This review ran in the San Jose Mercury News in 2002:Do you know the sensation of getting near the end of a book and feeling the thickness of the pages left? As the remaining pages of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel grew fewer I began to worry: Would there be room enough for what I wanted to know about the characters and their lives? There was. Divakaruni's narrative in ''The Vine of Desire'' is as gracefully structured as a piece of chamber music, with its interplay of themes and voices, ensemble and solo, working their way toward a final resolving chord. It begins with discord in the lives of the cousins Anju and Sudha, whom some readers have met in Divakaruni's earlier novel ''Sister of My Heart.'' Anju has miscarried and is emerging from a dark depression that has put a strain on her marriage to Sunil, an executive at a Silicon Valley company. Back in India, Sudha has left her husband: When an ultrasound revealed that the baby Sudha was carrying was female, her domineering mother-in-law wanted to have it aborted. Sudha fled her home, her spineless husband divorced her, and she's trying to raise the infant, Dayita, by herself. So Anju and Sunil invite Sudha and Dayita to stay with them in their apartment in San Jose. Soon after Sudha's arrival, Anju resumes her work toward a college degree and begins to find her metier in writing classes. Anju is particularly inspired by an instructor who introduces her to the letters and journals of 18th- and 19th-century women -- writers who were denied a larger literary fame: ''The instructor thinks of it as a great pity. Imagine all the letters that were lost, she said last week. All the diaries that were thrown away unread. What a waste. . . . Anju understood what she was saying. And yet -- what freedom it must have been! What exquisite loneliness.'' So Anju embraces such loneliness, seeking out a solitary space at the college where she can write: ''a room white as the inside of an egg, circular and without windows. . . . She has always thought of windows as distractions, drawing a person out of herself.'' But if solitude is freedom for Anju, it's oppression for Sudha, who stays in the apartment while Anju goes to class and Sunil to work. She cooks and cleans and tends to Dayita. And then one day Sunil returns to the apartmentwhile Anju is away and reveals his passion for Sudha. She repels his advances but can't bring herself to reveal the truth to Anju. Their meals together become ''a tableau of silence: three people, inside their chests small black boxes, holding inside them smaller, blacker boxes. . . . Until at the very center of the chest, the secret of whose existence they are totally unaware. The secret of the self, already pollinated by time's spores, waiting to burst open when they are least prepared for it.'' Against these images of enclosure, isolation and solitude, Divakaruni plays an awareness of the larger world. The novel takes place in a specific time -- 1994, the year of, among many other things, the O.J. Simpson case, with which Sunil is oddly obsessed -- and a very specific place -- the Bay Area, a place that Sudha, like many immigrants, has difficulty coming to terms with. Bay Area readers will relish the grace notes provided by Divakaruni's attention to local color. (She lives in the East Bay.) For example, there's the ostentatious Los Altos Hills trophy home where, at a party held by a successful Indian entrepreneur, Sudha meets Lalit Reddy, a handsome, thoroughly Americanized young surgeon, who begins to woo her. He takes her to Grizzly Peak to watch the sunset. ''Look,'' Lalit says. ''There's the campanile at Cal, there's the Bay Bridge, backed up as usual, there's Angel Island, where one time deer and immigrants were quarantined. . . .'' There's such fondness in his voice. I'm racked by jealousy. To belong to a place fully, to know it so well that you believe it belongs to you. Does he even guess how lucky he is? Sudha also senses that, like Lalit, Anju has found something in America that Sudha can't feel, as when Anju describes a member of her writers' group: ''She's from Iran,'' Anju says. . . . ''Her family fled the country during Khomeini's rule. She's writing an essay about that time, particularly what happened to the women. . . . She said I had real talent and owed it to myself to develop it.'' Owed it to myself. It was not an idea we'd grown up with in Calcutta. Owed it to my parents, yes. My ancestors. My in-laws. My children. Teachers, society, God. But owed it to myself? Yet how easily Anju says it today. What is it that I owe myself? The strength of Divakaruni's novel is that it's built up through poignant insights into the hearts and minds of Sudha and Anju. We learn, for example, that Anju is more ambivalent about her life in the United States than Sudha supposes: When she's invited by her writers' group to go see a movie ''about Indians'' at Camera 3, Anju fears that she'll wind up defensively explaining that Indians don't really eat monkey brains or sacrifice virgins to Kali. Or else that it will be a serious movie by an Indian director about poverty or police brutality and that she'll find herself insisting that ''there's a lot more to India than what you're seeing here.'' Anju reflects on what it's like to ''love parts of your heritage so much that it tingles in your fingertips like pins and needles. You're ready to kill anyone who criticizes it. And then there are things about it that make you want to drive your fist through a window.'' Because Sudha is untethered to the culture in which she finds herself, her situation grows dire when the tensions among Anju, Sudha and Sunil in the too-small apartment finally erupt, sending each of them in a new direction. And then we occasionally see the novel's gears meshing and wheels turning. Divakaruni reaches into conventional, even sentimental, fiction to work out Sudha's destiny. I also think that neither of the principal male characters, Sunil and Lalit, quite comes off the page -- I suspect that Divakaruni hasn't spent as much time inside them as she has inside Anju and Sudha. Yet once Divakaruni has established what course Sudha's life is to take, the richness of imagination that animates most of the book returns, and it moves to a lyrical resolution. Divakaruni has established herself as an important writer -- just last year, her collection of short stories, ''The Unknown Errors of Our Lives,'' had reviewers reaching for superlatives. ''The Vine of Desire'' does nothing to undermine that reputation. If you find yourself counting the pages left in the book, it's likely to be because you wish there were many, many more.
