Ladies Coupe

June 15, 2004
Nair (The Better Man) focuses on the seemingly restricted lives of contemporary Indian women. Akhila is a 45-year-old spinster who has supported her family since her father's death 26 years ago. Needing to examine her unfulfilled life, she buys a one-way ticket to a resort town. During the train ride, Akhila and the five other women in her compartment intimately share details about their relationships with husbands and families and their sexual experiences. Each woman's tale is a crystalline gem of knowledge and insight. While Margaret deliberately fattened her husband to take the nasty edge off his bullying personality, Sheela adorned her grandmother's corpse because she understood the old woman's vanity and fear of aging; Mari rejected the son who was born of a rape. A sensitive exploration of the tension of self-actualization vs. familial responsibility in a society with traditional values, this novel-first published in India and a best seller in France and Italy-will surely resonate with readers everywhere. For all fiction collections.-Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2004
At 45, Akhila awakes one day with a "fight-or-flight" notion. So she boards a train's ladies coupe (a segregated, second-class compartment found on most overnight Indian trains until 1998) and journeys from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. After her father's death many years ago, she became the head of her family's household. Breadwinner and martyr, she has sacrificed her desires to fulfill her family's wants and needs. A question has long weighed on her mind: Can a woman live without a man and be happy? The women Akhila meets on the train car respond with their life experiences. Nair's novel is feminist, but it is much more than that as Nair sensitively explores the intimate feelings of her women characters not only in vivid descriptions of their Indian lives, but also in the pleasure they take in something as simple as enjoying a forbidden egg. Nair is a powerful writer, who through this tender story shows great understanding and compassion for all women and for the choices and regrets they cannot avoid. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)