House of Caravans

One of the things I think I learned way too little about in school was the incredible historical importance of The Partition. It's such a momentous event, and it's become a subject I'm really drawn to in fiction. Which is why I was excited about this book, which starts promisingly with two parallel tracks: in one, a pair of brothers is miraculously reunited as they flee the newly-created Pakistan to India, while in the other the grandchildren of one of those brothers are reunited when one returns to India from several years in America in the wake of 9/11. As to be expected in this sort of book, relationships (particularly but not exclusively romantic relationships) between Muslims and Hindus are central to the narrative, with love being just one of the things that is achingly, irrevocably sundered along with India and Pakistan themselves. Ultimately I don't think the parallel narratives serve the story particularly well: the historical one is much more compelling and I never liked leaving it to return to the modern one, which doesn't feel like it has a lot of direction. The historical one is also where virtually all of the interesting character developments happen, with the modern characters never really feeling like actual people as much as ideas about what people could be. There's promise here, but the structure really cheats it of momentum in a way that it just couldn't recover from for me.