Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fasting, Feasting
Book Review: Anita Desai
Summary: 4 Stars
Anita Desai and her daughter Kiran are two foremost writers about India; it's past traditions and contemporary societal clashes told through the stories of very believable, sympathetic characters and their bizarre and purposeful struggles to cope and thrive. Wonderful descriptive language draws the reader into sometimes humorus, sometimes tragic, swirl of life.Book Review: Classic literature.
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, yes, Anita Desai does it again. The words are simple and precise, but the world weaved through them is profound and sad. The narrative is restrained. The characters are restrained. But the reader can be anything but.Book Review: Definitely more Fasting than Feasting!
Summary: 2 Stars
Very disappointing work from one of my favourite authors. Minimal character development, hardly any plot to speak of, stereotypical in the extreme, 'Fasting, Feasting' is a very pale reflection of the earlier (and stupendous) 'Clear Light of Day'. The attempt to juxtapose an eastern family dynamic versus a western one, without fully exploring either, came off as forced and disjointed ..and left each narrative feeling incomplete and unfulfilling to the reader.Book Review: Delves into the Inner Sanctum of an Orthodox Indian Family
Summary: 5 Stars
from BlueJeanOnline.comby Dashini Ann Jeyathurai, age 19, Teen Correspondent
In Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai takes on a task that many Indian and expatriate authors have deemed Herculean in nature, a task that involves delving into the inner sanctum of an orthodox Indian family in India. Many who have attempted this challenge failed and came out looking ignorant and insensitive of certain aspects of the culture. Few have succeeded, and among them is Anita Desai.
The reader is faced with several poignant issues played upon in a middle-class family attempting to deal with modernization, but they ultimately that realize life is meant to be lived in their society. A society with a veritable amount of prejudices weaved into its complex tapestry of customs and beliefs.
The story in itself is told from the perspective of the protagonist, Uma, who starts out as a wide-eyed child at a convent who has an enthusiasm for education and an awe of the enigmatic nuns who seem to glide through the school grounds. Unlike her younger sister Aruna, our protagonist does not have the privilege of having "books marked healthily in green and blue for success and approval." Instead, with the birth of her brother Arun, Uma takes on the role of nanny. Here, one encounters the distinct preference her parents have for the male child - a practice that was not uncommon at the time. The teenage Uma questions this sexism when she points out that an ayah had looked after both Aruna and herself as children. Why wasn't the ayah's care sufficient for a male child?
Desai next explores the conventional belief that tied a woman's worth to her physical appearance. A woman who lacked beauty was often rushed into the first marital offer she received, only to pay a heavy price later on. Desai shows the challenges a single woman faces regardless of how successful she is. By contrast, Uma's cousin is portrayed as the ultimate success because she is able to marry well thanks to her looks. One wonders how happy she truly was, however, when she eventually takes her own life.
Arun, Uma's brother, takes center stage several chapters into the book as he begins his studies in America, where he meets the dysfunctional Patton family. Arun is faced with unlimited freedom and grapples with an alien culture in which his landlord's daughter periodically vomits after meals and Ms. Patton is almost a non-entity in the family.
Ultimately, Anita Desai has established herself as one of India's finest fiction writers. To me, great authors are the ones who can make you keep turning the pages, eager to read the next line although there may be more pressing matters at hand - and Desai fulfills that description....
Book Review: Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
Summary: 4 Stars
In her novel, Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai eventually accomplishes what many writers attempt and then fail to achieve. She uses light touch, simple language, uncomplicated structure, but at the same time addresses some very big issues and makes a point.
Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity that parents present. These parents, however, are not at all alike. Mama is protective, perhaps selfish, and not a little indolent. Papa is a parsimonious control freak who locks away the telephone because someone might use it. But they are at least together. Their relationship has survived, despite the long wait for a son, and their disappointment at his disability.
Uma and Arun also have a sister, Aruna. She is bright and pretty, but in her own way she is also disabled, because she is a woman. Arun's disability is visible, but Aruna's exists because of the her society's preconceptions about women.
Uma is not pretty, nor is she academic. She wears thick glasses and has fits. And so in the middle class society the family inhabits, Uma can pursue only two possible roles. Either she can be married off, or she can become a labourer, a near slave for the family. The former, of course, is the same as the latter. Only the location is different. For Uma marriage doesn't happen. It does, but it fails before it starts, since the groom was already married and merely wanted to collect another dowry. The arranged marriages of both Uma's sister and her cousin also fail. Initially well starred, both end tragically.
The first part of Fasting, Feasting suggests a domestic drama, a faintly comic family trying to cope with their own cultural minority status within India's vastness. It takes awhile for the tragic elements of the story to surface. But when they do, they also disappoint, because only the two disabled characters, Uma and Arun, eventually display any honesty or compassion, everyone else being merely selfish, even those who kill themselves to end the pain. For women, it seems, even achievement is nothing but an asset to assist their trade. When offered a place at Oxford, a girl's duty precludes acceptance and necessity frames the letter as evidence of her greater eligibility. So what seemed to be a pleasant family tale of the idiosyncrasies of culture becomes a tragedy, and a tragedy for all women. Ugly, unmemorable Uma is the only apparent survivor, and that only because she is not even a competitor. She exists on the scraps of life she is allowed.
But what of Arun, the disabled boy? Well he is quite a bright lad. He goes to university in the USA, and to an institution with status in Massachusetts. But what is he to do in the holidays when the college is closed? We can't afford to bring his all the way home, concludes parsimonious Papa.
So Arun lodges with the Pattons, an all-American nuclear family, an American Dream of sorts, mum, dad, two kids, one of each. But Dad is a laconic type. A beer from the fridge keeps him quiet. The son has all kinds of ambitions, and yet none that are realistic. Mom is an emotional wreck. She years for something in her confusion, but has not idea what it might be. And her daughter is bulimic. Happy families.
So through Arun's eyes, and to some extent as a result of his culturally challenging presence, Anita Desai presents a picture of middle class American life that is utterly dysfunctional. But it is again the women who are most deeply affected. Mom does all the shopping and cooking to feed the unappreciative men and the daughter who cannot eat. She fantasises about Arun's cultural authenticity, sees in him qualities for which she yearns. The daughter is a complete head case. She is fat wanting to be thin, eating to fast, stuffing sweets until she vomits, perhaps a slave to a male-generated concept of female perfection. And Arun witnesses all of this. Eventually, in his deformity, he is the only presence that is not self-obsessed.
The title is important. Fasting, Feasting presents apparent opposites, two contrasting, if imbalanced scenarios, India and the USA. It offers two deformed observers, Uma and Arun. It unpicks two contrasting cultures and finds that women are slaves in both. The opposites are thus ultimately similar, hardly opposed.