britpeters

This book is worth all the acclaim it's gotten. Although I didn't choose it for this purpose, it was a good book to read while travelling, since one of its main themes is displacement and adjustment. On both my flights, my seatmates were on their way to or from India -- an interesting coincidence -- or do you just tend to notice things more when they are in the forefront of your mind? Favorite quotes, among many: "Ghosh shook his head. 'You are still young. Free,' he said, spreading his hands apart for emphasis. 'Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking about it too much first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.'" -p. 16 "For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding." -p. 49 "In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end." -p. 286-287

2022-10-29 03:54