Sekuel Sister of My Heart yang membuatku terbuai dalam jalinan kisah yang menusuk-nusuk jiwa..Chitra menggunakan bahasa yang indah untuk menggambarkan bagaimana rasanya mencintai, membenci, memendam impian, meluapkan hasrat, menanti, mengharapkan, menghapus kenangan, dan melangkah kembali.Aku terpana dengan keputusan yang diambil Sudha, merasakan sedikit kepedihan yang mungkin dirasakan Anju, berusaha memahami lika-liku karakter lainnya seperti Sunil, Ashok, dan sang dokter (namanya Lunit ya ? lupa..)Chitra seorang yang piawai merangkai kata dan menghubungkannya menjadi kisah yang unik, dari beragam pemikiran tokoh-tokohnya.Bayangkan bagaimana ia bisa menggambarkan karakter ketiga bunda hanya melalui surat-surat yang mereka tulis pada Anju dan Sudha tanpa menyebutkan identitas. Benar-benar para bunda yang komplit, ada yang menuntut ini dan itu, ada yang menerima dan membesarkan hati, ada yang memanjakan.Uniknya pula saat ia menggambarkan sudut pandang dan pemikiran sang dokter kala bersama Sudha serta apa yang kira-kira dipikirkan lawan bicaranya hanya dengan potongan-potongan kalimat:"apa yang kukatakan""apa yang kau katakan""apa yang seharusnya kaukatakan""apa yang ingin kukatakan"dan seterusnya..Sudha yang selama ini kurang menyukai pendidikan, dan hanya dikenal dengan kecantikan dan ketrampilannya mengurus rumah tangga, ternyata seorang yang bijak dan berani mengambil keputusan yang tepat.Anju yang memang lebih pintar dibanding Sudha dan lebih kritis, ternyata juga memiliki sisi-sisi rapuh dalam dirinya kala yang sangat diharapkannya hilang tanpa pernah dimilikinya.Sunil dan Ashok yang memendam impian, yang menanti dengan cara mereka sendiri untuk mendapatkan seseorang yang dicintai, serta kemudian menemukan jalan yang mungkin tak diduga.Sang dokter yang lucu dan benar-benar sahabat yang baik, bergumul dengan rasa kaget dan kecewanya, juga penerimaannya. Harapanku saat membaca jalinan kisah ini adalah Sudha akan menerimanya..lalu..baca sendiri biar tahu bagaimana :)Ini hari libur yang baik untuk menuntaskan buku ini, dan sungguh, aku seperti melihat sebuah film yang tak mengada-ada diputar di depan mataku. Deskripsi Chitra yang jelas tentang gerak-gerik tokohnya, situasi, latar, serta suasana membuatku membayangkan ada dalam dunia yang digambarkannya..Ini adalah sebuah novel, namun bagaikan kisah yang tidak berlebihan jika itu benar terjadi di dunia nyata. Mungkin banyak orang menghadapi situasi serupa dan harus mengambil keputusan berbeda yang lain pula efeknya. Apakah sebuah kebencian dan kemarahan bisa menghancurkan cinta di antara sepasang sahabat (saudari) yang tumbuh bersama dan menjadi sejiwa. Dapatkah tangan kiri membenci tangan kanan ?Aku punya sahabat perempuan dan saudari perempuan, dan aku sungguh berharap tidak akan pernah terjadi masalah pelik seperti dalam hubungan Sudha-Anju ini..namun bila suatu saat itupun harus terjadi, paling tidak aku dapat belajar dari kisah ini. Seperti juga yang dikutip oleh Chitra di halaman awal "Sister of My heart" dari kata-kata Chinua Achebe bahwa hanya kisahlah yang dapat menghindarkan keturunan kita dari kesalahan besar seperti pengemis-pengemis buta yang menabrak pohon kaktus ("Anthills of Savannah" --> belum dapat bukunya).Walaupun rangkaian kisah itu tidak selalu ditutup dengan bahagia layaknya di negeri dongeng, tapi paling tidak sebagaimana dalam kisah ini: mungkin itulah jalan terbaik :)-nat 03022011-
What do You think about The Vine Of Desire (2003)?
