Clear Light of Day
Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who...
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Set in India's Old Delhi, CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY is Anita Desai's tender, warm, and compassionate novel about family scars, the ability to forgive and forget, and the trials and tribulations of familial love. At the novel's heart are the moving relationships between the members of the Das family, who have grown apart from each other. Bimla is a dissatisfied but ambitious teacher at a women's college who lives in her childhood home, where she cares for her mentally challenged brother, Baba. Tara is her younger, unambitious, estranged sister, married and with children of her own. Raja is their popular, brilliant, and successful brother. When Tara returns for a visit with Bimla and Baba, old memories and tensions resurface and blend into a domestic drama that is intensely beautiful and leads to profound self-understanding.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780618074518 (0618074511)
Publish date: September 12th 2000
Publisher: Mariner Books
Pages no: 192
Edition language: English
I liked this book a lot. It’s an emotionally rich and nuanced tale of four adult siblings and their formative years in an old home in Delhi, where the tough, passionate older sister, Bimla, still lives, teaching history and caring for their mentally challenged younger brother. The timid younger sist...
If this book is on your reading list, I recommend you promptly remove it. This is a meandering tale of people, families and a country, all falling apart. While this theme alone could have had much potential, in Desai's hands it turns into a meditation on hopelessness and depression. The book migh...
"Nothing's over, ever." That's the conclusion that Bim and Tara come to after they spend a few weeks together in the childhood home where Bim still lives. That could be ominous, because there are a lot of unpleasant memories stirred up, from a childhood full of illness, unhappiness, and secrets. But...