those who have a stake in the adoption narrative

As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the central ideas of Not Only The Things That Have Happened is the complex and inherently problematic nature of inter-country adoption. That idea has not been explored by most Indian reviewers to the extent I might have liked, but I have been pleased to see several US birth mother and adoptee rights blogs taking a serious looks at the book from that perspective.

Marijane Nguyen, a Taiwanese American adoptee and music therapist, had this to say in her review on her blog, Beyond Two Worlds:

Mridula Koshy’s debut novel, Not Only the Things That Have Happened, is not a tale for the faint-hearted. It is a story that explores the impact of adoption, oppression, loss and identity. Koshy’s prose and storytelling is hauntingly beautiful and speaks directly to the heart. It is not a quick read, but one that invokes thought, and as such, is an important and compelling work... An element of grief seeps heavily into much of the story, as most of the characters experience a great loss. I didn't mind the sadness, quite the opposite. There was an underlying rawness that pulled me deeper into the story and gave it a true sense of realism. (full review is here.)

Marijane followed up by interviewing me. You can read that exchange here. 

Suz Bednarz, a reunited birth mother and  founder of ehbabes.com, a site and support group that provides reunion assistance to those separated by adoption, reviewed the book on her blog, Writing My Wrongs. Here's an excerpt:

I finished reading Mridula Koshy’s book Not Only the Things That Have Happened. I definitely recommend it, particularly for individuals experienced with trans-racial adoption. Koshy’s writing is thick and rich from the very first page. (full review is here.)

Jane Edwards wrote a lengthy review of the book at [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum. Her review also includes an interview. You can read the whole thing here.

This is the most nervous I've been in reading reviews of this book. I can't say how good it feels to be read seriously by those who I read as I was researching this book--the people who have a stake in this issue. Writing, like politics, is a fundamentally collective project. Developing new narratives for inter-country adoption is a task many, many people have been working on for a long time. I'm glad to see my book is contributing to that work.

Recent Reviews: Biblio and some blog love from here and there

Not Only the Things That Have Happened has been reviewed in several places recently.

Here's Manasi Subramaniam, writing in Biblio:

Koshy’s writing is dense and layered in the way of an onion: peeling involves tears and eating involves pungency, but the stinging rawness of the process is ultimately rewarding, if disquieting...The constant intermingling of timelines is expertly handled by the author with precision and subtlety. The obliqueness of the many layers can be difficult to navigate, but in all its piercing poignancy the book has an edge of empathy that is perhaps the most endearing quality of Koshy’s writing. (Full review available on the author's blog, or at Biblio, registration required).

***

I'm also pleased to see the book getting read and reviewed among bloggers. 

Here is Amrit Sinha at Live Your Life:

The story telling is immaculate, brilliant at parts, and accompanied with a beauty that is raw and divine...Like a work of art this novel narrates its tale, and you are drawn hypnotically towards its innate charms. Do not disengage yourself; rather, drift with the flow, and delve deeper into the trance. This book is about emotions of love, loss, trust and more, and once you are done unraveling the numerous tales hidden within the pages, you ponder over the firm faith that served as Annakutty’s strength throughout her life - “If it is real, you can remember not only the things that have happened, but also the things that are going to happen.” (Full review here).

Here's Deboshree, writing at Of Paneer, Pulao, and Pune:

As the 352 pages of Mridula Koshy’s ‘Not Only The Things That Have Happened’ narrate a tale – and so compellingly at that – crypticness gives way to wonder, melancholy and loveliness...‘Not Only…’ is a treat. Befitting for those hours of solitude when life looms large with questions of existence, dependence and persistence. As Anna puts it herself –“If I could, I would go back to the beginning. But I can’t. I can only go the end.” And this tale, by all means, is one that deserves to be accompanied till the last page.  (Full review here.)

Yatin Gupta, at Me About My Thoughts writes:

Mridula Koshy’s this book is a poignant tale about the mother and the son. The love, regret, loneliness, sadness, the search of identity and various other emotions come out beautifully through her words. A reader may find it a bit difficult to get hang of this book in the beginning but once you get hold of the story, you will not be able to put the book down. (Full review here).

And finally, Fiza Patham at insaneowl:

Mridula Koshy has captivated me with her novel ‘Not Only the Things That Have Happened'...the text also allows the reader to indirectly be a sort of ‘back seat writer’ who completes the story with his or her own interpretations… as it is said, the author writes the book but it is indeed the reader that finishes it. I have been deeply affected by this book & I recommend this newly crafted design of words to all & sundry. (full review here).

You can find a summary of reviews so far here.  