I've had this about a year, and it was about a year ago that I read the first book, Sister of my Heart. So I remembered enough of that plot to be able to follow this book, but not enough to be able to compare the writing style of the two, or how the narratives flowed. I've kind of delayed in reading this second book because... this will sound a bit dumb, but the front cover looks really uninspiring - kind of drab mustard yellow - and it kept putting me off reading this book! Stupid really, as I have enjoyed reading it this last week.It's a continuation of the story of cousins Anju and Sudha, now grown women; Anju living with her husband Sunil in the USA; and divorced Sudha coming over to the States to visit with her toddler daughter. So continuing on from where the first book left off. And in a lot of respects there isn't a lot of action to begin with, there's a lot of repressed feelings and issues getting to boiling point. Whilst Anju goes to college and Sunil goes to work, their visitor Sudha is basically left to be a housemaid for them, dependent on them to keep her (board and food) in the USA. Which frustrates her. Meanwhile, relationships in the household are deteriorating and forming.I did find Sudha really grew, became a likeable, real woman in this book - she makes mistakes, bad things happen and yet she has to keep going and try to find her own way. This is real life, and I liked the way the book didn't try to tie everything neatly together at the end, and no one was paired off again for the finale which was good. I wonder if there is/will be another book to continue their stories.
—Ape
Saia bener-bener suka gaya bercerita Divakaruni dalam buku ini.awalnya seh agak boring, maklum buku drama, hehe...gimana yah mengambarkan buku ini? hmmm...... ginih deh, ini cerita ngasal saia, gak ada di buku inih, cuma kayaknya sangat mewakili isi buku ini :Pbayangkan Anda sedang bercengkrama dg seorang rekan yang sudah lama tak bersua. tapi, dari tadi malah teman Anda yang mendominasi cerita. Karena dia terus ngomong gak jelas, Anda malah bosan mendengarnya, apalagi tema yang dia bahas menjemukan menurut Anda. Bayangkan, dalam setengah jam terakhir dia bercerita tentang cara membuat sup yang menurutnya enak!! Katanya, sebaiknya daun seledri tak dimasukkan di awal sehingga layu, tapi ditambahkan di akhir saat sup sudah matang, taburan bawang terlalu banyak malah mematikan aroma harum sayuran segar, bla-bla-bla-blaAnda nyaris merasa jemu total mendengar detail mengerikan seperti ituh. Sesaat saat Anda berniat mengalihkan topik pembicaraan...Dan, seharusnya, sayur sup jangan disajikan dalam keadaan panas.... soalnya rasa segar dari sayur bakal terkalahkan oleh panas.... Jadi inget, si X dulu pernah makan sup panas dan dia langsung memuntahkannya lagi.... eh, kamu masih inget kan dia? itu lho temen SMA dulu, sayang yah, dia bunuh diri.... Apa????????????!!!!!!! dan seketika, rasa kantuk yg tadi datang pun hilang. Dan Anda akan menamatkan buku ini hingga akhir :DYah, letupan-letupan tragedi dramatis menjadi bumbu menakjubkan dalam buku ini. Novel ini, termasuk tipe novel yang alurnya mengalir tenang... tapi di akhir, menjerumuskan Anda pada jeram yang curam, tak terelakkan.
— Δx Δp ≥ ½ ħ
I loved this book! It is a continuation of Sister of my Heart. After Anju has a miscarriage, she is despondent and depressed. Sudha comes to America with her baby daughter, (her mother-in-law in India insisted that Sudha have an abortion because the baby was not a boy). Sudha had her baby at her mom's home in India, and then left for America to help her cousin, the "sister of her heart." Meanwhile, Sudha has to cope with Anju's husband's love for Sudha, a love that had emerged back in India during both cousins' marriage in the first novel. Sudha struggles with her own desires for her cousin's husband, a new man she meets in America, an Indian surgeon, who falls in love with Sudha and wishes to take care of her, and the wish to become independent from any man willing to take care of her. Each character's feelings in this novel runs deep and is described with detail by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It is easy for the reader to become intimately involved with each character, and understand the pain each one endures throughout the story. The reader also "feels" the experiences and thoughts of Indian immigrants, new, and not so new, to America. My eyes were blurred by the time I finished reading this story, I read to the end because I could not stop...
—Marcy
