As Sweet as Honey

February 25, 2013
In her third novel (after Inheritance), Ganesan returns to the island of Pi in the Indian Ocean, "the tiniest crescent-shaped bindi above the eyebrows to Sri Lanka's tear." Mina, now grown, tells the childhood story of her Aunt Meterling's unlikely marriage to a stout Englishman named Archer; that she was tall and he short was only the beginning of their differences. Vows were barely exchangedâshe in a sari, he in a white suitâbefore the groom dropped dead. Amid her grief, Meterling discovered she was pregnant, a joyful, but problematic turn in her world of tradition. At the time, young Mina and her cousins barely understood the domestic drama unfolding before them; every overheard word was a puzzle. Meterling inherits Archer's fields and fortune in England, but is unfit to visit them when beckoned by Archer's distant cousin Simon. Instead, he comes to her and soon falls in love with his cousin's former bride. Ganesan spins the lush magic of island life out into the real world. Repercussions of colonialism echo for generations, but the women of Pi find opportunity in the tumult. In this enclosed world, Meterling was the first to dream a different life and her story inspires Mina's intimate retelling.

Starred review from January 15, 2013
The imaginary Indian coastal island of Pi, where Ganesan has set her previous fiction (Inheritance, 1998, etc.), works beautifully as the setting for this East Asian homage to To the Lighthouse, both the nostalgic recreation of a lost perfect moment and an exploration into Woolf's "thousand shapes" of love. The novel opens with a wedding and a death almost in the same breath. After a brief but romantic courtship, 6-foot, 28-year-old Meterling (thoroughly East Asian despite her eccentric German name) receives permission from her Hindu family to marry Archer, a dapper 4 foot-7-inch Englishman in his 40s. During their first wedding dance, he suffers a fatal coronary. Meterling is naturally heartbroken; she is also pregnant. The narrator of the aftermath, Meterling's much younger cousin Mina, lives with a passel of cousins, aunts and uncles in her grandmother's household of joyous pandemonium, which is not unlike the genteel chaos of Woolf's Ramsays; coincidentally, Mina's is a family of well-read Anglophiles, not unaware that Pi is a little like Prospero's enchanted island. Looking back from her own adulthood, Mina describes growing up in an innocent but not unsophisticated world in which people really do take care of each other and where what is meant to be happens. So her family accepts the scandalous fact that Meterling had sex before marriage and adores the resulting baby, Oscar. But Western influence is unavoidable. Mina lives with her grandmother since her parents are getting Ph.D.s at Princeton, and eventually, she ends up in America. Yet Mina still manages to tell the story of Meterling's unexpected second romance and marriage to Archer's cousin Simon, with whom she moves to England. The novel is masterful at exploring the difficulty of cultural identity and integration. There's also a bit of magical realism in the shape of a ghost. But ultimately, this is a novel about the many permutations of both love and family. Despite some slightly strained plot twists, the characters' genuine charm and the girlish, witty energy of the storytelling are irresistible.

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February 15, 2013
Ganesan's first novel since Inheritance (1998) is set on the island of Pi in the Bay of Bengal. The tale is narrated by Mina, who, as a 10-year-old, watches in awe as her six-foot-tall aunt Meterling falls in love with a chubby, genial Englishman by the name of Archer, only to tragically lose him just after they had exchanged their vows. Meterling's family is scandalized to learn she is pregnant with Archer's child, but it only fuels young Mina's imagination about their courtship. After most of his family gives Meterling the cold shoulder, Archer's cousin Simon comes to visit her, and he and Meterling fall in love quite unexpectedly. Smitten, Simon proposes to Meterling and spirits her and her baby, Oscar, to England, where Meterling not only experiences profound culture shock but also is thrown by the appearance of the ghost of Archer, who doesn't approve of her relocation. Whether she's describing verdant, lush Pi or bustling, crowded London, Ganesan brings Meterling's two worlds, and her conflicted feelings about each of them, to vibrant life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)