Heat and dust

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The beautiful, spoiled and bored Olivia, married to a civil servant, outrages society in the tiny, suffocating town of Satipur by eloping with an Indian prince. Fifty years later, her step-granddaughter goes back to the heat, the dust and the squalor of the bazaars to solve the enigma of Olivia's scandal.

'A superb book. A complex story line, handled with dazzling assurance . . . moving and profound. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has not only written a love story, she has also exposed the soul and nerve ends of a fascinating and compelling country. This is a book of cool, controlled brilliance. It is a jewel to be treasured' THE TIMES

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Jhabvala's eighth novel intertwines two stories of two Indias over half a century, and what the book is really about is the social sea change that separates the lifestyle of the narrator, as recorded in her journal, from that of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, whose story the modern heroine is pursuing through the old letters she carries with her. Olivia comes to India as a young administrator's bride in 1923. Isolated and bored in her European-style bower, she drifts into an affair with a charming but bankrupt prince and after aborting his child, remains in a mountain exile alone there for the rest of her life. Olivia's story is swoony and fatalistic, overpowering as the heat and the dust, but although her inheritor's account has certain parallels, the comedown into contemporary mores and morals makes plain the trade-off that progress has entailed. Instead of a dashing husband, she has an encounter with one of those exploitative nirvana-seekers--this one with a flat Midlands accent that makes his prayer ludicrous. No prince for her either: she becomes pregnant by a meek clerk. Unlike Olivia, she lives amid the lepers, cripples and beggars that populate the streets. The splendor that was has all decayed, and one can't help feeling nostalgic for the Olivias--weak, rotten Olivia destroyed by the exotic East--in comparison to the efficient young woman of today, with her sleeping bag, her rented spaces and rented lovers. An impressive juxtaposition. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.