China Room: The heartstopping and beautiful novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021

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Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher. I enjoyed the book, but I wish aspects had been more developed. Having just heard the author speak with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company, I appreciated the book a great deal more than I had right upon completion of it. I would be delighted to see it make the Booker shortlist.

An enjoyable, accessible, and relatively brief work of literary fiction set in the Punjab that concerns itself with marriage, sexual passion and possessiveness, sibling rivalry, self-agency, and the historically constricted lives of women. As engaging as it is, the novel feels a little thin and it contains soap-opera-ish elements; it requires the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The story, inspired by Sunjeev Sahota’s family history is created with strong story-telling skills and a fair share of claustrophobic tension. The novel takes his title from the cramped china room – complete with willow-pattern plates—that the breeding mare (Mahar) must go to when requested by her officious mother-in-law to meet her “husband” and hopefully, “get with child.”

The book is also underpinned by a sense of loss and of having to settle for a substitute or reduced status.

Interspersed with this story is that of a young man who is sent to his uncle in rural Punjab to get through the ravages of heroin withdrawal. As it turns out, he is the great-grandson of Mehar. Living in Mehar’s former house and building a crush on an older female doctor who visits him there, he tries to separate facts from legends. More in-depth thoughts to follow on https://thereadersroom.org/ where I am serving as a member of a panel (to analyze the Booker Prize). man is not intelligent while the computer system is (Dennett). 5. The Larger Philosophical Issues 5.1 Syntax and Semantics I liked how Sahota linked his motifs between the two storylines, and I also found the narrative suspenseful and interesting. Sure, many questions remain unresolved, and the novel could have been longer and could have given more details - in the end, I would have enjoyed to stay longer with the characters, because I wanted to know more about the years and people left out. The atmospheric writing is highly effective and touching.

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The author’s second novel “The Runaways” was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and was also winner of that year’s Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award for literary second novels. Monkman, Betty C (2000). The White House: Its Historic Furnishing & First Families. Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association. ISBN 0-7892-0624-2. His timeline and life connects with that of his great grandmother, Mehar, who as a young girl has an arranged marriage. She, along with Harbans and Gurleen, marry 3 brothers on the same day, in a period of time when they are expected to live under oppressive 'traditions' and rigid expectations, subject to the whims of rumours and judgements of small communities. Their lives are separate from the brothers, and whilst the men know who they are married to, they are kept in the dark, ruled over by their overbearing mother-in-law Mai, who organises the couplings, where there is a strong desire for a son. Any questions as to the brothers are rebuffed, and Mehar is to find her efforts for clarity and independence bring danger and threats.

SIMON: And do I have this right? I have read that you were a math student who didn't read a novel yourself until you were 18, and you bought "Midnight's Children" in an airport.Freidel, Frank Burt; Pencak, William, eds. (1994). The White House: The First Two Hundred Years. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-170-9. Both storylines are interesting and compliment each other. The first, being Punjab and 1929, explores themes of religion and caste. The terrible treatment of the women, who are essentially slaves in almost every facet of their lives, including sex. The birth of a son paramount to the patriarchal mother “Mai”. A quiet, restrained and understand novel set in early and late 20th century rural India through two members of one family: Mehar is a teenage bride who is married to one of three brothers in a Punjab family in 1929. The two other brothers are also married in the same ceremony to two other young women, and due to this - and the fact that the wives lead separate lives from their husbands and their encounters are only in darkened rooms - she does not know which brother she is married to. Mehar tries to figure out which brother she is married to, and this discovery changes the path of her life.

If memory serves correctly, it was Salman Rushdie—incidentally the first novelist Sahota ever read—who spoke of the "imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind" that members of the diaspora are given to in their writing. There is certainly something to be said of the way in which this is done in China Room: while Sahota's 'homeland' itself is free from the kind of nostalgic, elegiac tone Rushdie alludes at, his descriptions of village life nevertheless seem aimed for consumption by 'other eyes'; the central tensions in both narratives too reflect those of cinematic and soap operas set in their respective eras. However, these are mere observations and not value judgements, and the author does succeed in producing a tale that reaches varying degrees of compelling for various readers.

And more importantly, the portrayal and treatment of women was a problem. This is not a women empowering book. Not every book needs to be, but I was horrified by what I read in this book. Women were only viewed as a wife or as sex objects. There was one woman who seemed to stand her own ground and be independent, but even then the narrator was thinking lustful comments about her. It felt very demeaning for women. None of the relationships had any actual chemistry or attraction in them. It was all lust and sex. Women were the inferior beings throughout this book and I tried to remind myself that the stories were set in a different time period, but even the women seemed to feel purely lust for the men. As a women, it was disheartening to read how women were discussed and presented in this book. Mehar is not so obedient a fifteen-year-old that she won’t try to uncover which of the three brothers is her husband.” Spiralling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who in 1999 flees from England to the deserted sun-scorched farm. Can a summer spent learning of love and of his family's past give him the strength for the journey home?