Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fasting, Feasting
Book Review: Literature at Its Best
Summary: 5 Stars
I am amazed at some of the negative or lukewarm reviews this book has received. I read this when it was first published and was left breathless. I was in a state of bliss. This is what literature is supposed to be, I thought. This book, the first I had read by Anita Desai, restored my faith in fiction. I have been dissatisfied with the state of fiction for years and was ecstatic that I had found a book that could please me in a way that only great art is capable of doing. It is unfortunate that Desai has not received the popular acclaim that she deserves, despite her critical acclaim. She will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the best writers of the late twentieth century. I simply cannot say enough about this powerful, beautifully written, and subtle novel.Book Review: Lovely, heart-rending read about loneliness and family
Summary: 3 Stars
This is my first Anita Desai book and I enjoyed reading it. A story about the lives Uma and her brother, Arun, living in different continents, the book explores two different cultures and the different ways they treat untraditional, unconventional people. Throughout the book, the thread of the story is thinly related to meals and the food the characters encounter in their days.
Although I enjoyed reading the book, there's a certain restlessness and pointlessness, if you will, throughout the story. It's interesting to learn about the two cultures and I very much relate to the characters' loneliness and feeling of being a stranger even at home. However, I can't help but question the progression of the story. A lot of things are not resolved and the ending is rather unsatisfying. Nevertheless, this is a pretty well-written book and I will definitely read Anita Desai's other books.
Book Review: OMG WORST BOOK EVERRRR
Summary: 1 Stars
this is truly the worst book ive ever read. im soon 2 burn it. we had 2 read it for school, thats the only reason i finished it. it was horribly written, no plot and just outright boring. if your looking for a good read, FIND ANOTHER BOOK!!!!Book Review: Only half a book
Summary: 2 Stars
Fasting, Feasting is not a cohesive whole, but two badly fitted halves. The first half, which is better written, is set in India and follows Uma, an unmarried middle-aged woman living at the beck and call of her aging parents and enduring a kind of emotional starvation. Her parents will not permit her to establish any sort of life beyond the wall of her home, and her situation evokes pathos. The second half follows her brother, Arun, who is the center of the parents' attention. However, most of Arun's experiences are set in the U.S., where he is studying at an American university and spending the summer living with a suburban family, the Pattons. This section is not only utterly unconvincing, it is a caricature, and, in places, downright dishonest. So oblivious is each American family member---obsessively barbecuing dad, lipsticked mom, sullen and bulimic daughter, jock son---that Arun can't help but be uncomfortable. I suppose there are families as unpleasant as this one, but it's hard to imagine. So eager is Desai to critique what she clearly intends to be a typical American family that she depicts the father returning from work each day with a plastic sack dripping with blood from the meat he must throw on the grill (and that Arun, the mother, and the daughter won't eat). American supermarket meat does not drip through its plastic tray and this book does not compel.Book Review: Places Are Not What They Seem
Summary: 3 Stars
This is the first novel I've ever read by an Indian Author, so I have no frame of reference within which to compare this novel. Desai certainly has her own merits as a writer and her own opinions as a viewer of the world, but her effort comes out a little uneven and undisciplined.The novel starts off very masterfully and alluringly. Desai, at times, has an excellent prose style that is really more poetic than prosaic. The opening chapter with the initial characterization of MamaPapa and insect imagery and the cadences of her porch-swing description/metaphor are all very promising and well worth an English major's explication. I was reeled in by this first chapter like few other times I have ever read a novel.
But Desai doesn't sustain this throughout the novel. There are flashes of brilliance, certainly, but all-in-all her prose-style and narrative-weaving are uneven. I found myself disappointed in terms of her actual verbal display throughout the novel.
The structure of the novel is rather simple, also. Simply put, the reader reads "I" and "II" - the novel is a diptych. "I", which comprises over 2/3 of the novel and centers around the elder daughter Uma, ends with a somewhat inaccessible image of Uma standing in a river (no, this is not a fatal occurrence). Immediately, Desai shifts from India to the U.S. where Uma's younger son, Arun, has come to study at college. From there, you only have about a 60 pages or so read which was nice and thoughtful, but would have been better with more development.
What Desai does best, however, is explore the different qualities of life offered by examples of both typically Indian life and typically American life. Through the acquiescence of Uma to her very cut-out and preordained life in India and Arun's cooly observant and internalized reaction to American suburbia, the reader can well imagine that such a superior/inferior American/Indian (respectively) dichotomy is far from applicable. Instead, one can see through the fates and actions of Uma and Arun very real tensions between different value systems and appreciate the differences between them.
Overall, Desai gets a B for artistry and A- for content (more development would have been nice). It's really worth the quick (circa 230 light pages) read.