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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Stitching disturbance: Belonging by Umi Sinha

19/6/2016

6 Comments

 
Crouching on a high shelf beside the fanlight above the dining room doors, twelve-year-old Lila watches her parents and their guests sit down to a celebratory dinner. Her mother has embroidered the tablecloth in honour of her father’s fiftieth birthday, but the intricate design is obscured by the plates, placemats and silver platters. When these are finally removed, Lila still can’t get a clear sight of her mother’s handiwork, but she takes in the anger and disgust of the guests as they flee the room. Curious, she follows her father to his study where, before the adults usher her away, she sees the blood-strewn walls and smells the cordite.
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From this intriguing prologue, set in Peshawar in 1907, we follow Lila to Sussex, where she is sent to live with her great-aunt, Mina, in a culture and climate that feels decidedly alien. We witness her lonely adolescence in which her previous life in India is never mentioned, through the fight for women’s suffrage, to the First World War and the influenza epidemic of 1919. The novel also takes us back in time to Lila’s grandmother, Cecily, and her letters home to her twin sister, Mina, beginning in 1855 when she sets sail to India to marry an older man she barely knows. There’s a third point of view character in the diaries of Henry, Lila’s father, growing up happily, despite having never known his mother, in India until exiled to England to school.

Belonging is a quiet novel on a broad canvas, a novel about violence, from the absurdities of the British Raj to the damage wrought by family secrets when “we carry our parents inside us, their blood in our veins, their voices in our heads” (p311). It shows how resentment was engendered within the indigenous population when the relationship changed from commercial to imperial, culminating in the horrific Siege of Cawnpore. (I’m sure I’ve read about this in another novel, but haven’t been able to trace it.) It’s also about snobbery and the fantasy of racial purity, and the tragic consequences for those who don’t quite fit.

I liked this novel and my quibbles and more about my own limitations as a reader than the book itself, so no need to indulge me by reading on. I appreciate a time-fractured narrative with distinct points of view, but I struggle to keep track when we move back and forth between members of different generations of the same family at different points in time, as this does. While the Indian characters are sympathetically drawn, and the impact on them of structural inequalities is cleverly depicted, I thought it a pity that, with three point of view characters, all were of English stock. But without them it wouldn’t have worked so well as a family saga, and I did enjoy finding out just how Lila’s mother had stitched her disturbance into the tablecloth and where the origins of that disturbance might lie.

Thanks to Brighton-based small press Myriad Editions for my review copy.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Poppy Peacock link
20/6/2016 08:45:13 am

I've got this on my wishlist (initially intrigued by both premise & narrative structure) ... now keen to read it all the more from your review Anne, and oh, do wish I could spy a look at that tablecloth!

Reply
Annecdotist
21/6/2016 02:03:34 pm

I hope you enjoy it, Poppy. Even though it’s (only?) paperback, there are some attractive line drawings of the embroidery in the book, as well as the beautiful cover, but you have to read to the end find out what was so shocking.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
20/6/2016 12:29:11 pm

Yes, it's the tablecloth that's got me intrigued too. I wonder what was embroidered onto it, and what angered the guests so. Is it revealed in the book, or is the girl simply removed, forever to hurt through the lack of knowledge? Scenes like that which followed would be difficult to leave behind.

Reply
Annecdotist
21/6/2016 02:05:55 pm

Oh, yes, Norah, the author does paint a word picture of the embroidery towards the end of the novel (I’d have been disappointed if that secret hadn’t been revealed) and all I can say is that it must have taken a lot of skill to depict that scene in stitches.

Reply
Sarah
27/6/2016 07:55:42 pm

What was on that tablecloth?! I'm dying to know (no pun intended). Seems there's a lot going on here. This line is so stunning: "we carry our parents inside us, their blood in our veins, their voices in our heads..." How true.

Reply
Annecdotist
28/6/2016 12:59:16 pm

I don't want you to die, Sarah, and, of course, I can't reveal the author's secret here, nor can I describe it as eloquently as she did, so I'm afraid you're going to have to read the book!

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