The Pleasure Seekers Book

I was charmed by this book, charmed by the lovely characters who I felt invested in. For the last two days as I was floating through the BEAUTY-fully crafted pages, I wanted to know more and more about everyone involved, and when the book was finally over I was sad to have not been given a chance to know yet more about them. This is an immediate emotion. It may change after few days. But this is the most sensuous narrative I have come across in a long long time.

The book succeeds in recreating the story of a cross-continental love affair, surrounded by a bumbling Gujju family. It also succeeds in telling a tale spanning three generations with enormous ease. The setting is Chennai, Anjar, and Wales. The tale effortlessly moves between these three places with smooth jump cuts that position the camera into the past or future as Tishani pleases, but a great coherence is achieved which seems almost alchemical. In an interview she said that it took her eight years to write the book and because it is inspired from her own family, the real challenge must have been "what to eliminate" rather than "how to gather a plot". Eight years was the time it took her to even out the rough edges, to fill the novel with greater concerns than just the off beat love story, to provide an impossible but believable spiritual center in the character of Ba, to provide gorgeous and troubling snapshots of the family, the people who bring us into existence, who come running for us when we are trapped in earthquake ridden villages... who when they leave for good leave behind a space that we are supposed to fill with more love, and how difficult that is. For me, The Pleasure Seekers is a very successful family narrative. And because it comes from lived experience, and because the writer is a poet, the joy of reading it is enormous.

Having grown up in a joint family, I think about "family novel" a lot, maybe because it is the oldest literary genre, and because it is the story a writer can know intimately, probably the only story, because you can smell and touch your characters, you know their best jokes, you know what pisses them off, you know when they will throw tantrums and when they will act wise, because you have spent a thousand years with them and have a lot of events ready in your head - you can even take small bites from those events when you are alone and hungry to savor their many flavors. If a writer has talent the family is a fodder for a masterpiece. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buddenbrooks, and Corrections to name a few. Tishani Doshi's book should count among them. More so because it is intriguing to see that a book about emotionally successful people is very much possible, while the urge to slip into the dysfunction is ever so tempting. She achieves beauty here by metaphorical semblance of the two.