Josie Mitchell
The Parent Trap
In Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi’s Booker-shortlisted novel, a young woman watches as her mother loses things – recipes, streets, faces. Associations fade or blur until her mother is unable to navigate the streets of Pune in west India, where she has spent her whole life.
Memory is ‘a form of architecture’, wrote the artist Louise Bourgeois. ‘You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks.’ The novel’s narrator, Antara, must witness her mother’s house of memory crumble. The account is sharp and unsentimental, though rich with emotion: ‘I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,’ Antara tells us.
Faced with becoming a long-term carer, Antara imagines how things might be if India ‘allowed for assisted suicide like the Netherlands’. In fact, she confesses to dreaming about her mother’s death: ‘Sometimes, I refer to Ma in the past tense even though she is still alive. This would hurt her
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis
*Offer ends in TWO days*
Take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'Nourished on a diet of exceptionalism and meritocracy, millennials internalised the harmful falsehood that hard work necessarily yields success. The very least they should settle for is a "cool job", one that ... is the focus of their "passion".'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/workers-twerkers