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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Mar 2016, 256 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2017, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Naomi Benaron
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The twelve paired stories in Shobha Rao's An Unrestored Woman trace their origins to the formation of India and Pakistan in 1947, but they transcend that historical moment.
A young woman in a crushingly loveless marriage seizes freedom in the only way left to her; a mother is forced to confront a chilling, unforgiveable crime she committed out of love; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage; a husband and wife must forgive each other for the death of their child.
Caught in extreme states of tension, in a world of shifting borders, of instability, Rao's characters must rely on their own wits. When Partition established Pakistan and India as sovereign states, the new boundary resulted in a colossal transfer of people, the largest peacetime migration in human history.
This mass displacement echoes throughout Rao's story couplets, which range across the twentieth century, moving beyond the subcontinent to Europe and America. Told with dark humor and ravaging beauty, An Unrestored Woman unleashes a fearless new voice on the literary scene.
AN UNRESTORED WOMAN
Neela, on the night she learned of her husband's death, sat under the banyan tree outside their hut and felt an intense hunger. It was on the night of the train accident. No, not an accident, she corrected herself. Not at all. She felt this same hunger on her wedding day. She was thirteen years old and she sat on the altar wearing a sparkling red sari and the gold mangal sutra around her neck—thin, even by the reduced standards of the impoverished northern village—and tried desperately to silence her growling stomach.
The hunger on her wedding day might've been caused by the tempting mountains of food stacked around her. Fruits, coconuts, laddoos, twisted piles of orange jilebi. She'd never seen so much food; her mouth watered. She hadn't eaten since early morning and that had only been a meager helping of rice and buttermilk. Neela eyed the bananas and mangoes piled on the plate between her and the priest. He was reciting Sanskrit ...
Rao confronts issues head-on. With confidence and courage, she writes the thin line between shying away from violence and indulging in it. She writes the terrible beauty of life and of death. An Unrestored Woman is an auspicious debut. It is one of the most resonant works I have read in a long time. I could not bear to let these characters go, and the last lines left me hungering for more.
(Reviewed by Naomi Benaron).
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Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times best-selling author of We Are AlL Completely Beside Ourselves, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
This transporting debut will linger in your mind long past the last page. Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did The Damage
Shobha Rao is a spellbinding storyteller. With An Unrestored Woman, she lifts a handful of individuals from the wreckage of Partition and illuminates their inner lives with daring and empathy. Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter
Shobha Rao has given us clear-eyed stories of intense ruptures and unexpected connections, searing violence and genuine love.
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, Britain withdrew from India and the country split into two so as to form an independent Muslim country to the north-east and north-west of India. Although the British withdrew essentially without incident, the decision to partition India set off a tsunami of violence and what is considered the largest single episode of human migration in history. Somewhere between 12 and 15 million people—depending on the source—abandoned their generational homelands and fled, Muslims to West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and non-Muslims, including Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians, to India. Between 1 and 2 million people were murdered, and approximately 75,000 women were kidnapped, raped, and ...
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