Bitter Sweets - Roopa Farooki
Bitter Sweets is set up to be an epic, multi-generational classic novel much as Thorn Birds, but set in Pakistan and London. You start four generations back with a lying shopkeeper who pawns his bored 13 year old girl off on a wealthy family, convincing them that she is in fact a literate, well educated 17 year old. The book then lays out in painstaking detail how each subsequent generation is tained by these lies - how each person gets by in life solely by deception.It's certainly an interesting enough theme, and I did find the atmosphere of Pakistan life both at home and abroad to be intriguing. I read the book through in two days, and by the second day I had my boyfriend bring some some nice saag, pakoras and naan to eat. The book attempts to cover deceptions in all of their myriad forms - affairs, lying about being gay, lying to your parents about who you are dating, marrying a second wife, lying about a child's parentage, lying to yourself about how you feel, pretending to be like everyone else to fit in, pretending to be happy in a marriage for the sake of the kids, and much, much more. It's as if someone made a gigantic laundry list of all the ways deception could happen and then puzzled out how to fit each one into the storyline.
It's not just the soap opera story that involves deception, though. There are numerous discussions ON the topic of deception. They have a literary discussion of Andromaque. They talk about self deception. They muse on the necessity of lying to keep the gears of society turning smoothly.
At first, I thought it was the incessant sludge of lying which was getting to me. I tend to try to be a very honest person, and to read about person after person lying - in situation after situation - was draining. People in the story were lying just to lie, without rhyme or reason half the time. I think the only non-liars in the entire story were a mother-and-daughter pair named Verity and Candida. Well, that doesn't last long - soon even Candida is tainted and begins lying.
But looking more closely at it, it was the entire construction of the novel which bogged me down. Usually I run smoothly through a book, getting drawn into it and losing myself for a number of hours, the pages turning quickly. With this one, it felt like wading through molasses. The writing just didn't flow. I thought it might be due to a Pakistani "voice" - but I've read books by authors from this region before and adored them. I finally had to admit that it simply was clumsy writing that kept pulling me back.
It didn't feel as if I was immersed in their world, watching events unfold, understanding the emotions and instincts that caused the characters to react. It was more like watching a TV show where characters were very one-dimensional and they told you what they were feeling. The connection wasn't there. I had to believe what they said, because the emotions they talked about weren't described very well. Some of the emotional flip-flops were quite unbelievable. It also seemed like characters were incredibly dense when the plot called for it - and then supernaturally prescient when plot required that insight.
I had really high hopes for this novel, and maybe they were just *too* high for a first novel. I also have to think that a good editor could have cleaned this up quite a bit and helped to tune it into something more involving. I did find the worlds described to be interesting. I will keep alive the hope that if the author created a second novel with more "showing" and less "telling" - and if she finds an editor much more capable of tuning her words into a smooth-flowing story - that it will be one I really enjoy. This just isn't it for me.
Buy Bitter Sweets from Amazon.com
Modern Book Reviews
Top Selling Books of All Time