Review: Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
Review:
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
The most recent novel of Indian born author Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting (1999) tells the story of two middle-class families and the allegorical struggles of the individual members to find individual identity and happiness. This meticulously constructed prose gravitates towards the position of women in the family unit and explores socially ordered gender imbalance in domestic life. Featuring a traditional Indian family in provincial town India and a typical American family in suburban Massachusetts, Desai utilizes comparison and contrast as an effective writing mechanism. Unique in her approach and successful in execution, Desai's illustration of dichotomies within the two families range as obviously as the novel's title and as subtlety as a meal choice.
The potency of Desai's novel stems from her poigent exploration of social, political, and economic themes. The otherwise mundane families are made vivid with the novel's use of contrast. Desai boldly explores family conflict and the roles and factors which contribute to the family structure. Two distinct and adverse cultures are illustrated through the collectivist India and individualist United States, as Desai portrays the evocative internal struggle of the protagonists Uma and Arun to achieve balance between involvement and detachment, illusion and reality, instinct and reason, education and ignorance. The themes by which these contrast are achieve range profusely from the culture, tradition, gender roles, beauty, health, religion, marriage and family as gendered institutions, and poor treatment of women.
The most valuable insight Desai presents in her text is her evaluation of the intricacy of domesticity and the complex and delicate web of the family network. Desai dissects the flawed complexity of gender within the family structure. In Uma's traditional Indian family, Arun, as the only son, is the primary recipient of the family's resources.
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
The most recent novel of Indian born author Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting (1999) tells the story of two middle-class families and the allegorical struggles of the individual members to find individual identity and happiness. This meticulously constructed prose gravitates towards the position of women in the family unit and explores socially ordered gender imbalance in domestic life. Featuring a traditional Indian family in provincial town India and a typical American family in suburban Massachusetts, Desai utilizes comparison and contrast as an effective writing mechanism. Unique in her approach and successful in execution, Desai's illustration of dichotomies within the two families range as obviously as the novel's title and as subtlety as a meal choice.
The potency of Desai's novel stems from her poigent exploration of social, political, and economic themes. The otherwise mundane families are made vivid with the novel's use of contrast. Desai boldly explores family conflict and the roles and factors which contribute to the family structure. Two distinct and adverse cultures are illustrated through the collectivist India and individualist United States, as Desai portrays the evocative internal struggle of the protagonists Uma and Arun to achieve balance between involvement and detachment, illusion and reality, instinct and reason, education and ignorance. The themes by which these contrast are achieve range profusely from the culture, tradition, gender roles, beauty, health, religion, marriage and family as gendered institutions, and poor treatment of women.
The most valuable insight Desai presents in her text is her evaluation of the intricacy of domesticity and the complex and delicate web of the family network. Desai dissects the flawed complexity of gender within the family structure. In Uma's traditional Indian family, Arun, as the only son, is the primary recipient of the family's resources.