by PadmaViswanathan (Author)
Format: Illustrated
Pages: 636
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Harpervia
Published: Sep 2009
ISBN 10: 0547247877
ISBN 13: 9780547247878
We are left wondering what will happen as all cultures in the world continue to converge -- will a collective future become more important than singular, personal pasts? -- a mystery that the book earns, and one that haunts us well after closing the back cover. - Minneapolis Star Tribune
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. - Booklist
the portrait [Viswanathan] paints is dazzling. Gender rules, class relations, and the political castes of late 19th- and early to mid-20th-century India are well presented, making this an important work of historical fiction. - Library Journal, starred review
Viswanathan's absorbing first novel, based on her grandmother's life, goes deep into the world of sourthern India village life...Viswanathan is especially adept at unobtrusively explaining foreign customs and worldviews to Westerners while wholly respecting the power and significance they hold for practitioners. - Publishers Weekly [Viswanathan's] narrative, refreshingly, is free of anachronism, and she has a pleasing way of engaging the reader's senses--not least with some mouth-watering descriptions of 'dry and wet curries, pacchadis of yogurt and cucumber...deep-fried patties of lentil and chili, ' and other such delicacies....Of a piece with the recent works of Vikram Seth, and reminiscent at times of Garc a M rquez--altogether a pleasure. --Kirkus Reviews, starred review The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic and yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family's doorstep. It is also the debut of a major new voice in world fiction. - Booklounge.ca This is a rich, sensual book that uses life itself as its plot...reading it is an experience of immersion.... There is a whole world here between two covers. - The National Post (Canada) It [The Toss of a Lemon] pads in on little cat feet and rips you along. You don't realize you're on an epic journey in the midst of a generational saga until you're well along and it's far, far too late to turn back. Not that you'd want to. Not that you even could.... What astonishes here is Viswasathan's virtuosity...The Toss of A Lemon is astonishing. Brilliant. Beautiful. - January Magazine (Canada)With its rich and complex background and often sharp insights The Toss of a Lemon is a valuable and evocative work... - The Montreal Gazette
[I]n The Toss of a Lemon we see exactly how magnetic, how sinkingly seductive that [Brahmin] life was, and how difficult it must have been when the habits and customs of millennia were overturned by the shock of the new...Leaving the book feels like getting out of a warm bath on a cold day. Viswanathan is a charming writer...one's senses are overwhelmed by a rich density...Viswanathan makes clear the fear and ferocious love motivating ancient tribes, clans and classes that cling to the old ways. - The Globe and Mail The brilliance of The Toss of a Lemon rests not so much in its intricate plotting as in the compressed, poetic precision with which Viswanathan depicts a lost world. - Walrus This soaring new novel, inspired by the Edmonton author's family history, will draw comparisons to The God of Small Things, but Viswanathan has a voice and a vision all her own. - Chatelaine The Toss of a Lemon is an ambitious work that delivers through its careful examination of class hierarchies, gender divisions, and complex familial relationships...the prose is crisp enough to create a concrete sense of the places that the characters inhabit. The language captures unspoken melancholy through the rhythm of strummed drone strings, or the wonder of childhood curiousity through the taste of soil that 'is crunchy and damply acrid and contains a couple of jasmine petals'.....Ultimately the family at the centre of the novel serves as a fascinating microcosm of a a nation that is freeing itself of vestiges of colonialism and class divisions. - - Quill and Quire The story is heartbreaking and exhilarating, exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family. - The Asian Star In this, her debut novel, Padma Viswanathan performs a wondrous balancing act of words. She sustains a vivid sense of the moment while spanning decades, brings unforgettable individual characters to life while recounting a saga of generations, and lays bare the inner worlds of those characters while evoking an entire nation in turmoil. Rich with sensual detail, The Toss of a Lemon is the story of a community centred on tradition during an era of upheaval and change. Above all, it is a moving and deftly-drawn portrait of a family. - Alissa York It's a remarkable achievement for a book to capture the slow, stately pace of an 8,000 year old culture and yet keep a story moving at a brisk pace. The Toss of a Lemon gives readers the rare opportunity to enter the life of a Brahmin widow, to live her norms and routines and rituals as they have been lived by countless women over thousands of years. I closed it indebted for this immersion in a world I could not have otherwise entered. - Shyam Selvadurai The Toss of a Lemon is a glorious feat, as boisterously written as it is wholly engrossing. It's about love - and cruelty - and how each reverberate across the generations in one family. And it is that rare thing, a novel that manages to be both epic and intimate at the same time. - Peter OrnerWhat pleasure it was to read this rich and fascinating saga. It had me keeping the light on into the night, mad to find out what happened next. -- Lynn Freed, author of Reading, Writing, Leaving Home, Curse of the Appropriate Man, and the The Servants' Quarters
The Toss of a Lemon is a captivating novel that in relating the story of one Indian woman and her family tells the story of a changing society. Precisely and deftly written, constantly interesting, morally serious yet sympathetic -- I challenge any reader to start reading this book and give up on it. It joins the company of the great novels on India -- Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi
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