A Portrait of Female Consciousness
One of the important reasons why we read novels is for its ability to grant us a radical access to human interiority.
Recommendations is a weekly column, in our Books section, where we invite a well-known author to recommend four books translated from an Indian language. These are not just recommendations, but books that have made an impact on their creative world.
This month, we will feature author Saharu Nusaiba Kannanri’s selections.
Tomb of Sand
By Geetanjali Shree
Translated by Daisy Rockwell
It is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to know another human being and none of us are certain either about to what extent we can know ourselves. One of the important reasons why we read novels is for its ability to grant us a radical access to human interiority. While this is more or less achievable in literary fiction of almost any length, this particular need is best satisfied in what are usually called ‘big fat novels’ — Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, Joyce’s “Ulysses”, Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”, Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” all come to my mind.
Geetanjali Shree’s “Tomb of Sand”, through its protagonist in Ma, delivers this, both in scale and nuance. I haven’t read a more accomplished portrait of a female consciousness in many years. The book, of course, is more than a mere character study. It is about history and memory, desire and language, mother and daughter, border and belonging, loss and restitution, but ultimately, I believe, the triumph of the novel is Ma, the great and complex consciousness of an octogenarian woman — seemingly simple, and small enough to escape through the windows. A great book like this cannot travel to another language without the help of a great translator: Daisy Rockwell’s playful, frequently inventive, and erudite translation convinces me that she was the translator the book was looking for.
