At the heart of Anuradha Roy's latest novel is a single question: Why did Myshkin Chand Rozario's mother flee her marriage and family when her son was 9 years old?
"All the Lives We Never Lived," which follows Roy's 2015 Man Booker-longlisted "Sleeping on Jupiter," opens with Myshkin, now in his 60s, worrying over his memories.
He's avoiding opening a parcel that arrives in the mail, "pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has," because he knows it has something to do with his mom, Gayatri.
When she first left, Myshkin was angry, but as he remembers it, he mostly just wanted her to come back: "If I saw anything I associated with her — an empty vase that always had fresh flowers before, a white sari drying on a line — a giant fist of pain squeezed my chest hard enough to break my ribs."
Gayatri's escape from a stifling and unhappy marriage and search for freedom as an artist takes her to Bali, but becomes complicated by World War II and the persecution of her friends.
As "All the Lives We Never Lived" describes a mother's efforts to create her own unconventional life in a restrictive society, the book's content and tone reminded me of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. It also has a similar success weaving history into the lives of deeply rendered characters.
But despite the presence of real-life historical figures — including Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, German painter Walter Spies and English dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete, Roy's novel is set in a fictional northern Indian town — a place called Muntazir.
Both of Myshkin's parents end up leaving this hamlet near the foothills of the Himalayas, but Myshkin, a retired horticulturist, decides to stay. The stories he recounts begin in the 1930s, during his mother's childhood.