Reviewed in HT

Very happy to see Aishwarya Subramanian's review in the Hindustan Times this week.

[Not Only the Things That Have Happened] leaps nimbly between times and styles and its characters' points of view. The sheer quality of Koshy's prose is probably the best reason to read her, and in the earlier sections in particular the book's structure offers her a great deal of scope to play with style, as well as to weave in the cadences of colloquial Malayalam.

Koshy manages to touch upon the politics of adoption, language, exile, identity. Such a novel could easily have fallen into the trap of being dull and worthy. That it doesn't is something of a triumph; this is a fantastic book.

You can read the full review here. Go here for more reviews of the book.

And if you live in the US, you can get a signed copy here.

Hinge

Very pleased to read Anvar Alikhan's review of NOTTTHH in India Today this week.

Not Only the Things That Have Happened is a kind of literary diptych, like those artworks that consist of a pair of painted surfaces joined in the middle by a hinge, so that they face in two very slightly different directions. It is the poignant pairing of two hinged stories, of a mother and a son who were separated by circumstances many, many years ago...We hear the story from various angles: From Tessiebaby, Annakutty's half-sister; from Father Paul, the empathetic village priest; from Gretchen Oster, the woman who first adopted Asa, and managed to lose him. The result is a novel that is complex, yet so elegantly written that it manages to read lightly and pleasurably, without ever showing its inner workings. And that is what makes it so special. Koshy, who divides her own life between India and Portland, Oregon, is able to capture the worlds of both the protagonists, in Kerala and in the US, with admirable authenticity and acuity.  

It is a remarkably self-assured work, and it feels slightly humbling to be in the presence of a literary talent like this. I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more of Mridula Koshy in the times to come.

 Read the full review here.

First Reviews

A couple of reviews have come out this week. Extracts and links are below.

 First, there is this from Naintara Oberoi in Time Out:

Motherhood looms very large – and in many forms – in the book as well. Koshy’s contemplative eye takes in several maternal figures...Despite the drama, Not Only the Things That Have Happened is far from schmaltzy, rather feeling its way through the kinds of lack that cannot be blotted out. The novel retains Koshy’s characteristically measured, poetic voice with its undertow of unease. (Full review here.)        

And this from Sanjay Sipahimalani in Mint Lounge:

The immersion in the lives of the people of this region is almost Faulknerian in its intensity, along with the milieu against which they have come of age: The influence of Catholicism, the grip of caste, trade union and Left movements and the distance between the impoverished village and the bustling city...Koshy’s
 primary interest is in the impact of past bereavement on present-day lives and she follows her characters’ befuddled journeys and their real and imagined histories with an empathetic eye. (Full review here.)

Update: You can read a more recent, and very nice, review of the book by Anvar Alikhan in India Today here. 

Reviews and links from DNA and down under

In DNA this week - Deepanjana Pal picks seven writers who've influenced writing in India. You can read the on-line slideshow version of her piece here. The e-paper version is here.

 I'm finally catching up on news from Australia.  I've also updated this blog's sidebar to indicate where Australian reader's can find the book.

On January 21, If It Is Sweet was "The Pick of the Week" in The Age (Australia). In his review, Cameron Woodhead wrote:

A short-story collection of rare eloquence and maturity, Mridula Koshy's If It Is Sweet mines the lives of ordinary people in the great metropolises of India...What is surprising is the intensity and freshness of the author's prose, her gift for the dramatic compression of opposite emotions, and the striking sense of drama she brings to her characters' interior lives.

The Age also had this to say about the book in another review published in their Bookshop section January 15, 2012:

The matter of India will loom large in the 21st century. This collection of stories looks at the country's class conflict,  castes and the new capitalism. It is character-centred - women and men, workers and children. The struggle is just to stay afloat across generations (the title story). Labour is not depicted as being dignified but nor does Koshy condescend to the people in her pages. Impressive.

While in Australia last year, I part of a panel discussion with Leslie Cannold and Jane Caro at the Brisbane Writer's Festival. The talk was later broadcast on ABC Radio National. You  can hear that discussion here.

 I was also interviewed on, 'Yes She Can’, a multicultural women’s radio program broadcasting on Canberra’s Multicultural Service (CMS) 91.1 FM. You can hear the show here.

And finally a post I wrote on the Australian blog, Readings.com here. It gives some of the stories behind the stories in If It Is Sweet.

Year End

I can't believe I've made it on to a year-end list. Manjushree Thapa said this in her Best Fiction article in ekantipur.com:

"So much of the English literature coming out of India today is marred by its authors’ inability to take pleasure in language. (Which, if you think about it, is quite self-defeating.) If It Is Sweet by Mridula Koshy is an important corrective to this. Every story of this collection shines like a cut-and-polished gemstone lodged in the finest of settings."

