This is my last book review of 2021. It was a great year and I feel ecstatic that I could keep up with my reading and atleast penned down few book reviews. as much I love reading, I love writing about them. I am wrapping up this year with this great book and hoping for a great bookish year ahead.
A Happy New Year 2022 !
This is my last book review of 2021. It was a great year and I feel ecstatic that I could keep up with my reading and at least penned down a few book reviews. As much I love reading, I love writing about them. I am wrapping up this year with this great book and hoping for a great bookish year ahead.
A Happy New Year 2022 !
Anindita Ghose’s debut novel, “The Illuminated” has been released at a time, when human life is battling for its existence. Ravaged with grief, loss and death due to the pandemic have left life hopeless and devoid of joy.
The Illuminated traverses the trajectory of grief, grieving and the inconsolable pain which affects the relationship of a mother and a daughter. While the premise of the book primarily focuses on the thin contours of Tara and Shashi’s relationship, it also explores, loneliness in marriage, liberation in widowhood, sexual exploitation in academia, women in politics, the confusing nature of desire, and the distance created among family members due to loss.
Tara is a scholar of Sanskrit poetics who has been living in Dharmshala. She was raised by a father who entrusted faith in her decisions and whose life’s mission was to make her happy. His sudden death leaves her with a void that is difficult to fill. She drowns herself in remorse as she receives the news of her father’s death after many days and fails to reach for his final rites. This creates a wider divide with her mother Shashi which reaches a point of no communication.
Shashi, her mother, is a philosophy graduate who has dedicated her life to looking after the family and raising up to the status of her husband Robi, a man who is respected in the community and is financially well-off. Here we find a bitter tone of patriarchy, where Shashi’s life revolved around her husband and her ‘duties’ as a wife. The relationship had everything other than emotional bonding. Robi’s sudden death opens up a new world for her. While she tries to come to terms with the void created in her life, she also discovers new facets of her personality which she had lost in this journey as a mother and wife. She tastes a sense of liberation after Robi’s death and decides to live her life on her own terms.
While the mother and daughter struggle to come to terms with the loss in their own way, they experience the challenge to empathize with each other which is heavily laden with guilt, anger and disappointment.
Ghose explores this delicate equation with care. Maternal love which triumphs all challenges finally won over the anger of Tara and the duo made peace. What follows later, is a beautiful tale of two women who shed their identities as a mother and a daughter and bond over love, kinship, trust and the most basic identity that both of them are women. Shashi starts seeing Tara as a woman in the world and not only as a daughter. She also seeks inspiration from Tara’s feisty spirit as she comes into her own.
There is a significant sub-plot which makes this novel more contemporary is the MeToo movement. However, it would have been more compelling if it would have been dealt with greater detail.
Overall, I loved the book and it leaves you with an aftertaste and a hunger for more. It’s a beautiful journey where you explore so many emotions and the complexities of the relationships. What did not work for me was the details of the Sanskrit literature. At times I lost the pulse due to the heavy Sanskrit literature references.
I would give this book 4 out of 5 stars