To learn facts about one's parents from their younger days can be a sobering experience. But discoveries might be especially painful if the facts concern a mother who abandoned her child. Anuradha Roy explores this dynamic in her perceptive new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived.

In 1992, Myshkin Chand Rozario is in his mid-60s. He still lives in his childhood home in the Indian town of Muntazir, where he works as the superintendent of horticulture, "a glorified gardener," as he puts it.

Myshkin has received a large envelope from someone in Vancouver. The contents of the package pertain to his mother, Gayatri, which prompts Myshkin to recall the events of his childhood in 1937, when India was still under British rule and his mother yearned for a more fulfilling life. Into this picture come two real-life figures: Walter Spies, a German painter who met Gayatri years earlier, and Beryl de Zoete, an English dancer who horrifies young Myshkin with pronouncements like, "I eat little boys baked in the oven. With extra salt." Inspired by Spies' philosophy that "there is music in everything, beauty everywhere," Gayatri leaves her family for what she hopes will be a more exciting and artistic life.

If the novel goes off on too many tangents, Roy is nonetheless a thoughtful writer who creates beguiling scenes, such as the emergence of women holding candles at nighttime, "a wavering line of fireflies," as they sing a Muslim mourning chant. All the Lives We Never Lived is an affecting tale of loss, remarriage and rediscovery.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the Nazis rising, a German artist arrives in an Indian village and sweeps away Gayatri, a woman from his past eager to flee marriage and motherhood for soaring freedom. Her story is told by the son she leaves behind. From the author of the Man Booker long-listed Sleeping on Jupiter.

In her fourth novel, Man Booker-long listed Indian author Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter) draws on historical events unfolding in 1930s/40s India—colonialism, Gandhi, World War II—to tell the story of Myshkin Chand Rozario, who, like his name, doesn't quite fit in. Myshkin, in his 60s, is looking back at his childhood, when his mother ran away to Bali with the German artist Walter Spies and dance researcher Beryl de Zoete, both of whom are based on real people. Myshkin is a grumpy old man who never married but is attached to the trees and plants he's nurtured in his role as the town horticulturist. In the chaos of World War II, he lost contact with his mother and never did find out what happened to her. But he's bequeathed a series of letters she wrote to a friend when she first left India and appreciates as an adult how, being trapped in an arranged marriage, she writes about needing to create her art. VERDICT This novel has an epic feel but also portrays the feelings of an abandoned child and captured woman while strongly evoking the sounds, scents, plants, people, and social structures of India at the time. [See Prepub Alert, 5/14/18.]—Jan Marry, Lanexa, VA

The latest novel from Roy (Sleeping on Jupiter) is a lush and lyrical fusion of history and storytelling. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the fictional Indian small town of Muntazir—amid India's fight for independence from Britain and the breakout of WWII—legendary singer Begum Akhtar, dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete, and German painter Walter Spies all figure prominently in the tale of nine-year-old Myshkin, who's abandoned by his free-spirited mother, Gayatri, and then largely ignored by his college professor and political activist father, Nek. When Myshkin, in his 60s after a career as a horticulturist, gets a package of letters his mother wrote during her self-imposed exile in Bali, it sets off his narration of Gayatri's rebellious youth, her oppressive marriage to the strident and rules-bound Nek, her decision to leave "that monsoon day in 1937" with Spies and de Zoete—and Myshkin's lifelong struggle to understand his mother's radical choice. Myshkin believes Akhtar, whom his mother tends to when the star falls into one of her "spells of grief and suspicion," may have inspired his mother's own decision to run away and find "a different life." "My mother knew when she left that she had poured petrol and set a match to every bridge between herself and her family," Myshkin recalls. "After such desertion, what forgiveness?" This mesmerizing exploration of the darker consequences of freedom, love, and loyalty is an astonishing display of Roy's literary prowess. (Nov.)