On familiar territory

Families are complicated. Leo Tolstoy knew it, that’s why Anna Karenina opens with the memorable line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. While they get under your skin like no one else can, you also know that you’re tied to them in a way you aren’t with anyone else. Or perhaps you’ve cut yourself off — but even in the distancing, you reveal something about yourself. But this makes for great stories — essential to the writers and readers among us.

This month, I’m going to talk about three books relating to big families, where the dysfunction is as much a part of the story as the love and the bonds between them.

Water cooler

Half The Night Is Gone , Amitabha Bagchi’s gentle, sorrowful book about two families — one, of a writer who has lost his only son, the other a large business family in pre-Independence India — is that rare literary novel that has appeal for everyone who reads it. There’s history, there’s the literary life, and woven through it is the theme of the Ramayana, as the various characters define themselves through Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas , and use it as a way to live their lives.

Half The Night Is GoneAmitabha BagchiJuggernautFiction ₹599

Bagchi arranges his characters like stacked Russian dolls, one story emerging out of another, which also suits the book-within-a-book quality of the narrative. Vishwanath, a Hindi novelist, has just lost his only son to an accident, and to soothe himself, he writes a book, the book we’re reading, about Lala Motichand, a canny, traditional man in Delhi during the end of the freedom struggle, and his household — specifically, his three sons (two legitimate and one not) and his help (one of whom is a retired wrestler, whose family stays on in service.) I loved Bagchi’s first novel Above Average , because of the astute eye he turned to family and relationships, and this book improves upon that. Every character is real and so fleshed out, you’re never stuck wondering why you should care about this new person who has just popped up on the page. He seems to love his characters, and as a result, the reader will too.

Watchlist

Family sagas don’t get any more sprawling than Jane Smiley’s epic The Last Hundred Years trilogy. The books move down from 1920s to show the life of the Langdons, farmers in middle America of German stock, beginning with Walter Langdon, his young wife, Rosanna and their infant son, Frank.

Golden AgeJane SmileyKnopf Fiction ₹2,400

As we move down the years, the children begin to have their own lives, spouses and children, but really, if a hero emerges, it is Frank, the most interesting and complicated of all the siblings. He is a bad father and husband, but he is good with women, and his offspring as a result are equally messed up. By the time we move into present day, it is the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna who have taken centre-stage, by the time the book ends, it is 2019, and even though no one could have predicted the turns the world would take in the last three or four years (the books were published in 2015), it’s pretty accurate about our collective state of mind. It’s easy to lose track of who’s who, especially by the end of the second book, but once you reach Golden Age , the final book in the trilogy, you marvel at this ambitious literary project, just one family, and their unfolding history, and the history of America told through their ups and downs. Plus, there’s a helpful family tree at the beginning of each book you can keep going back to.

Way back

Difficult DaughtersManju KapurPenguinFiction₹250

The setting of Half The Night Is Gone , the sprawling Indian family in just-before-Independence India, put me in mind of another book I loved which deals with a similar time and place.

Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters is a book I keep re-reading, just because her fictional family is so real and vivid, you feel like they’re acquaintances from somewhere and you like to be reminded about what happened to them.

At the centre of it is a young woman, the oldest in her large family, who falls in love with the married professor next door, and how that changes the course of her history and the history of everyone else around her. Her large Punjabi family is dealing with their own struggles as India is divided, and it is also a time where young women began to assert their independence, inspired by the changes around them.

Kapur is known for her stories within the home, and how home is also a political space. This book is the best example of that.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of six books, the latest one being The One Who Swam With The Fishes

Twitter: @reddymadhavan

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