Book: Fire on the Mountain
Author: Anita Desai
Pages: 145
Read On: Paperback
How Long It Took Me To Read: 1 day
Plot Summary: Gone are the days when Nanda Kaul watched over her family and played the part of Vice-Chancellor's wife. Leaving her children behind in the real world, the busier world, she has chosen to spend her last years alone in the mountains in Kasauli, in a secluded bungalow called Carignano.
Until one summer her great-granddaughter Raka is dispatched to Kasauli and everything changes. Nanda is at first dismayed at this break in her preciously acquired solitude. Fiercely taciturn, Raka is, like her, quite untamed. The girl prefers the company of apricot trees and animals to her great-grandmother's, and spends her afternoons rambling over the mountainside. But the two are more alike than they know. Throughout the hot, long summer, Nanda's old, hidden dependencies and wounds come to the surface, ending, inevitably, in tragedy.
Marvellous yet restrained, Fire on the Mountain speaks of the past and its unshakable hold over the present.
General Thoughts: Anita Desai is another author I discovered this year and fell in love with. I feel so stupid that I hadn't read anything by her before! Stupid, stupid me! Her writing is lovely. Poetic. Beautiful and just fantastic. I am so glad I have found her at last and I cannot wait to read more by her. This is the second book of hers I've read and I am going to read another- Fasting and Feasting- later on this month.
Isn't this cover just beautiful?
Review: To be very honest, most of this book was a bit tedious reading experience for me. The reason being that the first quarter or more of this book is very heavy on descriptions of Kasauli, the hills, the home of Nanda Kaul and the general landscape of the place. As a rule, I am not a big fan of overly-descriptive books. I much prefer conversation and whats going on inside the heads of the characters and other aspects of books rather than knowing the lay of the land in great detail. This book has a lot of descriptions and while it was beautifully written...it just isn't something I like.
But the bits about the characters- especially Nanda Kaul's life, her former home and her former way of life were great. I also loved how her isolation, her disdain for family ties and how much she enjoys her life in the hills were shown. Here was a woman who had done her duty towards her family for years and years and was done with being social and was done with being needed and being surrounded by the demands of family. She enjoyed her life in the hills, enjoyed being by herself and wanted nothing to come in the way of her new life, not her childhood friend Ila Das or even her great-granddaughter Raka.
Raka- initially, by reading the description of the book, I somehow thought (entirely my fault) that Raka would be young woman...or at least a teenager. I didn't think that she would be a little girl! It was a surprise and a wee bit of a disappointment...again this is all me. I have no idea why I was expecting a young woman but I was. That being said, I soon got over my slight surprise and got on with the book. Raka is like her great-grandmother, but while Nanda prefers being left along because of her long-life of being surrounded by people and their needs and wants, Raka prefers isolation and solitude because that who she intrinsically is. She likes her own company. Prefers being left along and doesn't want to spend any time with Nanda. I loved how this irked Nanda even though she had only reluctantly agreed to keep for the summer.
I loved the attempts of bonding between the two characters, the stories Nanda tells Raka about her own childhood were lovely.
The sense of the long summer days, the wandering, the aimless ambling...was just brilliantly done. And even though I am not big on descriptive bits, the bits about Raka's daily wandering and adventures were superb.
The ending of this book though...it blew my mind! The slights twists in the end were fantastic and seriously made me gasp! I didn't see them coming nor did I expect any twists. It was brilliantly done!
The best part of the book though for me was Ila Das...man..it broke my heart. I pretty much put the book down and mulled things over. I loved, LOVED the bit with her in it. Seriously fantastic! She shows in the last 30 pages and just takes over the book. Seriously, read this book...read it for this character.
Rating: 4/5
Totally recommend!
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