The Abundance
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A luminous, bittersweet novel of India and the American midwest, immigrants and their first-generation children, and the power of cooking to bridge the gulfs between them
When Mala and Ronak learn that their mother has only a few months to live, they are reluctantly pulled back into the midwestern world of their Indian immigrant parents--a diaspora of prosperous doctors and engineers who have successfully managed to keep faith with the old world while claiming the prizes of the new. More successfully than their children--equally ill at ease with Holi and Christmas, bhaji and barbecue, they are mysteries to their parents and themselves.
In the short time between diagnosis and deterioration, Mala sets about learning everything she can about her mother's art of Indian cooking. Perfecting the naan and the raita, the two confront their deepest divisions and failures and learn to speak as well as cook. But when Ronak hits upon the idea of selling their experience as a book and a TV documentary, India and America, immigrant and native-born are torn as never before.
With grace, acuity, and wry compassion, Amit Majmudar has written anew the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations in The Abundance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Majmudar (Partitions) returns with a moving story of motherhood across cultural divides. After Mala and Ronak's mother tells them she has been diagnosed with cancer, the center of their world shifts from their own children and spouses and back to the woman who raised them. Their mother fears the change her illness will bring, not only to her body but also to the family's comfortable routine. She realizes some good might result, though, when Mala unexpectedly decides to learn how to cook the Indian meals she ate as a child. During the hours they spend together making dahi and rotli, Mala and Ronak's mother (never given her own name) muses upon watching them grow up and mature, from struggling as the children of immigrants in the Midwest to becoming parents themselves. Majmudar's precise dialogue saves the novel from its few moments of sentimentality and makes the theme of the divide between immigrant parent and first-generation children seem surprisingly fresh. Powerful in its simplicity and honesty, The Abundance reminds us of the way our roots inevitably shape our adult selves.
