There is the story line, and then there is the prose style. Both might, at first reading, bring to mind Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Here, though, point of view and tone is subdued. Evasion and narrative elision is maintained throughout The Blue Bedspread, which might leave some readers asking for more (clarification).Unlike The God of Small Things, where the loose ends come together in the end, The Blue Bedspread does not propose a unified tale. In this sense, it is realistic and honest. The "stories" narrated here cannot evoke a coherent whole, a complete fictive universe - for memory, especially that of the narrator, is fleeting. The painful past is best kept forgotten, and yet, the Brother feels a duty to recall as much as he can for the Sister's baby he is addressing. The past, the truth, comes back to him slowly, and is revealed to us gradually, triggered by images, words, sensations, all of which come throughout the duration of a single night, as he remains awake recalling, repeating, evaluating, transcribing. Like the symbol of the blue bedspread, memory has become eroded by time, use, and washing. Yet there exists a persistent nostalgia for the love, hope and comfort enmeshed in the tattered and discolored fabric of the bedspread.
I'm not sure what this book was intended to be. It's only about 200 pages long and is more a collection of snapshots than a linear novel; really it felt more like a collection of sketches strung together on a thin thread. It was also obvious where this was going to end from around page 5 - certainly by page 50, when every possible bad thing from a dysfunctional family had been tossed into the mix - and it just became a matter of waiting for the author to get to the point and say it. By that point, he'd already covered domestic violence pretty well (wife-beating, sexual and physical abuse of children, possible murder) and then there's incest, in case that wasn't enough. The themes repeat but not with any real coherence. This is why any comparison to Raymond Carver is unfair; Carver drew lines until it hit you (or you had a pretty fair guess) while these were just sketches without any illuminating moment. Well-written sketches but no novel.
What do You think about The Blue Bedspread (2001)?
The story and the themes of this book have potential to be really engaging. I like stories set in India and I like the idea of puzzle-pieces of information coming together to reveal the whole story slowly. The author didn't do this very well. It felt like he was practicing 5 techniques of creative writing illusion and ended up with a half-finished puzzle! At the end of the book, I was left without definitive answers to some of the books big questions...what happened to the narrator's mother exactly? who was the baby's father? how long since the narrator had seen his sister?
—Gina
I am glad I read Raj Kamal Jha's 'If you are afraid of Heights' first instead of ‘The Blue Bedspread’. It might have put me off Jha forever. The book deals with terrible things done within a family by other family members. Incest and sexual abuse are so terrible that sometimes the mind refuses to accept that such things happen in everyday families, but it does happen and Jha shows us beautifully that middle class families in India are not as wholesome as we would like to believe they are. I howe
—Sonia Gomes
A man gets a call in the middle of the night in Calcutta from the police to say his sister is dead, and her orphaned newborn needs to be picked up before she's placed in foster care. He comes home and places the child on a faded blue bedspread, that was a family heirloom, sharing it with his sister when they were children. He writes stories during the night, to his niece, for her to one day understand her family history. This book put me to sleep almost every time I opened it. It's a short book, and extremely boring. Some people might say it's poetic, but it's actually filled with incest and abuse. Definitely a thumbs down on this book.
—Carla
