Nathaniel 's Reviews > Cracking India

Perhaps I'm the wrong audience for this book. Perhaps it was a bad translation. Perhaps I'm just in a really bad mood. But I really, really did not enjoy this book.

This is a book about civic turmoil in 1940's Lahore as it transitions from India to Pakistan, from the perspective of a little girl. It is a book in which several people are harassed or killed by religious extremists, and in which half of the characters die or disappear. Yet I still found it to be boring, uneven, and poorly suited to the novel format. Though Sidhwa masterfully communicates a sense of innocent cluelessness in her young protagonist, who often recounts events she has observed without understanding them, this device often results in the reader lacking crucial information about what is actually occurring in the book. Much of what actually occurs is also only things that a young girl in a repressive culture would see, so there's more description of people sitting around the house talking or kids horsing around with each other than anything else. It is consequently difficult to develop any sort of emotional stock in the characters, who flit in and out and ultimately mostly are killed off abruptly "offscreen" without much dimensionality or purpose. There is also no story arc, and the protagonist never develops at all - it's really just a very long series of observations about a turbulent period in history as recounted by a little girl. In that sense, this book is very educational, and I learned a lot about the history of the India/Pakistan split. But "educational" is really all this story has going for it. As a memoir or in some other nonfiction format it might have been interesting, but as a novel it just doesn't work.

Again, I'm probably not the right person to appreciate this book. But unless you're a very, very committed third world development crusader of the old (1970's-1990's) school, you'll probably not find much to like here.