Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #204375 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-08
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 640 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780151015337
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Journalist, playwright and short-story writer Viswanathan's absorbing first novel, based on her grandmother's life, goes deep into the world of southern India village life. Starting in 1896, the story follows Sivakami, a Tamil Brahmin girl, from her marriage at the age of 10 through her long widowhood, while Indian political and social life lumbers through immense changes. Before he dies, Sivakami's astrologer husband, Hanumarathnam, foresees his death in the malignant interactions between his stars and his son Vairum's. Though he trains a trustworthy servant to assist Sivakami until their son comes of age, the world that Hanumarathnam leaves behind is rapidly changing, and the family is not entirely fit to survive it; Vairum, especially, suffers the pain of a father's disaffection and, later, a widowed mother forbidden to touch any human being during daylight hours. Irreconcilable conflicts between tradition—especially the strict caste rules of Brahmin life—and the modernizing world lead predictably to alienation and tragedy, but on an epic scale. Viswanathan is especially adept at unobtrusively explaining foreign customs and worldviews to Westerners while wholly respecting the power and significance they hold for practitioners. (Sept.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by V.V. Ganeshananthan

A novel set in the Indian subcontinent and published in the West bears the burdens of our preconceptions. It is easy to assume that a book about a high-caste child bride who becomes a widow will fix its sights only on the girl's woes and the deep injustices of caste. But while Padma Viswanathan's first novel, The Toss of a Lemon, has at its heart a 10-year-old Brahmin girl who marries an ill-fated man, its ambitions transcend culture and country to reach for the nature of fate itself.

The book opens in 1896, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as a village healer and astrologer seeks young Sivakami's hand in marriage. Hanumarathnam's proposal bears a strange caveat: His horoscope hints at his own premature death. But her parents need not fret, he insists: "As that prediction is contained in the weakest quadrant, it holds no weight, as you know, though ignorant people let it scare them." So Sivakami becomes a child bride, and her background assures her top rank in the social and religious order, but horoscopes drive the book's plot.

The titular toss refers to Hanumarathnam's strategy for determining his children's astrological charts. Sitting outside the birthing room, he marks the moment when a midwife tosses a lemon through a window, signaling the appearance of the infant's head. Then he calculates its future. All seems well with the couple's first baby, a daughter called Thangam for her golden color. But then Sivakami bears a boy, dubbed Vairum for his diamond-like eyes. Families normally celebrate sons, but this unattractive, intelligent child's horoscope foretells his father's death within three years. Resigned, Hanumarathnam begins to prepare Sivakami for widowhood and trains a servant boy named Muchami to be her aide in the management of her household and property.

When Hanumarathnam does die, Sivakami finds that Muchami is the only person who will selflessly help her. When she sees that her brothers will not act in Vairum's interest, she defies tradition by raising her family in her husband's village instead of her own. That choice shapes the divergent lives of her children. Literally luminous, Thangam attracts the reverence of her fellow villagers. In one of the story's several notes of magical realism, Thangam sheds a kind of gold dust, which her admirers collect and use as they would holy ash. But despite her near-sacred status, Thangam's horoscope presents an obstacle to betrothal because it prophesies her husband's death. The only willing suitor is a shiftless man whose stars predict his wife's death even more strongly. It's a match of dueling destinies.

Thangam eventually bears 10 children. When Sivakami sees that her daughter is failing to manage her unreliable husband and their offspring, she assumes responsibility for the older children. Over the years, as Thangam bears more and more children to be raised in Sivakami's strict home, Vairum's resentment grows. A college-educated social progressive who disapproves of caste tradition and astrology, he watches as his mother raises his sister's children under Brahmin traditions he believes to be wrong. Although Vairum is now Muchami's employer, the servant remains loyal to Sivakami and tries to serve as a bridge between mother and son. This servant's fascinating inner life may deserve a novel of its own. Even in such a sprawling story, we don't get far enough into his head.

All this takes place against the backdrop of considerable change in India, as the book spans more than 60 years. Viswanathan renders these developments -- changes in marriage laws, for example -- in simple, often beautiful language, with details that intersect subtly with the enormous cast of Sivakami's extended family and their friends.

Viswanathan prefaces The Toss of a Lemon with an epigraph from the great Indian novel Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie. Viswanathan's book, like Rushdie's work, aims for epic status. But it actually achieves something that is in many ways more nuanced than the broad brushstrokes of an epic: a meditation on fate's workings in a family dominated by the quiet rule of one woman -- and the struggle of her son against the strictures of her belief.


Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
With an assured voice and a deep understanding of her characters’ moral values, Viswanathan breathes life into the social changes that swept through early- to-mid-twentieth-century Tamil Nadu, India. In 1896 10-year-old Sivakami becomes the child bride of a healer predicted to die young. Left a widow at 18, she dutifully obeys her Brahmin heritage’s millennia-old customs—strict rules dictating her appearance, food preparations, even whom she may speak with or touch. Sivakami devotes her life to her family, but her decisions on daughter Thangam’s marriage and son Vairum’s secular education occasionally have heartbreaking results. Janaki, Sivakami’s similarly conservative granddaughter, later grows to adulthood in an India that comes to view Brahmins not as a proud, mutually supportive people but as racially pure bigots—an opinion her uncle Vairum shares. Despite the saga’s length, there are no dull moments or extraneous scenes. Most impressively, Viswanathan immerses readers in the realities of the caste system from both sides; in telling a universal story of generational differences on a personal level, she makes a vanished world feel completely authentic. Superbly done. --Sarah Johnson

Customer Reviews

Extraordinary Cultural and Generational Experience
A Toss of a Lemon is an epic spanning 70 years of Indian life, in the Brahmin tradition. While it's fictional, it's unlike typical fiction in which the story builds towards an ultimate conclusion or climax. This story is simply a narrative, a chronicle that seems so lifelike that I would have believed it to be nonfiction.

The language is largely informational, in contrast to dramatic or theatrical storytelling, and it carries the reader along much like a boat on a river. The narrator tells the story of the family matron, Sivakami, beginning at the age of 10, continuing through her marriage, the birth of her children, the death of her husband, her widowhood, her family and extended family, and her religious traditions and Brahmin ways. The author describes in matter-of-fact detail a family and social system ruled by religious observance and superstition that contrasts sharply to modern ways and progressive ideas as the story marches through the decades.

Although I thought, at first, that this would be a dry narrative, I quickly identified with Sivakami as a woman bearing up under the strains of life, fiercely endeavoring to retain her dignity and hold her family together. Her Brahmin practices, complete with caste prejudices, dietary laws and purification ceremonies, make her who she is and are her only real support after the early death of her husband when she is only 18 yrs. old.

The author does not interpret events for the reader, but simply reports the incidents as they occur, from the points of view of the various characters. An ingenious web of familial relationships is woven in which personalities and politics are all made plain without fanfare or needless drama.

I feel that I know more about Indian culture and the politics of the caste system from reading this book of fiction than from any textbook I have ever studied on India and its people. The text is sprinkled with Indian words and phrases, briefly defined and then used repetitively throughout the story. Brahmin worship, beliefs and lifestyle practices are also used throughout and described only briefly or mentioned in passing, although they play a part in so many situations that the reader not only becomes familiar with them, but comes to expect them, even when not mentioned in the text. It is a near total immersion in Brahmin culture. I actually had a craving for lentils and curry.

There is a portion of the book that deals with specific political struggles against the caste system and involving British/Indian relations. My Indian history isn't sharp, so I was lost in a couple of places, but the narrative carries the story along and I found that as I kept reading, a lot of my confusion was cleared up. I know a lot more about India's struggle for independence and the caste system than I ever knew before, as well.

As an American, the caste system sets my teeth on edge, but in this story, it was the basis for the Brahmin's sense of belonging, security and order. Those who opposed the caste system and those who clung to it were portrayed in nearly the same light, neither side being right or wrong, simply opposite sides of an internal struggle.

I loved this book. The characters were vivid and alive, the setting painted in readable detail. The culture came absolutely alive to me as the characters walked in and through it. I highly recommend this book.

An Indian novel well worth reading
I have a real passion for Indian novels--before I ever was able to visit India, I admired the work of Ved Mehta, Sharon Maas, and Chitra Divakaruni. After visiting India several times, I've come to really enjoy novels by Indian authors.

Padma Viswanathan shows us an India most of us are unfamiliar with; the devout Brahmins of southern India. Taking a generational and leisurely pace, the author tells the story of an Indian family via a young widow Sivakami. The rituals of orthodox Brahmins, the deeply entwined nature of the caste system and the drama of intergenerational family struggles make this a novel on par with novels of the last century--and here is a caveat: if you want violent action and non-stop drama, this book isn't for you. It harks back to a different, lost era, which is the effect, I am sure, the novelist was striving for.

As in many Indian novels, there is always a touch of magic and supernatural mixed in. The daughter Thangam and her gift of leaving a trail of gold dust wherever she walks, and all the prophesies of marriage, children and death tied together, and the conversations the devout Sivikami has with her gods are treated as if they were natural phenomena.

This is a side of India I am sure most readers have not experienced; the rituals of Brahmins are not well-described in most literature. After reading "A Toss of a Lemon", you will have a different, panoramic and cultural impression of Indian life as it was in the past.

Readers Will Either Love It Or Hate It
The Toss of a Lemon will leave little middle ground with readers. Fans of the book will get swept up in the book's epic, yet intimate, scope and be transported to another world by the book's intricate descriptions. The book's detractors will only experience tedium after being exposed to over 600 pages of names and ritual titles.

Which side of the argument do I agree with? While impressed at the effort that it took to write the book, I find myself on the "tedium" side. The main reason why I feel this way is because the story, despite clearly being a very personal tale for the author, has a surprising lack of emotion. The entire story seems stultified by the very social structures that it portrays. Consequently, it is difficult to generate an emotional connection to the characters when those characters spent most of the book repressing their emotions for the sake of their social class.

Family stories set in other cultures can work (see The House of the Spirits). But, those works contain an emotional center to which readers from other cultures can relate. Such a center isn't present in The Toss of a Lemon. Thus, while the book is an impressive achievement, the story itself is not worth the effort needed to read the book.