The Far Field
Ratings9
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings9
Average rating4.1
“Remarkable . . . Vijay traces the fault lines of history, love, and obligation running through a fractured family and country.” —Anthony Marra, New York Times–bestselling author Winner of the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize–winner Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present. In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion. “A chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible—and honest enough to make them real.” —The Washington Post “A singular story of mother and daughter.” —Entertainment Weekly
Reviews with the most likes.
This book is beautiful, difficult, meticulous yet winding, and exactingly devastating.
An exquisite train wreck. Unlike anything I've read or could imagine myself reading, much less enjoying, but I did, both, and I'm finding it hard to figure out why. For now I put the blame squarely on Vijay's shoulders: she is remarkably skillful at observing human relationships; at creating complex, inconsistent, puzzlingly real human characters and dynamics. Her ability to describe settings only adds to the charges against her.
The Far Field grabbed me from the first pages and kept me hooked until near the (weak) ending. Is that a spoiler? It shouldn't be. I don't feel upset about it, certainly not compared to my feelings throughout the rest of the book. And feelings, there were a lot of. The principal character in the novel is Cruelty, one of my lifelong foes. There's the deliberate kind meant to sting; the crushingly indifferent institutional kind; the inadvertent cruelty of thoughtless words or actions; the kind that's an accidental byproduct of good intentions; and the coldly calculated cruelty of the sociopath. Wait, don't leave: it's not like that, not unbearable every-page evil, there's tremendous beauty and discovery too, kindness and affection and vulnerability. It's just that the lasting consequences of cruelty infuse every page.
The protagonist is unlikable but not actually despicable: a shallow, self-absorbed privileged young woman with a reverse-Midas touch: bringing harm and hurt to every life she touches. The catch is, it's the narrator herself admitting these actions, with a buffer of six years; transformed and reflective. None of her hurt is intentional—it all stems from her clumsiness, ignorance, naïvete—but somehow this makes it hit harder. I've been there, I've hurt people with my thoughtlessness, those moments haunt me and I've used them to work harder toward being better. Or have I? The narrator's voice is hard to pinpoint: she clearly has the insight and self-awareness to recognize her actions; the courage and compassion to write of them. Is it enough? Transitively: am I enough? What injustices am I turning a blind eye to, or even perpetrating myself?
I really don't have the talent to describe The Far Field. But that's not my job; my job is to encourage you to read it yourself. I hope you do.
Is lack of activism, cowardice? Is okay to just be concerned with what affects you and your family, daily? What happens when a foreigner decides to take activism into her own hands, while trying to find herself, at the same time. This novel grapples with these issues.
