Dusty and Boring........

For a Booker prize winning novel written by a multiple Oscar winning writer, this book is mediocre at best. Long before the Booker garnered glamor and fat advances, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala won it in 1975 for Heat and Dust. It was also turned into a movie by James Ivory.

The narrator, a young English woman, comes to India sometime after the Independence to understand the life of her step-mother, Olivia Rivers. She knows Olivia only from the letters she wrote to a friend. Her interest is the affair Olivia had with a local Nawab. It is not clear why the narrator is so interested in Olivia or what she intends to establish from her stay.

Jhabvala was born Ruther Prawer in a German Jewish family. She immigrated to England before World War-II, married an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala and lived in India for a significant part of her life. Inspite of her background, she falls into the all too familiar pattern of exoticizing of India. The India of the British Raj with Nawabs, servants, strange customs, poverty, heat and dust. In some strange way she also allows her characters to justify customs like "sutte" (burning of a widow on her husband's pyre). There is an attempt to portray the characters as instinctive and passionate, but they come off as petulant and silly.

I wouldn't recommend this novel unless you wanted to understand the stereotypical India from a westerner's eye.