Small Days and Nights

   

    "It's in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights."

     Tishani Doshi uses that line of James Salter's as the epigraph to her novel Small Days and Nights, and it's an apt choice for a novel which takes a macro lens to some big subjects. This is not a pretty book, in places not an easy one to read, but it is compelling in its dissection of the dis-easedness of life, the ways in which we are unequal to our fate or unwilling to own it.

    Set in contemporary India, it's the story of Grace who has returned to Pondicherry on the death of her mother. She inherits a house on the coast, and a sister she didn't know she had, for Lucy has Down's Syndrome and has been cared for in an institution all her life. With a failed marriage behind her, Grace takes on the house - despite its remote and dangerous location - and makes a home for Lucy and herself, but she is restless, aimless, finds it hard to adjust to her new reality, and as tensions rise in the surrounding area and within the blue-shuttered house by the sea itself, Grace learns about sacrifice, choice, and the accommodations we make which really matter.

    What's skilful here is the way in which not only Grace's past but her parents' history too forms a background for her present story. Memories, moments, longer recollections or discoveries are layered into the narrative like pieces of fabric stitched one on top of another, but this is no prissy embellishment, rather it's workmanlike appliqué using concise offcuts: misshapen, raw-edged, and wearing the stains of past use. In that sense it's a perfect medium for a study of family, for families typically aren't neat but unfinished, made from disparate materials which under tension can pull apart at the seams. Tishani Doshi understands the forces which strengthen and weaken relationships, the 'small days and nights' in which ties bind or break; she presents them here with candour and without apology in a concise and melancholy story which although it travels far and wide in scope and location ultimately comes home.

Comments

[Fran H-B]

Fingers crossed the library has this. Sounds slightly different, and your review has certainly piqued my interest.

[Cornflower]

It's not a comfortable read, and its rawness will be off-putting to some, but I do think it's well done.