Preeta SamarasanBesprekingen

Cuando la criada de la familia de la plantación de caucho es despedida por unos crímenes que no se han resuelto, es sólo la última de unas precipitadas pérdidas que han sacudido la vida de Aasha, la hija de seis años de una acaudalada ––aunque emocionalmente pobre–– familia de inmigrantes indios. En el transcurso de las últimas semanas, su abuela materna muere en circunstancias extrañas, y su hermana mayor, Uma, se va para siempre a la universidad a EE UU. Unos hechos que la hacen cometer algunos errores en nombre del amor.

A beautifully written novel about a wealthy Indian family in Malaysia. Everything is not as it seems in this epic family saga and Samarasan utilizes rich prose and well-developed characters in unveiling the many layers of the families dark secrets. The story is told from various points of view in a seamless and unconfusing way. It was great read and would be a good book club pick.

This novel begins and ends with the departure of Chellam, the doomed and disgraced servant girl the wealthy Rajasekharan family of Ipoh, Malyasia had hired the previous year to care for the demanding Paati (grandmother). During the year of Chellam's stay we come to know and care for the family, and its flawed and damaged members.

Central is Aasha, the 6-year old daughter, who, having accepted her mother's rejection and disdain of her, now has to contend with her beloved older sister Uma's withdrawal of her affections and imminent departure for college in the US. Aasha watches and observes her family, with her only companions the ghosts that only she can see and hear. Suresh, Aasha's 11 year old brother, like 11 year old boys the world over, provides comic relief. Then there is Appa, the brilliant Oxford-educated attorney who, to his mother's (Paati's) dismay chose to marry a simple poorly-educated girl, rather than a more modern woman. The years pass, Appa regrets his decision, and is more and more absent from the home. Amma, the mother, has been transformed from a sweet, caring young woman to a social-climbing harridan, with no empathy for plights of her daughters, or for Chellam or Paati.

This beautiful, sad and hopeful book can be characterized by Tolstoy's line that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Samarasan brilliantly tells this family's story against the backdrop of newly-indpendent Malaysia.½

This novel is interesting for the insight into life in Malaysia and particularly for a second / third generation Indian family living in Malaysia. There are few characters here that are attractive, with the exception of the three children of the Rajasekharan family. The narrative unfolds in a complicated haphazard way, flitting between dates to drip feed the reader information and this was disorientating and confusing. Most of the action takes place in the house and the street;, it feels as if the women and children rarely go out and this gives the novel a claustrophobic feel. The father does go out for long periods and we do follow him briefly and the mother makes a trip to her sister in another town at one time. This street, the houses and the occupants are clearly described and are part of the novel. There are many secrets that are revealed that explain the actions of characters and show how the characters have damaged each other. I found this a difficult novel to read because of the structure and the subject matter and got little joy from it.

This book is actually set in Malaysia, but the main characters are an Indian family. The story involves the death of an elderly woman in the family, and the subsequent dismissal of a servant girl who is held responsible. Through the eyes of the six year old protagonist, Aasha, and occasionally other characters, the book swoops backward and forward through time to show the subtle and complicated threads that tie together families in love, loyalty, hatred and deceit. While the book particularly illuminates aspects of its particular setting in time and place, the complications of a postcolonial world, it also examines the complicated division of loyalties within families, particularly immigrant families who feel a special insularity.

60. Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (2008, 340 page Hardcover, read September 28 - October 18)

This one just didn't work me. Actually, I'm not sure Indian novels, in general, works for me. I think I have read four different books from Indian authors from very different backgrounds (all women though). Each has very nice prose, sometimes spectacular vocabularies, but go on and on about stories that don't seem very interesting to me. Somewhere along the line I'm missing something.

Evening is a Whole day is the stifling story of an unhappy wealthy Tamil family in Malaysia with one very unfortunate servant. It touches on the place of Tamils in ethnically divided Malaysia, the cultural stratification of this Tamil society, and even the 1969 riots in Kuala Lumpur (an ethnic riot between Malays and Chinese). At first I found it pleasantly readable, but not memorable in that I wasn't thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. But I had to force myself through the second half as it slowly revealed each somewhat interesting but not fascinating event in drawn out emotionally indirect detail. I think I'm happy to have read it, but I didn't enjoy the actual act of reading.