It's past the year-end, but I'll have my list out soon.

After the Fall

This is a longer version of a piece I wrote for the Indian Express. You can see the on-line version here.

The Bible of my childhood was beautiful: covered in maroon leather, gold tooled, gilt edged, and illustrated with magnificent colour plates. Did it have marbled end pages? Possibly. There definitely were pages for recording the happenings of many generations of family life—births, marriages, deaths. We, a family displaced and dispossessed, were too abashed to touch these pages. I read through all the other pages—the glorious and the gory, the ones that made me weep and the ones that made me squirm. I was nine then, and ten when we moved and lost the Bible. With the passing years the memory of the actual book grew grander in an effort to keep up with the resonant power of the stories contained within.

Recently I have been reading aloud from the Books of Samuel and Kings to my seven, nine and eleven year olds. The emotions contained within are unparalleled in any other work of literature. We have King Saul’s love of the young David, followed by his jealous rage when David surpasses him in the people’s eyes. Saul chases David into fields, David chases Saul into caves. In the crucial moment, neither can bear to kill the other. The plot thickens as David is rescued by Saul’s son Jonathan, who loves David ‘as if his life depended on him; he loved him as he loved himself.’

Many chapters and stories later when David is king over all of Israel and Saul and Jonathan are cruelly dead, when David is done sending Uriah to certain death so he can take Uriah’s wife Bathsheba to bed, when his son Amnon rapes his daughter Tamar, and when another son Absalom, brother of Tamar, kills Amnon, and turns on David, the text grows silent as David’s tens of thousands march against Absalom. There is no carnage written into the pages, just David’s grief, the grief of a man who lost his first love so many years before, betrayed and killed many others, and now hearing the news of his son’s death weeps: ‘My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!’ As a writer I can see the value of where the narrative slips underground to emerge further on in the story, with a roar.

Some Recent Blog Love

I really love getting blog reviews. Often literary blogs are written by fellow writers, and always by avid and discerning readers. Here are three blog reviews and one interview that have come in recently.

This book is a delight to read. Koshy is a wonderful stylist; her style is exactly right for the short story: evocative, finished and allusive. In her plots, she is not afraid to be twisted, and she mixes the surreal and the gritty with aplomb.
-- Rimi Chatterjee's blog, Live Like a Flame

I collect books and have a special fondness for short story anthologies, like many genuine readers out there. And like them, I too have this habit of reading passages, chapters and stories again and again. I know that I will read these stories again sometime in the future. There are some authors one can return to. Mridula Koshy is one of them.
-- Rumjhum Biswas' blog, Writers & Writerisms

Koshy’s writing is a hurricane, words swirling around with such intensity around the reader who she situates within the calm of the eye.

--Words Uttered in Haste

I am always surprised by the things that come out of my mouth. It seems yet again it is about the meaning of work in our lives. I think this has a lot to do with where I live.
My Little Magazine: Interview

Review Highlights

In its first six weeks, If It Is Sweet has been covered widely in the Indian press. Here are some highlights from reviews so far.

Mridula Koshy’s new book of short stories, If It Is Sweet, is a well-paced, strikingly original collection that navigates locales between Los Angeles and Delhi, using several voices to mark out its thematic and stylistic ground…This riveting collection, at once nuanced and adventurous, will stay in the reader’s memory for the way it probes away at the complexities of class and money, transgressions and violations.

--Naintara Maya Oberoi, TimeOut Delhi, July 9, 2009. Full review here:

There is a rawness about these stories that comes not from a lack of intellectual sophistication but from the forthrightness of the narration and the uninhibited portrayal of emotions. The writer is clearly a close observer of life, her own and of others around her, almost a spy who pries into their private moments of love, intimacy, fear, jealousy, proximity to death…What counts more than the narrative is the language — tender, poetic, informed by our mutilingual milieu. The stories retrieve to fiction, if not to history, marginalised lives around us. But they aren’t shown as objects of condescending pity, but as real beings with their own joys and longings. They together make a statement about power in its myriad manifestations, from capitalism to patriarchy.

