Peachy Reads

Two recent graduates of Brown embark on an around-the-world tour, starting in China.  Things  go  downhill rather quickly when the rough standards of a backpacker’s life grate on them, and they are challenged  by the realities of traveling in a communist country in the 1980s where there is virtually no tourist infrastructure and nothing is in English.  Their bumbling attempts to cope are laughable, but become rather tragic as their relationship begins to fray, and one of the pair begins to suffer with psychological episodes.  It all goes rather wrong at the end with an unexpected and rather abrupt return to New York City. I like the nostalgia of this.    The two go abroad in the eighties and listen to the music I remember from college. It was an era before the internet and cell phones, so travelling required a bit more organization and forethought, which may be the reason their trip is doomed from the start.    They seem to want to wing it, succumb to frequent illnesses, and ha

This family saga involves two brothers who grow up in Calcutta.  One is killed by state forces after his clandestine involvement in an anti-government group, the Naxilites, a Maoist force that was active in India starting in the late 1960s.  His brother, who was studying in the United States at the time of his death, marries his brother’s widow and so the uncle serves as father to his unborn child.  The book mainly charts the history of Subhash and Gauri’s strained relationship, and the often difficult growing up of Gauri’s daughter, Bela.   Gauri eventually abandons Subhash and her daughter, and the secret of Bela's real father remains unrevealed for far too long.  Gauri has her own secret, which the reader only finds out at the end of the novel, a secret that might reveal her motivation to flee any vestige of her past and link to her life in India. Once again Jhumpa Lahiri crafts a tale that successfully and beautifully spans cultures and generations.