This book. I just can't even formulate a response.Something about this was just the perfect mix of everything. Maybe it's because I'm Indian, too, but really, all the problems, all the characters, even the dialogue resonated with me. This somehow answered a lot of the questions I formulated myself, and the characters' ambition, hopes, attitudes were like putting a mirror up to myself. The story starts with a young Indian girl who attempts to suicide but fails upon her mother finding her and 'saving her'. (Honestly, this was one of the best suicide scenes I've ever read. The feelings were captured almost perfectly, as were the conflicts in the narrator's head. Her actions, such as registering the heat of the bathtub and then realizing it doens't matter anymore. Or her feeling that her failure at life extends to her failure to end life because she failed to die. It was all so well written, something I could definitely understand even if I don't agree with her course of action.)However, instead of trying to show directly how wrong Devi was in trying to suicide and giving up a life she could have had, the character does not immediately bounce back - instead there is a bout of escapism, where Devi returns to her childhood response of refusing to communicate while she sorts out her emotions. Through a long, incremental process, Devi sees her screwed up family in a new light, appreciating her mother, understanding her grandmother who breaks all social norms, and breaking through her sister's tight facade of a successful VP who is driven by her work life. She takes up cooking to stream her identity and create a fusion of food, a mix of culture that represents her.Shoba's ambition is literally what I want for myself in the future, and I constantly battle the fear of losing my social life and everything else I value by pouring myself into the drive for this. Reading this, I answered some questions, raised others, and otherwise really thought about where my life can go from here. In terms of the Indian culture throughout the book, I felt that the honor, values, traditions, and attitudes were all portrayed very well. Usually, reading these books, I'm wary of how exaggerated the culture is, or I feel insulted to be related to such whiny, uptight peole and want to scream out that not everyone is like that. The stereotypes, however, managed not to permeate this book. It was uniquely its own, something that showed individual people, the life of an Indian living in the Silicon Valley, constantly struggling to maintain her roots and keeping face with some of the more conservative views of the older generation, while acknowledging that after living here her whole life, she truly is an Indian American.The cultural identity helped me look into myself and realize some things that I couldn't contemplate previously. Divorce, a negatively connoting shame to an Indian, is addressed through Shoba's relationship to her husband and the loveless marriage. Meanwhile, arranged marrianges, a long-standing tradition that continues to baffle me, manifests in Saroj's relationship and it truly shows the effect of perseverance, trying again, and enduring. The judgmental older generation and the importance of impressions in the Indian community makes more sense to me. Overall, this book just makes sense to me, and holds great personal value, a trove of vicarious experience. I definitely recommend this for the depth of the novel, the accurate portrayal of a culture, and the general values beyond the culture, including suicide, family, recovery, love, lineage, passion, etc. Well-written, polished, and enjoyable, this book has entered my list of favorites, and hopefully it will enter yours too!
Devi feels like a failure. She has no husband, no children, and now she’s lost her job too. She compares herself to her older sister Shobha, who appears on the surface to be the ideal traditional Indian wife, and finds herself wanting. She decides that life is no longer worth living, and carefully plans her suicide, an event that she wishes to proceed as painlessly and neatly as possible. But something goes awry:“Death was supposed to have happened. She had chosen to die, but now she was alive, a survivor. What exactly had she survived? How was she supposed to deal with the failure to end her life as well as the failure of not being able to live it with any dignity?” [p. 34]Serving Crazy with Curry is about Devi and her family. When Devi’s suicide plot fails, she adopts a vow of silence, returns home to live with her parents and begins to cook. Saroj and Avi immigrated to California from India many years ago, and Saroj has never truly settled here and still yearns to return to her homeland. Saroj’s mother Vasu comes to visit once or twice a year. The story is mostly about the relationships between these four closely connected women: Devi, Shobha, Saroj, and Vasu. Malladi did a wonderful job of painting these characters individually, giving them each a vibrant personality of their own. She seamlessly weaves in a compelling backstory for each of them that helps us to understand who they are and why they manage their lives the way they do. I was disappointed that the book was set in the U.S. (I was hoping it would be set in India), but Malladi brought plenty of rich Indian culture to the mix. Devi shops, prepares, and cooks fragrant and flavourful recipes, using techniques learned from her mother but always incorporating her own ideas for unusual ingredients. The author deals with Devi’s recovery in a sensitive and thoughtful fashion, delving deftly into the psychology of suicide and the dangers and obstacles that surround a survival. There were numerous times that I felt that the author was so close to grasping onto something truly deep and meaningful in this book, but somehow it quietly eluded her pen each time. Malladi, however, definitely has a talent for description and wordplay:“She had to go. She could feel it all the way inside her where the small sparks of light were playing, trying to stimulate her heart, which was slowing down making her free, unfettered.” [p. 227]I enjoyed reading Serving Crazy with Curry, but I frequently felt that this young author fell just a bit short of writing something magnificent, instead of something merely good. There was much to sink myself into, and yet the plot that floated around the main character often felt somewhat contrived and manipulative.“I feel like a walking mass of pain, unable to understand my actions, yet feeling little remorse, which makes me feel guiltier. This is a vicious cycle I can’t break free of.” [p. 231]This is the third of Malladi’s five published novels, which she’s been producing more or less annually since 2002. At only 33 years of age, I suspect that she has many more good novels to come, and that her skill will only increase. Definitely an author to watch.