--K. Satchidanandan, Tehelka, June 21, 2009. Full review here:

Koshy—who was born in Delhi, lived and worked in the US for about two decades, and now lives in Delhi again—says she was “a trade unionistbefore she was a mother and a mother before she was a writer”. These anterior layers of her experience are given expression in the mingled toughness and tenderness of her stories. Many of them are about an underclass of workers—construction labourers, carpenters, garbage collectors, maids—living quietly in the interstices of a thriving south Delhi; one family’s slum home has tin walls “filched long ago from the construction of the Chirag Dilli flyover”. There are excellent close descriptions of the labour of workers, whose condition is sometimes intuited from the smallest details, as when the protagonist of ‘The Good Mother’ hears the sounds of hammering next door and decides that the tools are either “made light, for smaller hands, or made cheaply, for poorer people."...this is absolutely rigorous and distinctive work, and there is a sound and a sense in these stories that make Indian fiction a bigger place.

--Chandrahas Choudhury, Live Mint, June 20, 2009. Full review here. And on The Middle Stage.

Here is a natural stylist, with an easy, accessible turn of phrase…Hers is a determined, stealthy eye, born of fierce concentration, often conjuring up a rustic quiet: ‘Now her pregnant beauty startles him like the fish that rustle and slip past his shins in the flooded fields of paddy he bends over to seed.’

--Rajni George, India Today, June 22, 2009. Full review here.

Koshy’s insights into hidden lives will resonate with people across the country.

--Anjana Basu, The Statesman, June 14, 2009. Full review here.

The writing is evocative, layered and masterful... [Koshy's] fascination with the underbelly is something she has in common with Aravind Adiga, but where his writing is terse and action- oriented, her stories delve deep into the head space of these faceless, marginalised people.

--Sunaina Kumar, Mail Today, Sunday June 7, 2009

…beautifully spare and evocative, with turns that are riveting, surprising, and revealing of the mysteries of the human psyche… Koshy’s greatest strength is that she never over-explains or condescends. She expects the reader to follow even the most dizzying movements, such as rapid changes of geography, or sly shifts from interior monologue to dialogue. This fine sensibility sets her apart. So many writers today rush to ‘say something’ at the expense of artistry. Koshy is a rare—and very welcome—exception.

--Manjushree Thapa, Outlook Magazine, June 8, 2009. Full review here (free registration required)

Past Reviews

From reviews of First Proof 3 (Penguin India)

Somehow, the fiction section of such anthologies is always less rewarding. The stories, though competently told, rarely open up new territory. One exception is Mridula Koshy’s story about an impoverished Kerala family in the US, “When the Child was a Child”. For a change, Indians have problems relating to each other, instead of relating to American society. I wasn’t surprised to read that the author, who lives in New Delhi, was once a Union and Community Organiser in the US. Her work is certainly the most accomplished in this section.
— Eunice de Souza, Time Out Mumbai, Issue 16 April 4, 2008
http://www.timeoutmumbai.net/books/book_review_details.asp?code=229; reg. required


Among the fiction writers, Mridula Koshy, Temsula Ao and Noureen Sarna leave an indelible impression. Despair and fortitude fight an unequal battle in “When the Child Was a Child”, Koshy’s haunting portrait of an impoverished U.S.-based Malayali family coming apart at the seams as it struggles to survive in a squalid tenement building reverberating with “the quiet misery of spoons moving in plates”.
— Mita Ghose, The Hindu Literary Review, Sunday, February 3, 2003
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2008/02/03/stories/2008020350080300.htm


From reviews of 21 Under 40 (Zubaan)

“Mridula Koshy’s ‘The Large Girl’ and Diane Romany’s ‘Ferris Wheel’ are bold, evocative.—Brinda Bose, IndiaToday, April 30, 2007

How much more real, and empathetic is the lesbian in Mridula Koshy’s “The Large Girl”, so delicately drawn down to the last, grief-ridden sentence: “Do you miss me? A thousand and one chances will come and go in this small city, in this small world. I will never see you again.” There is sexual imagery in this story, too, but it’s bred into the waft and weave of the tale.
—Sheba Thayil, The Hindu Literary, Review, July 1, 2007
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2007/07/01/stories/2007070150020100.htm


“…do feminist love stories exist? On what terms? And how does one wash that cloying taste away? Perhaps the answer lies in Mridula Koshy’s “The Large Girl,” the story of the ‘extramarital’ relationship between onetime classmates: romance threaded into the mundane of shared cigarettes on a terrace, recurrent (and impotent) quarrels and partings, comparisons to other lovers, imperfection (“Mostly I am thinking, ‘Why do I like her? She is so vulgar’ ”). But something rings disturbingly true: mostly love is messy, frustrating, imperfect.”
—Disha Mullick Bose, Biblio, May/June, 2007

“The Large Girl” by Mridula Koshy is about an extramarital lesbian fling, and honestly, the lesbian angle is not what makes the story sensational, it’s got a lot more going for it.
—Rupa Gulab, DNA Sunday April 22, 2007