracted from the main story going on.
I’m not Indian but I also questioned some depictions of India represented in this book. I did some research and the author is Desi-American, but this can show in the book, which is entirely set in India. As I was reading it I thought that the depiction of Pune was stereotypical at times, reducing the city to caricatures rehashed over and over again in Western media, film, and literature. It seemed almost stereotypical at times, which worried me as a reader for the sake of representation.
Overall Thoughts
I’m so confused at how this made the Man Booker Prize shortlist as well as the list for the Women’s Fiction Prize. I think this would have been a more authentic experience if the author managed to create something with a bit more chemistry, because perhaps she herself felt removed from her characters. That makes us, as readers, feel another disconnect as we’re reading as well. All in all, I don’t really recommend this novel. I got off feelings when I saw the cover blurb was the author of Eat, Pray, Love and I should’ve listened to my intuition there.
