When we find ourselves unmoored, we might be extra motivated to seek to consolidate our roots. That’s the slim connection between these two novels in which a woman confronting terrible loss decides to research her family tree. Both involve a story of migration: Jane Ashland’s ancestors moved from Norway to the USA; Neha’s in The One Who Wrote Destiny came from Kenya (and before that India) to the UK. For another novel about tracing the members of an extended family, see Kintu.
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The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland
by Nicolai Houm translated by Anna Paterson
Jane Ashland travels from her native Wisconsin to Norway, ostensibly to connect with the branch of her extended family that didn’t migrate to the US generations before. But it’s clear she’s also escaping a life that’s lost all meaning. A creative writing tutor, and novelist who is finally attracting media attention, she’s abandoned her art, suffering from something deeper than writer’s block. Receiving inadequate support from her parents and doctor – the latter expecting her to whizz through the stages of grief while seemingly getting her addicted to diazepam – she self-medicates with alcohol to ward off the panic attacks. Having alienated the family with whom she’s been staying, Jane finds herself alone in a tent amid mist-covered mountains, which is where the reader first meets her.
Cutting back and forth in time, we gradually get a sense of who Jane is, where she is, and why. Although angry and withholding, Jane is a sympathetic character right from the start. While her predicament is tragic, there’s a thread of hope that perhaps nature will prove her salvation. Nicolai Houm has previously published two other novels which were critically acclaimed in Norway. The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland is the first publication of his work in English. Thanks to Pushkin Press for my advance proof copy. For other recent reads about writers and writing, see last November’s post, Two novels about writers and the real-life characters who get beneath their skin. For more musings on literary grief, see my post Good grief for writers?
Cutting back and forth in time, we gradually get a sense of who Jane is, where she is, and why. Although angry and withholding, Jane is a sympathetic character right from the start. While her predicament is tragic, there’s a thread of hope that perhaps nature will prove her salvation. Nicolai Houm has previously published two other novels which were critically acclaimed in Norway. The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland is the first publication of his work in English. Thanks to Pushkin Press for my advance proof copy. For other recent reads about writers and writing, see last November’s post, Two novels about writers and the real-life characters who get beneath their skin. For more musings on literary grief, see my post Good grief for writers?
The One Who Wrote Destiny by Nikesh Shukla
After being diagnosed with the cancer that killed her mother while she was still a baby, thirty-five-year-old Neha gives up her job as a computer programmer to develop a program that will predict how and when a person is to die. For this, she needs all the information she can get about her extended family. Naturally reserved, and preferring computer code to any of the languages of her heritage, her ambition forces her to engage with her father Mukesh who moved from Kenya to Keighley in North Yorkshire in the mid-1960s. But will he get beyond the oft-repeated narrative of how he met her mother, and was roped into playing the part of Rama at a Diwali festival? Will Neha have the patience to listen? Meanwhile, as her twin brother Rakesh tries to make it as a stand-up comedian, Neha tries to trace their maternal grandmother with whom they spent an idyllic week in Kenya at the age of eight.
Focusing on a key moment in the life of each of the four main characters in turn (poor Rakesh, the writer, not even given the chance to tell his own story but having it told by a series of not altogether sympathetic characters he meets after his sister’s funeral), The One Who Wrote Destiny is a family saga of three generations of British Kenyan Gujaratis. It’s about difference, within families, countries and communities, and whether believing in destiny is adaptive or otherwise. It’s also about the legacy of absent parents, Mukesh must have struggled to care for the twins when he was grieving the loss of their mother. Most powerfully for me, it’s a story of the mutations of British racism over the past half century, from the mob armed with bricks and hate-filled words gathering outside the hall where Mukesh and his future wife are staging the Ramayana to Rakesh being pressurised to tell a racist joke on a (thinly-disguised) comedy quiz show on TV. I did find some of the novel’s jokes about cultural appropriation a little overdone (having never come across the tautology ‘chai tea’) – but maybe I would say that, being white. Having heard him speak at a conference last year, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read Nikesh Shukla’s third novel in advance of publication. Thanks to Atlantic books for my review copy.
Focusing on a key moment in the life of each of the four main characters in turn (poor Rakesh, the writer, not even given the chance to tell his own story but having it told by a series of not altogether sympathetic characters he meets after his sister’s funeral), The One Who Wrote Destiny is a family saga of three generations of British Kenyan Gujaratis. It’s about difference, within families, countries and communities, and whether believing in destiny is adaptive or otherwise. It’s also about the legacy of absent parents, Mukesh must have struggled to care for the twins when he was grieving the loss of their mother. Most powerfully for me, it’s a story of the mutations of British racism over the past half century, from the mob armed with bricks and hate-filled words gathering outside the hall where Mukesh and his future wife are staging the Ramayana to Rakesh being pressurised to tell a racist joke on a (thinly-disguised) comedy quiz show on TV. I did find some of the novel’s jokes about cultural appropriation a little overdone (having never come across the tautology ‘chai tea’) – but maybe I would say that, being white. Having heard him speak at a conference last year, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read Nikesh Shukla’s third novel in advance of publication. Thanks to Atlantic books for my review copy.
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