2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/179643#4893797

In 1980 in Ipoh, Malaysia, a few jarring events sweep over 6-year old Aasha: the dismissal of an 18 year-old servant in shame and disgrace, the departure of the oldest sister to university in America, and the recent, troubling death of Aasha’s grandmother Paati. The ensuing story is a portrait of a family whose dysfunction and secrets insidiously consume all of its members, with a narrative that slowly moves backwards to reveal past wounds in layers like geologic events told in rock strata. I found this book to be unrelentingly sad, particularly as it chronicles the experience and interpretations of the family’s children and a very vulnerable servant. Aasha, whose companions are the household’s ghosts, is watchful and vigilant, trailing her silent and closed older sister Uma like a shadow in the desperate hope that she might catch a glimpse of the old Uma, the one who played with her and doted on her, before she loses her to America forever. Uma’s exclusion of her sister and emotional distance from the family is selfish and unforgivable, until the reader reaches the Uma layer and gains insight into her cold self-defense. Other characters are likewise excavated and explored: mother Amma’s bitterness and cruelty, grandmother Paati’s manipulation and willful decline, Chellamservant’s wretchedness, and jovial but perpetually down-on-his-luck Uncle Ballroom. Perhaps most complex of all is father Appa -- we trace his path as he navigates the toxic family dynamic, his children’s adoration-turned-guardedness, and his politically idealist hopes and dreams for the nascent nation of Malaysia, a diverse patchwork of Malays, Indians, and Chinese struggling with identity, belonging, and racial and class issues following independence from the British Empire. These interweaving elements are told with wildly playful and humorous language, breathtaking, visceral descriptions of Malaysia, and a distinct Indian-Malay music and rhythm.

The book is too depressing for an unqualified recommendation, but I do admire Ms. Samarasan’s storytelling skill. The family story is too complicated and intricate to assign blame. The Malaysian history is fascinating, and intimately, subtly told, and the language is simply captivating, right from the first page:

“There is, stretching delicate as a bird’s head from the thin neck of Kra Isthmus, a land that makes up half of the country called Malaysia. Where it dips its beak in the South China Sea, Singapore hovers like a bubble escaped from its throat. This bird’s head is a springless summerless autumnless winterless land. One day might be a drop wetter or a mite drier than the last, but almost all are hot, damp, bright, bursting with lazy tropical life, conducive to endless tea breaks and mad, jostling, honking rushes through town to get home before the afternoon downpour. These are the most familiar rains, the violent silver ropes that flood the playing fields and force office workers to wade to bus stops in shoes that fill like buckets. Blustering and melodramatic, the afternoon rains cause traffic jams at once terrible -- choked with the black smoke of lorries and the screeching brakes of schoolbuses -- and beautiful: aglow with winding lanes of watery yellow headlights that go on forever, with blue streetlamps reflected in burgeoning puddles, with the fluorescent melancholy of empty roadside stalls. Every day appears to begin with a blaze and end with this deluge, so that past and present and future run together in an infinite, steaming river.

In truth, though, there are days that do not blaze and rains less fierce. Under a certain kind of mild morning drizzle the very earth breathes slow and deep. Mist rises from the dark treetops on the limestone hills outside Ipoh town. Grey mist, glowing green hills: on such mornings it is obvious how sharply parts of this land must have reminded the old British rulers of their faraway country.”

Die Großmutter ist tot - Ursache dafür ist, dass sie gestoßen wurde. Aber wer war es? Schnell wird die Hausangestellte Chellam als Schuldige ausgemacht - aufgrund einer Lüge. Denn in Wirklichkeit war sie nicht einmal in der Nähe...In Rückblenden wird die Geschichte der Familie aufgezeigt, die zu dem Todesfall führt.

Also ich muss sagen, sooooo schlecht fand ich das Buch nicht. Und zwar gerade wegen der Rückblenden. Wäre die Geschichte von Anfang bis Ende durcherzählt worden, wäre sie sehr schnell langweilig geworden.

Egoismus ist das prägenden Element dieser Geschichte - er ermöglicht die Lügen, das Verschweigen....besonders der Vater ist mir zutiefst unsympathisch - und das von Anfang an. Aber auch Patti und der Rest der Familie können keine Sympathiepunkte sammeln.½

Evening Is The Whole Day starts with the ignominious departure of a disgraced maidservant from the Big House, a blue-painted mansion on a quiet street in Ipoh, Malaysia. Her mistress is sitting at the kitchen table, spitting out angry and embittered words towards the two youngest children of the house, who are sitting as quietly as they can in the hope that no-one will notice them. The eldest daughter left the previous week, to study in the US. The father of the house is at his office.

The story then works its way backwards, unpeeling the onion-like layers of secrets, misunderstandings, suspicions, betrayals and petty inhumanities which have created this broken, unhappy family.

Although the events are increasingly harrowing, the lushness and beauty of the language stop this from being a depressing book.

