A Matter of Time

One morning, with no warning, Gopal, respected professor, devoted husband, and caring father, walks out on his family for reasons even he cannot articulate. His wife, Sumi, returns with their three daughters to the shelter of the Big House, where her parents live in oppressive silence: they have not spoken to each other in thirty-five years. As the mystery of this long silence is unraveled, a horrifying story of loss and pain is laid bare - a story that seems to be repeating itself in Sumi's life.
Set in present-day Karnataka, A Matter of Time explores the intricate relationships within an extended family, encompassing three generations. Images from Hindu religion, myth, and local history intertwine delicately with images of contemporary India as the women of this family face and accept the changes that have suddenly become part of their lives.

Deshpande has published, in India, four novels, a screenplay and dozens of short stories. Her first book to reach these shores reveals a novelist who cares less for exotic cultural properties than for the intricacies of family relations. When respectable professor Gopal walks out on his wife, Sumi, and their three daughters, she has no recourse but to move back into her family's house in Bangalore. There she reencounters her estranged sister Premi, delves into the scandal behind her parents' marriage (they have not spoken to each other for more than three decades), and then into her grandparents' complex past. With psychological acuity, Deshpande switches between first- and third-person narrators, crosscutting skillfully among passages of fraught conversation, swaths of remembered narrative, and meditation: "the bliss is only for moment," Premi speculates, "It touches us and goes on." As Sumi, Premi, Aru and their peers unravel the problems Deshpande poses, they discover new and clearer ways to think about their own status as mothers or daughters or wives. Analogies from Hindu belief and myth make clear that Deshpande writes for readers inside India first and foremost. But her careful exposition renders literary and historical reference no more a barrier to comprehension than the characters' unfamiliar names. Published in India in 1996, this novel places Deshpande in distinguished international company; readers who enjoy Anita Brookner or Isabel Allende may find distant analogues here. An afterword by Indian feminist editor and publisher Ritu Menon helps American readers grasp Deshpande's aims. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In her first, somewhat charmless book to be published here, Indian writer Deshpande tells a story familiar to readers in the West: a family crisis is triggered when a husband walks out on his wife. Deshpande, the author of 80 stories and seven novels, begins her tale briskly. When Gopal leaves his wife, Sumi, for reasons that are, at first, unexplained, he opens a wound in her through which her familys legacy pours onto the page. While very little actually happens here, dozens of chapters are spent retelling the history of Sumis people. Bearing her husbands sudden and unexpected departure with unexpected fortitude, Sumi relocates herself and her three daughters to the Big House, her family home. Sumis mother, Kalyani, lives there with her husband, Shripati, whose own abandonment of his wife is recalled. Manorama, Kalyanis mother and Sumis grandmother, quietly presides over the unfolding family story, which is rich in abandonments and betrayals. Finally, Aru, one of Sumi's daughters, completes the circle, and it is her fate in the context of her familys historical patterns that provides much of the intrigue. The fragments of this history are often moving, but they seem a loose jumble, lacking the particular flavor of a specific perspective. Given the complexity of Sumis family tree, Deshpandes failure to clearly demarcate her charactersreaders will be hard-pressed to say what any of them actually looks likemakes for a thinly presented present time, through which recollections dart quickly into view. After a tragedy at the close, Gopal suffers an existential crisis of meaning in his life. Aru sends him away, freshly fortified among the women of her family. The concept herethat the patterns of family history sustain the women who are able to confront and cooperate with themis compelling, but the execution, with rare exception, is rather dull. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.