REVIEWER COMMENTS"THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS is a big book with a baroque design. By an interweaving of narrative voices, a brilliant picture is drawn not only of individuals – a forceful feminist grandmother; a father dressing up in kilts and brogues, with a fixation on Scotland – but of a whole upper-class Indian family." Adam Lively, “Gone to the Devil,” Punch, October 7, 1988 "Fantastical though the framework may seem, THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS is neither a fantasy nor science fiction, but a vividly realistic presentation of three generations of Parsis living in Navsari and Bombay. A variety of strikingly life-like characters, drawn with a warm feeling of kinship, yet with much humour, and often with a penetrating satirical observation, give the novel a vibrant sense of reality." Homai Shroff, “Remembering Bapaiji,” The Indian Post, December 18, 1988 "Desai’s style is fluid and he weaves together a tapestry of Parsi history, religion and social change quite well. His keen mind, his elephantine memory (which accounts for the title) and his sharp humour make for enjoyable reading." Glenn Rogers, “Parsi Tales,” Afternoon Despatch, July 19, 1991 "Novelists have used various devices when dealing with history, personal or autobiographical. Witness Salman Rushdie’s brilliant MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN. Boman Desai, a Parsi, raised in Bombay and now living in Chicago has devised a memory machine as the engine of his narrative in THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS. "The inventor of the Memoscan is Homi Seervai, a young Indian scientist working in America. Thwarted in love, Homi links up in his machine with the aim of living unto death the few moments of fulfilled love he had had. But it doesn’t work like that: Homi is plunged into the past, and the story unfolds. Homi’s backgrounds, family, and India come to life with great vividness and humour. Added to that are rewarding insights into the alien wisdom of exiles. The writing is at times lush but never dull. The observations are acute; you sense a generosity of spirit in Desai’s way of looking at the world and at people." Elon Salmon, “Mid-West Crises,” Yorkshire Post, September 15, 1988 "Desai is an adroit writer whose style is deceptively simple and droll. The characterizations are vibrant. The dialogue is easy despite some literal translations. The prose is limpid. The book is as evocative as a box of old snapshots, and the reader can chuckle over the idiosyncracies and behaviour. The writing has so much drive that, once started, it is almost impossible to leave this book unfinished." Roshni, “Looking Back,” The Statesman Literary Supplement (India), April 23, 1989 "Desai is rightly aware of the vitality of the dead: a theme he exploits to the full with disarming unpretentiousness, humour and characterisation both warm and sharp. Young Homi hides, a reluctant voyeur, under his grandparents’ marital bed. His grandmother speaks from her chosen place in heaven: Cambridge, England, where a winter fireside is so much 'toastier' than an Indian summer. His dead father dances the Highland Fling in Edinburgh. "This is an accomplished first novel, an ingenious approach to the family saga form. It is a fastidiously written experiment in time in which the author has brought off exactly what he set out to do – to bring everyone and everything from a Persian elephant slain by Arabs to young Homi in America 'all together in one place and time.'" Janice Elliott, “A Night of Bliss,” The Independent, October 8, 1988 "The forty chapters, each really developed anecdotes rather than discrete short stories, are grouped around six characters, all closely related, and utilize numerous narrative voices that are, for the most part, effective in delineating the personal, family, and professional lives of an upper-class non-Hindu Indian clan. There are detailed, accurate descriptions of places visited by members of the family – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Darjeeling, Chicago, and northeast Pennsylvania – that belie the prefatory publisher’s note that the author’s 'memory is not what it used to be.' A worthy addition to Indian fiction in English." A. L. McLeod, World Literature Today, Summer-Autumn 2002 |
THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS
THE MEMORY OF ELEPHANTS (a summary) When Homi Seervai, the Parsi whiz kid from Bombay, comes to Aquihana University in Pennsylvania, he hopes to invent a machine, the memoscan, which will allow him to scan the memories of any individual. The machine would work much like a movie projector, allowing him to move backward and forward as he pleased in the movie of his life so that he might select the moments he wishes to relive. Homi falls in love with Candace “Candy” Kirchner, who dumps him once her curiosity about him has been satisfied. Unable to deal with her rejection, Homi sets up the memoscan with a tripwire mechanism to enable him to relive endlessly the time he has spent with her, and attaches himself to the machine though it is still a prototype. He anticipates living no more than three to four days by which time dehydration will have taken its toll on his body, or else the convolution holding his memories of Candace will have been deepened enough by the repeated action of the electrodes to have destroyed his brain – but he doesn’t think of it as dying as much as living forever with his love. What he doesn’t anticipate is that the memoscan will immerse him in a coma, penetrating beyond his personal memories into his collective unconscious, the repository for the memories of mankind, where there are no walls between the living and the dead. In this twilight zone of his brain he meets his dead grandmothers and father who acquaint him with the splendor of his heritage and ancestry, spanning from the 7th century in Iran to the 20th in America. He imagines at first that he is going crazy because he sees and hears the actual battles and negotiations between his 7th century Irani ancestors and their Muslim conquerors, the first standard-bearers of Islam. Not only does the past become the present, but the present mingles with the past. His brother is seated in a vigil by his bedside when he notices a resemblance between his brother’s ears and their paternal grandmother’s, at which point his brother becomes their grandmother who grabs the narrative by the reins and leads Homi through the vistas of her own life. He sees everything she shows him as if it were a movie in which he has gained a phantom presence, and hears her as if she were providing a voiceover. He had known her as a woman of some eminence, but never recognized how very venerable a person he had in his own grandmother, taking her instead for granted. Homi is comforted by her story, realizing that he is not going crazy but has tapped into an alternate reality through the netherland of the memoscan, leading to the chaos he experienced before his grandmother seized the moment. Understanding the nature of his reality he begins to enjoy the show as his maternal grandmother takes the reins to reveal how she had been married as a young girl to a man more than twice her age for his money and the advantages and disadvantages that had accrued from the union, leading Homi to better understand the grandmother he had known only as quixotic during her lifetime. The reins are yielded in turn to his father, mother, and brother, and Homi learns the enchanting love story of his parents and the sacrifices made by his younger brother, their stories played out against a backdrop first of the Raj with the British holding sway – but giving way to an India, independent but still in the throes of emancipation. Centuries of history coalesce in Homi’s bedroom, as do entire cities (among them Aquihana, Navsari, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Chicago, and Bombay), before he recognizes the stupidity of his ingratitude. Blessed with the brain of a genius, the ability to probe the secrets of the Unconscious, he had chosen instead a selfish and self-destructive love. The novel has been his long night, but the last page sees him rise from his coma, excited once more by his life and its possibilities. |
|