Salman Rushdie's influence is clear, in the book's punning, multi-linguistic exuberance, the pungent smells and spiciness in the air, and the fact that many family milestones take place at the same time as significant events in the development of the country. But this is more a family saga than a Malaysian Midnight's Children, although along with the hints of family difficulties there are rumbling undercurrents of the country's racial tensions. (I am not sure if the resentments and suspicions, passed down the generations, are meant to be a metaphor for communal relations in Malaysia. It's possible, but this is not overplayed.)

This was a phenomenal read - fantastic writing, a vivid sense of place, and a powerful story.

A different culture--Malaysia--but the family that's in trouble could be anywhere. The author reveals character slowly and the story evolves unusually as the author returns to an earlier time with each chapter. I found the book engrossing from the first sentence. The author shows exceptional creativity in her writing.

The review posted by bibiliobuli is very comprehensive and accurate. I found the book to be very well written; at times witty and others sad. Regardless of class, the characters are not infallible, however class does distinguish how these characters and society deal with those shortcomings. Samarasan takes us inside of Malaysia and the Big House to the point where the reader feels a part of the family, let alone inside of Malaysia. The mark of a really good book is to leave the reader wanting more and that is how I felt after reading this debut novel. Evening is the Whole Day is a beautifully written and I am looking forward to the next offering from Preeta Samarasan.½

The review by bibliobibuli is so comprehensive and intelligent that there is really nothing I can add except to say I thought that EVENING IS THE WHOLE DAY is a lovely, but ineffably sad book.½

It’s a twenty to ten on a September morning in 1980, and the Rajasekharan family of Big House, 79, Kingfisher lane, Ipoh family are assembled to pack their disgraced servant, Chellum, back on the bus to Gopeng. Lawyer Raju Rajasekharan (known throughout the novel simply as Appa) stands at the gate in the rain with Chellum’s wheedling, drunken father, while the two youngest children, Aasha and Suresh are kept at the breakfast table to bear witness to their mother’s scarcely contained fury as the hapless girl bumps three-wheeled, broken-strapped suitcase down the stairs.

We don’t immediately know Chellum’s crime (though Amma plants the rumour that she may be pregnant) but we are told that a year from now Chellum will be dead. This is not at all the spoiler it may at first seem, because this is a novel entirely concerned with excavating the past: the narrative seeks causes, and causes of causes, moving backwards in tiny increments of time, even while unveiling the larger story of an immigrant family’s rise from humble beginnings.

We soon learn that there’s been a death in the family. Appa’s formidable mother, Paati has died under mysterious circumstances in the bathroom, and Chellum is to be blamed for it. But just as the 1980 TV series Dallas (much loved by Malaysian audiences) invited viewers to ponder “Who killed J.R.?” so it appears as the novel unfolds that Chellum isn’t the only one complicit in her death. And as it turns out, this isn’t the only skeleton rattling round in the family cupboard. As the layers of lies and evasions are peeled away, no-one (not even Paati, not even sweet little Aasha) is entirely innocent, and convenient and face-saving fiction is invented to hide uncomfortable truths.

Since the powerless are always the most convenient scapegoats, carrying away in a metaphoric sense the sins of the rest, and so it is with Chellum and Appa’s brother (the quaintly named Uncle Ballroom). Both are unceremoniously packed off baseless pretexts when their real crime was actually to have been witness to much more.

Despite the god-like authority of the narrator, the narrative stays closest to six-year old Aasha, the latest in a long literary line of child protagonists drawn into an adult world in a way they cannot understand or really cope with. (There is, incidentally, a beautiful nod to Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the scene where the children put on a play for their parents.)

Watchful and aware, Aasha is the main witness the novel’s events and the keeper of secrets. She is even on speaking terms with the Big House’s ghosts, the most permanent of which are the daughter of the previous owner of the house, forever trapped in her last memory of being pulled into a mining pond as her abandoned mother committed suicide, and the ghost of Paati, who returns from the ashes of her funeral pyre even more grotesque and lizard-like than when she was alive.

The dispatch of Chellum is only the last in a series of events which have rocked Aasha’s world. The most painful has been the sudden change in her once doting older sister Uma before she leaves to study in America, and the child’s heartbreak is palpable.

Although on a the surface a story about a particular, dysfunction family in Ipoh, the novel must also be read on a higher level, the personal and domestic reflecting the national and political. For, just as Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is born at the exact moment his country gains independence, and his own fortunes are closely paralleled by those of India, so too the events taking place in the house on Kingfisher Lane echo those of the wider nation. At Independence, the house is taken over from Mr. MacDougall, a dyspeptic Scottish tin-miner, and on the stroke of midnight 31st Aug 1957, Appa’s father, Tata, switches on the light switches for the first time. Appa himself has great schemes, both personal and political, and in 1959 sets out to find a bride as “the first part of his five year plan”.