What do You think about Serving Crazy With Curry (2004)?
Devi has decided. Her life just seems to hold no more meaning and she cannot see a future for herself. Her parents want her to become a traditional Indian wife. She can't seem to hold a job. She will never be like her sister, Shiobba, with a great job, a great husband and a wonderful life. And so, she makes detailed plans to end her life.If she had remembered that her mother had a set of keys to her apartment, she might have actually succeeded. But her overbearing mother walks in to find Devi in the bathtub with slit wrists. Just as Devi has done in the past whenever the world seemed to become too much, she stops talking. She goes back to her old bedroom in her parents' house and discovers a notebook -- a notebook about cooking. The kitchen that had always been her mother's sole domain became Devi's kingdom. Devi started to cook and cook. The family finds that Devi's cooking leads to interesting changes in familial relationships.This was a most enjoyable book, with wonderful descriptions of Indian food meant to feed the soul. By setting the book within the Indian culture, there is a freshness for the American reader seldom realized in other typical cooking novels, that are most often mystery series.I highly recommend this book for any age.
—Lydia
Pros: very readable, kept me interested, Indian family dramaCons: I didn't like that a miscarriage was a major plot point and that the idea of having kids would have saved Shobha's marriage and Devi's life. The food (one of the things that drew me to this book) didn't sound so great to me even though I like Indian food. Devi seemed to recover way too fast from a suicidal mindset, not sure if that is realistic.Setting: Bay Area and some flashbacks in India. The setting was not very well done. The Indian scenes were set a bit better, and the Bay Area scenes were just in the generic family home and on the freeways.Emotional response: Irritation - Saroj was the embodiment of all of my mother-in-law's bad traits - cries way too frequently (like multiple times daily), cares too much about aesthetics, control/neat freak in her own house, gossiping and talking about trivial things at inopportune times, smothering her children by trying to do too much for them, having to be so fair in even trivial matters (like buying mangoes at the market; she bought 9, so she could have 3, and each of her daughters who didn't even live with her at the time could have 3; this is not necessarily a bad trait, just is a little over-the-top sometimes). It was so funny that the only zodiac sign mentioned in the book was Saroj's - Libra, which is also my mother-in-law's sign.Favorite characters: Vasu, Girish, Avi - all the quiet and calm ones in the book!Advice/Lessons Learned: Avi's secret to staying calm in life was to write letters to people. He rarely gave them to the recipient, just used them to vent.Place read: upstairs at in-laws
—Lindsey
This was the first work by this author I read, and it started my fascination with American ethnic subculture literature (e.g. the new explosion of Indian literature written for American audiences, exploring themes such as family, change, love, and social acceptance). I think Jane found it at duty free in Canada on the way to Morocco. The story is about a South-Indian family living in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is something I immediately could relate to. A great storyteller once said "stories tell us how to live and why." Malladi's literature not only fulfills those two roles, but give me a peek inside Indian and Indian-American cultures that have real meaning, not just another travel guide or history/sociology book.
—Anna
