Latitudes of Longing

March 1, 2020
A promising debut novel sweeps through a series of stories that join human lives to the natural world in South Asia. The first book of fiction by Mumbai-based journalist Swarup is made up of four linked novellas. Their titles--Islands, Faultline, Valley, and Snow Desert--suggest the book's emphasis on how people connect (or don't) to their planet. Islands is a strong start, the engaging story of an arranged marriage between two very different people that grows into genuine love. Girija Prasad, India born and Oxford educated, is a man of science. His bride, Chanda Devi, has more education than many Indian women but is also a mystic who routinely speaks to ghosts and trees and can sometimes see the future. In the middle of the 20th century, Girija's government job takes them to the remote, wildly beautiful Andaman Islands, a penal colony under the British Empire that newly independent India is trying to figure out what to do with. The book vividly recounts their often humorous, sometimes surreal, and ultimately touching relationship. The subsequent three sections are not as well developed. Faultline delves into the lives of Mary, a Burmese woman who was Girija and Chanda's housekeeper, and her son, a political prisoner in Burma who has renamed himself Plato. Valley branches off from that section to follow Plato's best friend, a smuggler from Nepal. Thapa is "a man nearing sixty, besotted by a girl young enough to be his granddaughter" whom he meets in a dance bar in Kathmandu. Thapa's travels lead to the final section, Snow Desert, and the story of Apo, the aged leader of an isolated village in the icy Karakoram Mountains, in the no-man's land between Pakistan and India. In all of the sections, the author writes of characters' many visions of geological time and of the web of life endangered by human actions: "In the approaching horizon of the future, the calamity is a certain uncertainty, the greatest one there ever will be. It links them all." Visions are remarkable experiences that are notoriously difficult to capture in language, and here they fall into ineffectual repetition. Aiming for a story of human connection to the universe, this novel falters after a strong start.

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March 30, 2020
Swarup debuts with an inventive novel in stories that features a multigenerational cast in search of love and worldly purpose. In the opening story, “Islands,” it’s 1948 and Girija Varma, India’s first head of the National Forestry Service, lives on the Andaman Islands with his clairvoyant wife, Chanda Devi, who speaks with the local ghosts as she and Girija start a family and take in a young woman, Mary, to act as nanny. “Faultline” sees Mary’s return to the mainland years later after learning that her long-abandoned son, Plato, has been imprisoned. Plato’s drug-smuggling friend Thapa leads the third story, “Valley,” and takes to a young woman, Bebo, who works at a dance club in early ’90s Burma. Swarup concludes with “Snow Desert,” in which a village elder falls in love with an outsider and assists a scientist in understanding the nature of earthquakes. By integrating magical elements—talking glaciers and yetis appear—Swarup eschews conventional love stories to focus instead on many forms of desire, while the zigzagging across time and place. This offers beautiful depictions of humanity through a successfully experimental form.

Starred review from April 1, 2020

DEBUT "I am not well read, nor am I a craftswoman of language," the Mumbai-based journalist/educator Swarup insists in an author's note to her editor. And yet her debut novel will certainly be one of the most wondrous literary achievements to hit the shelves this year. A multigenerational epic intertwined with spellbinding myths, Swarup's is a many-layered narrative that begins and (almost) ends with Girija Prasad, "the man who studied trees," who has just married "the woman who spoke to them" at story's opening and who meets his geologist grandson by the closing pages. In between, he becomes a father twice, then a widower, dies too young, and yet his departure is long delayed. Beyond limited corporeal forms, love haunts, triumphs, survives--in a young abused wife who kills her husband in order to protect their unborn child ("His father wasn't a monster. Nor is she a murderer"); in an innocent student more philosopher than fighter brutalized by injustice; and in a loyal friend who's part savior, part storyteller. All these and more will be linked across borders and barriers, from sinking islands to glacial mountaintops. VERDICT Extraordinarily affecting, this work should be a priority acquisition for all libraries with astute, globally hungry patrons.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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Starred review from May 1, 2020
The lush monsoon-soaked Andaman Islands. The snow deserts of Ladakh. The valley of Kathmandu. The jagged edge of Burma. Swarup's lyrical debut exalts in the majesty of the South Asian subcontinent by framing every one of her characters against these spectacular landscapes. The series of loosely interconnected novellas feature characters who understand that here, where the Himalayan tectonic plates are still moving at an impressive clip, it is the elements that are in charge. The humans are mere spectators, crushed or buoyed by their predetermined destinies. In the opening story, "Islands," a young forest services officer in a newly independent India falls in love with his bride, Chanda Devi, at the Andaman outpost. Chanda Devi can communicate with the spirits that haunt the island, a gift that is prized over and over again as the humans make their peace with the region's violent natural history. Generous doses of magical realism mixed in with regional folklore add to the atmospheric charm even if the addition of historical context feels a tad incongruous at times. These sumptuous and haunting narratives confirm a character's worst suspicion that reality is the worst story ever written. Fiction is infinitely better, especially when it offers true escape like this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)