Chapter 7 is the only part of the novel where the action moves beyond the claustrophobic atmosphere of Big House, opening the novel up to light and air in much the same way as a garden courtyard serves an old Malaysian mansion. Uma and her mother make a trip to visit family in Kuala Lumpur. Amma is heavily pregnant with Suresh. Riots break out in the city, preventing their return home, and Amma is about to deliver and needs to get to hospital. The date : May 13th 1969.

May 13th has left deep scars the Malaysian psyche, yet the race riots and their causes have remained the great unwritten about in Malaysia fiction. The only other author willing to enter this territory was Lloyd Fernando with Green is the Colour, and even then the actual conflict remains largely in the background. Samarasan plunges her characters into the thick of the action and exposes the racist sentiments of the various groups in a way that Malaysian readers may indeed find unsettling.

So much remains unanswered about this dark incident in Malaysian history and so it is fitting that the author handles this part of the using personified Rumour (in a red dress) and Fact (in coat and tales) dancing a grotesque tango in the streets. “Some events and emotions are so huge that they don’t seem to be governed by the laws of realism,” Samarasan has said. Malaysian readers will of course know only too well that Rumour and Fact will continue to dance in a country where press freedoms are limited.

Samarasan is clearly critical of the insularity of her characters. Despite living in an ostensibly multi-cultural society, the Rajasekharan family have little contact with Malaysians of different races, and don’t even deign to learn the national language. It is ironic of course, that at the same time the children’s frame of reference includes so much that is imported from the west such as Wrigley’s chewing gum, Hawaii Five-O, The Wind in the Willows and Simon and Garfunkel. Malaysians of all racial backgrounds will recognise the phenomena of the cultural cocoon.

Just as we have our scapegoats in the foreground of the novel, so too they appear in the background. Appa is involved in the conduct of a murder case of one Angela Lim found stuffed sown a manhole near Tarcian convent school. Is Shamsuddin bin Yusof really the murderer, or has he been conveniently framed? Malaysian readers will of course immediately spot the anachronistic references, to more recent murder cases and tabloid scandals which have captured the national imagination.

Not only is Evening is the Whole Day an extremely intelligent novel which works on different levels, and explores a variety of themes, the writing is simply stunning. The style, while evocative of other Indian authors influenced by the exuberance Rushdie such as Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai (against whose work comparisons are bound to be made), also draws on the darkness of the gothic, and as far as I’m aware, no other writer has managed to better use absolute misery for such comic effect since Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm.

There’s a playfulness and a sensual love of the language which means that every sentence, every single paragraph gives an almost physical pleasure and must be fully savoured, and the imagery is fresh and frequently surprising. There is too a sharp eye for the tiniest of details and Samarasan delights in long lists with one object piled onto another which not only achieve a kind of a poetry, but also add to the cluttered and claustrophobic atmosphere of Big House.

Samarasan has moved away from the frangipani and jasmine scents of much Asian fiction, confounding perhaps a Western audience’s expectations of a certain kind of exoticism. There are to put it bluntly, and awful lot of scatological references: shit seeps into many of the scenes whether the stench from Amma’s mother improvised chamber pot doing battle with the smells of the family dinner, or Chellum’s “volcanic attack of diarrhea, all rapid fire bangs and squeaks and liquiescent bursts”, or the anonymous “sly lingering fart” on Ipoh railway station platform.

Perhaps more remarkably, in a novel published overseas and aimed at an international market, a great many local words, both Tamil and Malay are woven into dialogue in the way that Malaysian speakers actually do speak These words are not italicized, not footnoted, not explained in a glossary and not in any sense apologised for. This is as much a political decision as a literary one. As Samarasan has pointed out in an interview with Quill magazine : “Schoolchildren studying literature in the colonies had to navigate Cockney speech patterns, imagine for themselves what toad-in-the-hole might taste like, picture moors and bogs and fens and determine the emotional significance of each of these landscapes. Now we get to tell our own stories, and this requires your dealing with my rubber estates and char kuay teow and cursing in Tamil. In the long run, this will be good for all of us. A little cultural immersion never did anyone any harm.”

Samarasan is an astonishingly self-assured young author who seems to have hit the ground running at first attempt. She plays with our expectations of an Asian novel in Evening is the Whole Day, revisiting the well-worked genre of the Indian family saga with a freshness that easily transcends all the stereotypes. And for a Malaysian reading public hungry for fiction that explores political and social issues unflinchingly, and Evening is the Whole Day will be seen a fearless burst into new territory.

Perhaps we’re getting a little blasé these days, but our Malaysian authors have done enormously well on the world stage recently, winning and being nominated for major international awards. I think we can expect Samarasan to add one or two more to the national mantelpiece.