Tomb of Sand

November 1, 2022
Opening with the phrase, ""A tale tells itself,"" Shree channels a story that indeed has a life and will of its own. Ma, a widowed matriarch in old age and despair, has literally turned her back to her family and the world. Despite this stance, Ma's story takes flight with sensual beauty and utterances of wonder-filled wisdom. She journeys through the quotidian indignities of old age; she is lost, found, and hospitalized. Ma also journeys through the complicated mire of personal domestic drama. Ma's final journey is a flight abroad. The gorgeous writing is fluid and poetic, yet it is also plain and arresting with its direct second-person narration. Rockwell's translation retains wit and rich flavor, with many words that vividly reflect Ma's life. This novel, translated from Hindi, won the International Booker Award. Readers of international literature, award-list titles, and literary fiction will cherish Shree's written intricacies of interior worlds as well as her detailed settings that evoke a strong sense of place.

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November 28, 2022
This alluring, International Booker–winning saga from Shree (The Empty Space) employs magical realism to recount a matriarch’s rebirth in contemporary India. After Ma’s husband dies, she refuses to get out of bed, leaving her oldest son, Bade; his wife, Bahu (also known as “Mem Sahib,” which means white woman living in India); his sons Siddharth and Serious Son; and his feminist sister, Beti, to worry. After receiving a cane covered in colorful butterflies from Overseas Son, Ma holds the cane up and says, “I am the Wishing Tree. I am the Kalpataru.” From there, she gives away most of her possessions and disappears. Later, Ma returns—not to her wealthy son, Bade, but to Beti, and bonds with her old friend Rosie Bua, a hijra who understands the power of the Wishing Tree. The prominent characters’ names are honorifics (“beti” means daughter), as in the charactonyms of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Ma goes on to challenge expectations of her role as a mother in her rebirth by pursuing autonomy and enlightenment. The leisurely pacing and drawn-out accounts from the various characters make for a slow burn, but Rockwell does a lovely job preserving the Hindi wordplay in Shree’s kaleidoscopic epic. This is worth signing up for the long haul.

December 1, 2022
An 80-year-old woman begins a new life and, in the process, confronts her past. Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, this ambitious novel is something of a behemoth, upending and redefining concepts of modernity, boundaries, gender, colonialism, and the India-Pakistan Partition. Along the way, Shree challenges the idea of what a novel--or even a story--can do. At the book's center is 80-year-old Ma, who lives in Delhi with her son and daughter-in-law. Deeply depressed following her husband's death, Ma refuses to get out of bed. Then, suddenly, Ma disappears for a few days, and when she turns up again, with no explanation for her absence, she goes to stay with her daughter. Beti, a writer and a divorc�e, has spurned the more traditional life her brother pursued and prides herself on her freedom. But as Ma returns to life, Beti is forced to question just how modern and progressive she really is--after all, it's Ma who's developing an intimate friendship with a hijra and casting aside her traditional saris; Beti is more discomfited by these actions than she can admit even to herself. The complex relationships depicted here could have filled a dozen other novels, but they are not Shree's focus. Instead, she tugs at the conventions of the novel itself: "Think of a story as a living being," she writes. "There are countless beings and countless types of beings." Some of this material becomes repetitive and could have benefited from a strict editor. Then, too, Shree is occasionally prone to a didacticism that isn't quite as mind-blowing as she might have intended: "That which is perceived in a state of semiconsciousness is true unvarnished reality," for example; "A rock is only a rock as long as it's a rock." Still, the language games and puns, nimbly translated by Rockwell, are delightful ("Their minds turned to curd: hue and cry occurred"), and Shree's larger project is truly admirable: an utterly unique novel that redefines its own boundaries even as it unfolds. Shree's experimental novel doesn't always succeed--but even when it fails, it fails in a compelling way.

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