I love this vital, compassionate and tragic book.

books:


	• Evening Is the Whole Day: A Novel Preeta Samarasan Houghton Mifflin, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

`Even noon is evening to she who waits..'

This is a hauntingly beautiful novel. Simultaneously filled with hope and despair, Ms Samarasan gives us characters who are never just stereotypes (although sometimes the accurate depiction of certain characteristics comes dangerously close to a stereotypical presentation). No, what Ms Samarasan has delivered is a novel peopled with individuals who are generally disappointed in the past and present and occasionally hopeful for the future.

The story finishes in Malaysia in 1980, but circles through the family history, aspirations, hopes disappointments and secrets of the Rajasekharan family since Appa's grandfather emigrated across the Bay of Bengal in 1899. We view the present through the eyes of Aasha, the youngest of the three Rajasekharan children. Aasha is secretive and far from impartial: she doesn't want her older sister Uma to leave Malaysia for the USA and is reacting to tensions and other secrets within the family that, at 6 years of age, she can observe without necessarily understanding. By contrast with the relative life of privilege of the Rajasekharan family, is the sad tale of Chellam: the exploited, underprivileged and wronged servant girl who is the same age as Uma.

This novel is primarily about family: secrets, relationships and aspirations. But it is also about life in Malaysia over a century which encompassed independence, race riots and significant migration. Each of the Rajasekharans struggles to find his or her own happiness in a world which is changing rapidly. My favourite character was the 8 year old son, Suresh. He brought a perspective to the story and a hope, perhaps for a collective future that was less apparent from the views of the other characters.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

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There's nothing new under the sun

...yet isn't that just what a wonderful book is: a glimpse of a new, whole, and unique world view, seen through the eyes of its incandescent characters.

Preeta Samarasan's debut novel "Evening is the Whole Day" is just such a work: so much in it is familiar, is known to us just from living our lives; but then there are the remarkable moments of insight, delivered to us as a treasured gift, and we see and understand things that have always eluded us.

Samarasan creates characters so true and deep that we accept and value their stories, even as they are heartbreaking.

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I love this vital, compassionate and tragic book.

This book is wonderfully tragic and hilarious and gripping. Evening is the Whole Day just teems with that specific kind of tragedy of misrecognition and then, also, the scary speed at which these mistakes multiply and magnify once they gain a certain momentum.

Last year I finally read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Samarasan's book made me think of that classic, with its birth of nations, and the intimate picture of a family amidst the ethnic and nationalist conflicts. But Rushdie's characters are further back in the scene, whereas Samarasan's characters were so crisp. High-def! Also crisp were the swirling hopes and hostilities of the people of Malaysia.

Evening is the Whole Day has a rare, thoughtful and compelling treatment of the ravages of class. It was not a black and white portrayal; I saw the good and bad in every character, without feeling like Samarasan is, or I should be, in the least bit ambivalent about them. They all suffered from shortcomings in the capacity to love and to forgive! And yet the novel and its characters possessed all the beautiful vividness of living and the hopes and expectations of the same. The dashed innocent hopes, pettiness and cruelty in the book felt real and insufferably sad. But I didn't come away from the book feeling hopeless or dark, because the story floats so convincingly on the levity of the tone, the beauty of the characters and the empathy I felt coming from the narrative voice. This is a great book.

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A raucous, inventive debut

It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. It's written with such energy and wit, such detailed characterizations, and with an incredibly deft handling of tone. Everyone is to be pitied, everyone is at fault. The world is vivid and new, paced like a careening train. The story line tends to stall occasionally though, in a kind of circular telling amidst all the energy and description -- but that's my only criticism. I couldn't put this book down, and very grateful for the pleasure it gave me.

a love (-less, -ly) story

One of the reviewers said something that I want to re-iterate: this book chronicles the tragedy of the absence of love. That is when the evening is the whole day. And so in that absence of love, love is what I notice and think about. The people in this story yearn for a connection to one another, but love can only emerge in the telling of that yearning. Inside the language of the novel is where the love lies. I found myself reading whole passages aloud. I could have used scissors to cut out certain descriptions I loved and pasted them into a blank book and called it a book of poetry. That space between the tragedy of the absence of love and the redemption of the writing of it, that gap is heart-breaking and heart-restoring.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Set in Malaysia, this spellbinding and already internationally acclaimed debut introduces us to the prosperous Rajasekharan family as its closely guarded secrets are slowly peeled away.

When Chellam, the family's rubber-plantation-bred servant girl, is dismissed for unnamed crimes, her banishment is the latest in a series of recent, precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha's life. A few short weeks before, Aasha's grandmother Paati passed away under mysterious circumstances and her older sister, Uma, departed for Columbia University--leaving Aasha alone to cope with her mostly absent father, her bitter mother, and her imperturbable older brother.

Beginning with Aasha's grandfather's ascension from Indian coolie to illustrious resident of the Big House on Kingfisher Lane, and going on to tell the story of how Appa, the family's Oxford-educated patriarch, courted Amma, the humble girl next door, Evening Is the Whole Day moves gracefully backward and forward in time to answer the many questions that haunt the family: What was Chellam's unforgivable crime? Why was Uma so intent on leaving? How and why did Paati die? What did Aasha see? And, underscoring all of these mysteries: What ultimately became of Appa's once-grand dreams for his family and his country?

Sweeping in scope, sumptuously lyrical, and masterfully constructed, Evening Is the Whole Day offers an unflinching look at relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, the wealthy and the poor, a country and its citizens--and the ways in which each sometimes fails the other. Illuminating in heartbreaking detail one Indian immigrant family's secrets and lies while exposing the complex underbelly of Malaysia itself, Preeta Samarasan's debut is a mesmerizing and vital achievement sure to earn her a place alongside Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, and Zadie Smith.

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