Reviews for A short textbook of chemical pathology

The average rating for A short textbook of chemical pathology based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-17 00:00:00 Rickey Davis This review ran in the San Jose Mercury News in 2002: Do you know the sensation of getting near the end of a book and feeling the thickness of the pages left? As the remaining pages of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel grew fewer I began to worry: Would there be room enough for what I wanted to know about the characters and their lives? There was. Divakaruni's narrative in ''The Vine of Desire'' is as gracefully structured as a piece of chamber music, with its interplay of themes and voices, ensemble and solo, working their way toward a final resolving chord. It begins with discord in the lives of the cousins Anju and Sudha, whom some readers have met in Divakaruni's earlier novel ''Sister of My Heart.'' Anju has miscarried and is emerging from a dark depression that has put a strain on her marriage to Sunil, an executive at a Silicon Valley company. Back in India, Sudha has left her husband: When an ultrasound revealed that the baby Sudha was carrying was female, her domineering mother-in-law wanted to have it aborted. Sudha fled her home, her spineless husband divorced her, and she's trying to raise the infant, Dayita, by herself. So Anju and Sunil invite Sudha and Dayita to stay with them in their apartment in San Jose. Soon after Sudha's arrival, Anju resumes her work toward a college degree and begins to find her metier in writing classes. Anju is particularly inspired by an instructor who introduces her to the letters and journals of 18th- and 19th-century women -- writers who were denied a larger literary fame: ''The instructor thinks of it as a great pity. Imagine all the letters that were lost, she said last week. All the diaries that were thrown away unread. What a waste. . . . Anju understood what she was saying. And yet -- what freedom it must have been! What exquisite loneliness.'' So Anju embraces such loneliness, seeking out a solitary space at the college where she can write: ''a room white as the inside of an egg, circular and without windows. . . . She has always thought of windows as distractions, drawing a person out of herself.'' But if solitude is freedom for Anju, it's oppression for Sudha, who stays in the apartment while Anju goes to class and Sunil to work. She cooks and cleans and tends to Dayita. And then one day Sunil returns to the apartmentwhile Anju is away and reveals his passion for Sudha. She repels his advances but can't bring herself to reveal the truth to Anju. Their meals together become ''a tableau of silence: three people, inside their chests small black boxes, holding inside them smaller, blacker boxes. . . . Until at the very center of the chest, the secret of whose existence they are totally unaware. The secret of the self, already pollinated by time's spores, waiting to burst open when they are least prepared for it.'' Against these images of enclosure, isolation and solitude, Divakaruni plays an awareness of the larger world. The novel takes place in a specific time -- 1994, the year of, among many other things, the O.J. Simpson case, with which Sunil is oddly obsessed -- and a very specific place -- the Bay Area, a place that Sudha, like many immigrants, has difficulty coming to terms with. Bay Area readers will relish the grace notes provided by Divakaruni's attention to local color. (She lives in the East Bay.) For example, there's the ostentatious Los Altos Hills trophy home where, at a party held by a successful Indian entrepreneur, Sudha meets Lalit Reddy, a handsome, thoroughly Americanized young surgeon, who begins to woo her. He takes her to Grizzly Peak to watch the sunset. ''Look,'' Lalit says. ''There's the campanile at Cal, there's the Bay Bridge, backed up as usual, there's Angel Island, where one time deer and immigrants were quarantined. . . .'' There's such fondness in his voice. I'm racked by jealousy. To belong to a place fully, to know it so well that you believe it belongs to you. Does he even guess how lucky he is? Sudha also senses that, like Lalit, Anju has found something in America that Sudha can't feel, as when Anju describes a member of her writers' group: ''She's from Iran,'' Anju says. . . . ''Her family fled the country during Khomeini's rule. She's writing an essay about that time, particularly what happened to the women. . . . She said I had real talent and owed it to myself to develop it.'' Owed it to myself. It was not an idea we'd grown up with in Calcutta. Owed it to my parents, yes. My ancestors. My in-laws. My children. Teachers, society, God. But owed it to myself? Yet how easily Anju says it today. What is it that I owe myself? The strength of Divakaruni's novel is that it's built up through poignant insights into the hearts and minds of Sudha and Anju. We learn, for example, that Anju is more ambivalent about her life in the United States than Sudha supposes: When she's invited by her writers' group to go see a movie ''about Indians'' at Camera 3, Anju fears that she'll wind up defensively explaining that Indians don't really eat monkey brains or sacrifice virgins to Kali. Or else that it will be a serious movie by an Indian director about poverty or police brutality and that she'll find herself insisting that ''there's a lot more to India than what you're seeing here.'' Anju reflects on what it's like to ''love parts of your heritage so much that it tingles in your fingertips like pins and needles. You're ready to kill anyone who criticizes it. And then there are things about it that make you want to drive your fist through a window.'' Because Sudha is untethered to the culture in which she finds herself, her situation grows dire when the tensions among Anju, Sudha and Sunil in the too-small apartment finally erupt, sending each of them in a new direction. And then we occasionally see the novel's gears meshing and wheels turning. Divakaruni reaches into conventional, even sentimental, fiction to work out Sudha's destiny. I also think that neither of the principal male characters, Sunil and Lalit, quite comes off the page -- I suspect that Divakaruni hasn't spent as much time inside them as she has inside Anju and Sudha. Yet once Divakaruni has established what course Sudha's life is to take, the richness of imagination that animates most of the book returns, and it moves to a lyrical resolution. Divakaruni has established herself as an important writer -- just last year, her collection of short stories, ''The Unknown Errors of Our Lives,'' had reviewers reaching for superlatives. ''The Vine of Desire'' does nothing to undermine that reputation. If you find yourself counting the pages left in the book, it's likely to be because you wish there were many, many more.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-22 00:00:00 Forrest Goodgame I loved the predecessor to this book, Sister of My Heart. It was a fabulous story of strong women. They made amazing selfless choices out of love and loyalty to each other. Even when you didn't agree with their actions, you understood their motivations clearly. I highly recommend Sister of My Heart. I was excited to find out a sequel existed and picked up The Vine Of Desire almost immediately. Somehow, this book was the opposite of the first and made me dislike almost all of the characters I loved so much before. The characters acted very selfishly on all fronts and their motivations were almost a complete mystery. I think the intent was to explore freedom from duty and putting yourself first but everyone was hurtful and self-absorbed. It ended better than I expected but I still didn't enjoy this book and wish I had stopped after the first.