I feed Ma sugar daily, and she consumes it like an addict. She becomes more like another sofa every day. No one notices this is the reason — no one makes the connection. They don’t believe in science unless it comes from the mouth of a doctor and in the form of a tablet. They don’t go to the studies, the source. Rats. Rats and mice are the key to understanding who we are as humans. What happens to a rat in ten days may happen to us in ten months or ten years, but it will happen.
At first blush, Burnt Sugar looked like an ideal fit with my interests: An examination of a difficult family dynamic, set in a culture and country foreign to me, referencing dementia, art, and the demands of motherhood. And as I read, I was always interested in (and sometimes mildly shocked by) the details that author Avni Doshi included; I was certainly never bored. But ultimately, there’s nothing very weighty or artful here — passages that appeared interesting in the moment don’t stand up on a second read through — and when I eventually learned that Doshi isn’t actually from India (she was born and raised in New Jersey, currently lives in Dubai) that seemed to explain a lot: this isn’t really an insider’s story, and even the parts that are apparently based on Doshi’s actual experiences felt written at a remove. I simply didn’t connect to this novel as much as I had hoped to. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption — a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned. But now, I can't even the tally between us. The reason is simple — my mother is forgetting and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt.
Burnt Sugar opens with a promising premise: After a lifetime of feeling neglected and abused by her mother, Antara is forced into the role of caretaker as her mother begins to suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s. The reader is asked from the beginning to consider what a young mother’s duty is to her daughter in light of her own desires, and as the roles become reversed, what are a daughter’s duties to a mother who was always prickly and whose mental deterioration is making her even more so. As the timeline shifts between the present and the past, interesting details specific to the India setting are related (baby Antara is taken from her father’s home as her mother flees to an ashram and becomes the guru’s lover; older Antara spends an abusive year at a Catholic boarding school; adult Antara spends time with her husband and friends at the Pune Club, an exclusive oasis of green in the city, built by the departed colonial-era Brits, used currently by the entitled) — and as interesting as I found these details in the moment, I have to note that reviews of Burnt Sugar by Indian readers describe these details as cliched and out-of-touch. I did like the timeshifting format here, however, as later scenes highlight the unreliability of memory (and, ultimately, the unreliability of our narrator, and perhaps, her mother, too).
But again, small passages that I found interesting in the moment didn’t add up to greater profundity, and I’m adding more than the usual number of excerpts to preserve for myself what I mean by that. On this difficult mother-daughter relationship:
Ma doesn’t know. I never told her that for a portion of my childhood I was always hungry and have been searching for some fullness ever since. Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.
On the setting of Pune:
The morning traffic collects at every corner, and Pune feels like one long bottleneck. Each eruption of horns is a torrent of bullets, and before long I am riddled. It will be winter soon and the temperature drops suddenly. Human beings need to be eased in slowly. Sudden movements lead to schizophrenia and sore throats.
On Alzheimer’s (from which, apparently, Doshi’s grandmother suffered):
The mother I remember appears and vanishes in front of me, a battery-operated doll whose mechanism is failing. The doll turns inanimate. The spell is broken. The child does not know what is real or what can be counted on. Maybe she never knew. The child cries.
On the strain her relationship with her mother puts on Antara’s marriage to a mild-mannered Indian-American:
Tonight, the silence feels alive. I am not sure if I started it, but it seems like something I would do. Doubts tumble in quickly to bury me; maybe he and I, we were never quite what I thought. I believe that if we don’t resume our conversation, if we never refer to it again, it will go away. If we never speak about Ma, she will cease to exist.
On Antara’s art (she’s a pencil drawer and her main project is a multiyear effort to copy a facial portrait every day from the portrait the day before and see how it changes from the original over time — what her mother dismisses as a game of “Chinese Whispers” and also as a “lie”; whenever an author uses an artist as the main character, I assume the “art” being described is a metaphor for the writer’s own goals and processes):
Painting was just an impression. Drawing, I saw, was the grid. Ground, walls, sky. All the things that were real yet incomprehensible. The city was changing every day, bridges, skyscrapers, new hotels. Small Portugese bungalows were being levelled to make way for malls. Everyone wanted to build up. Only I had the urge to strip down. That analysis seems laughable now. The truth is drawing was all I knew. It was automatic, something I did in my sleep. Even now my perception cannot completely fathom the wet complexity of colour. Wherever I look, I see lines.
On Antara’s own experience as a new mother (apparently based on Doshi’s experience with postpartum depression):
The street is raucous. I look around and I don’t know where I am. Has the city transformed so much since my internment? Was this the plan all along, to come together and watch me dissolve into nothing? Maybe this is the point of pregnancy, of motherhood itself. A child to undo the woman who bears it, to pull her safely apart.
I like all of those passages — and I had highlighted several more along the way — but ultimately, this novel felt inauthentic and overworked; a collection of nice passages that don’t add up to something more (and maybe that's because, like Antara, Doshi is interested in "stripping down" and "seeing the lines" or "grid"; maybe what I like is the colour and cohesiveness that paints adds?). I liked the details about life in India, but give a lot of weight to those Indian reviewers who found them cliched. I liked how the format led to thought-provoking revelations; I liked the sentence-by-sentence writing (even if some details seemed thrown in for shock value). I liked this — but a Booker finalist? That, I don’t get.
The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.
