Moving On - Shashi Deshpande

Fiction

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Shashi Deshpande is a new authoress for me, though not at all a new author for many Kannadigas, and I'm glad I tried her novel out. It's always a joy to find amazing authors.

Deshpande's novel centers around a family who's legacy is death. She slowly unwinds each death through the course of the novel, drawing the reader in to each scenario. It's not necessarily a sad novel, though the characters grieve in their own ways, but it is a reflective one. What gripped me most while reading this is that the main character is in a constant state of analysis when her father dies. He has left a conspicuous journal that leads her to understand him (and her mother and sister) better than she ever had when they were alive. 

A widow with nearly grown children, she wanders into a sexual affair and then a romance after years of denying herself contact with others. The marriage she had treasured, we come to find out through the book, was not as healthy nor functional as we thought in the beginning. Her husband also gave in to suicide for the vaguest of reasons.  Her romance at the end of the book doesn't feel like one and goes through some difficulties, though the reader ends up feeling that it may go in a positive direction.

While all of this unwinding is happening, the character is tasked with helping her daughter decide what to do with her father's house - as he has left it to his grand daughter. She deals with people breaking in, trying to strong arm her into selling it a certain way, and all the difficulties a property owner faces - not to mention a woman alone. In the end, they decide to keep the house and the guilty parties are caught. One twist is that her sexual affair ends up to be the very person who is trying to get her out of the house. 

Deshpande does a masterful job of bringing us through some of the more abstract questions and scenarios that follow death, but are far more common than we think. How well do we actually know our parents? How functional were our relationships and how much of that was just gloss that we applied because we wanted them a certain way? The author doesn't really give us answers, but she does show how the main character makes peace with her own discoveries. She also does a terrific job of portraying a woman who has incredible strength and won't be made to fall in line with what others want. 

I highly recommend this book. There are only a few things that people outside of India would struggle to understand, and the questions that Deshpande brings up are ones that we all face and can relate to. 

~Becky~