Jini Reddy

How do you come to this book? or how does this book come to you? For me it was like being approached by a dog wagging its tail but slightly turning its head away as if I were about to hit it, like it was pleased to see me but afraid of pain, like it was being drawn to something it knew would hurt it.

So where do we begin on this confused and unsatisfying book? First off we have the author, a person of Indian heritage, brown skin, in a land, England, that is run by whites. She doesn’t feel part of this land, she never grew up here, has none of the cultural references that others seem to have and seldom feels welcome amongst strangers. And what is she doing here, in this book? She is seeking the magic in the landscape. Something she never seems actually achieve.

At times I found it frustrating and annoying, like a teenage angst novel but other times completely heartfelt in her apparent rejection by the land she is living in.

There was one scene where she goes to place in Wales where a team of people have been resurrecting/restoring/creating something, let’s call them a bunch of greenies and she appears in their midst after they have bonded as a group. Her entrance, a brown skinned Indian girl pulling a red suitcase on wheels, doesn’t engender cries of welcome, or even “who are you?” She feels the lack of a backpack is just the beginning of why she will never fit in.

As a person of “strangeness” I could completely empathise with her having been in many such situations myself. By strangeness all I mean is being unlike the people you find yourself with. Having said that she never actually seemed to make any effort to overcome or bridge that gap. Alot of the time I felt that alienation went both ways, the greenies probably felt alienated as much as her its just they had the numbers. A lot of people do not know how to address "other" in people.

At heart, I felt that she had never really come to terms with herself as a brown skinned Indian girl in England and therefore everywhere she went she seems doomed to experience that alienation?

She details her many wanderings across the land looking for this “magic in the landscape” all of which seem to amount to a series of disappointments in one form or another. I was very tempted to give it up and go on to read something more rewarding but I stuck it out in the hope that she would indeed find this magic and experience the climax of this search and enjoy the spiritual and emotional resolution this would bring. Indeed, seeing how many were left in the book I assumed that was what was in store. But no, the remainder of the book was an index and other stuff. I felt cheated out of an ending that I felt this book needed let alone deserved.

In lots of ways I felt a better book would have been exploring the alienation she feels in this land and coming to terms with her place in it, because she definitely has one.… (lisätietoja)