Freight-train sentences
Da Cunha undoubtedly weaves very credible tales of female lives, and manages to reveal how often the inner lives and feelings of women are very different from the face they reveal to the world. Her stories are very perceptive of the complex emotional needs of women. The story 'A Nest of Old Feathers' is a tale about an interesting relationship that develops between a middle-aged woman and a rather eccentric, old gentleman based on their common passion for books, the title story narrates the anxiety and inability of a young woman to fit into the compromise of marriage in an urban setting so removed from the idyllic village where she roamed freely with her father, while the story 'The Permanence of Grief' weaves a tale about a very thought-provoking relationship between a brother and sister. There is a definite patterning of Cunha's exposition of womanhood. Her stories explore all the roles of a woman, from the daughter with an Electra complex to the matriarchal mother of the Sons and Lovers category who turns her son into an emotional cripple. But each tale is told from an emotional angle, Cunha tries to articulate the unique set of fears, apprehensions, dreams and disappointments at every stage of womanhood.
However, perhaps the weight of the emotional burden that the writer aspires her prose to carry proves to be disruptive, for her prose wavers between verbosity and disjointedness. I cannot resist giving an example of a freight-train sentence that left me confused and exhausted: "There was dust on the mirror and cobwebs and powder, and old bills, and a lovely bit of blue and white pottery, somebody must have brought back for the old man, lovingly wrapped in soft underwear, against jolts and knocks and the myriad horrors of travel, and now she thought here is that bit of ceramic which has travelled over land and sea and time for a young man who must have held it warmly and now an old man who can hardly see it anymore lets it lie, if he remembers it at all, wrapped in a thick cobweb of dust on a dressing table between gooey, oozy, cough drops and pink Cremaffin also oozing out of a rusty top, oh, time is awful, time is sad, and we don't learn anything." In the other extreme Cunha almost obsessively punctuates both her narrative and dialogues with dashes that are intended, I can only assume, to portray fragmented emotional states but their excessive use often leave the reader hanging too; for example:
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. "They'd see to it that Safia pulled through--I mean the other time--"
"I wish that those three things had helped her when she--you know--later--"
"Yes, well, but the later time--was quite impossible in every way--the conflict--she was just torn--torn apart "(p.227)
I have to admit that in the course of reading the book I found myself repeatedly tempted to flip back to the publication details to assure myself that a novel that has so obviously been poorly edited and reviewed before publication was actually published under the hitherto prestigious Penguin Original Books Series. My final statement would be that the slipping of standards that this book is a witness to is disquieting.
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