Bøger af Padma Viswanathan

The Charterhouse of Padma is a novel told in two parts: in each half, a South Asian woman, "P," living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is writing an essay about her favorite color: chartreuse. The first P is a translator and professor, married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As lockdown commences, she discovers a secret about him, one that upends her understanding of their relationship and their marriage. In the gulf of their widening estrangement, P imagines a double, someone very like herself but less lonely, more independent, more angry, more maternal, more fun... . Now we meet another "P": a novelist, married to a successful poet and translator called Mat. It's her second marriage-the first was upended when she discovered a bad secret about her then-husband. This P is abraded, exhausted and enraged: by racial microaggressions, by structural obstacles, by the ways her husband's reaction to her own overdue career success is challenging their marriage. Granted stillness by the pandemic, though, P rediscovers joy and hope in her relationship. Eventually, each woman is led by her essay to the Chartreuse Mountains, the region made famous by the monks and their secret elixir, as the two "P"s trajectories converge"--

Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.