My curiosity had gotten the better of my trepidation, I lazily thought, as I downloaded Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi. The subject matter was going to be emotionally demanding. A long-standing, gnarly mother-daughter relationship along with said-mother suffering dementia. Eeeks!
Reason dictated that I should leave this one for the intelligensia. I had lost my mother young-ish, so would the tension in the story hit too close to home without an outlet? Yet, the suppressed writer in me, with many lingering stories, was itching to explore.
Avni was young and short-listed for the Booker with her debut – an achievement of no small measure. Her crisp and stark writing style received universally glowing praise from the powers-that-be in book review. She was also a good friend’s wife. Support, I must.
And so I found myself, downloading Burnt Sugar out of technical curiosity and resolutely deciding to skip past any particularly taxing bits. I was in the midst of a pandemic-cloistered life in London, after all, and heavy reading was exhausting.
The reviews were accurate regarding her stark and almost-caustic writing style – I found myself highlighting sentences that I particularly liked or disliked. I mulled over what I would keep and re-write were this my little gem. Check.
What a surprise when I discovered that this novel, with a downright miserable premise, had an engaging depth. It was not the downer that I had envisaged. Mea culpa. Book by its cover, and all that…
The impact of dementia was scattered throughout in a way that made it easy for me to engage with this subject. And it slotted rather nicely, I thought, with the Peter Attia’s podcast on Alzheimer’s Disease that I had, coincidentally, listened to recently (recommended, btw).
The potential tensions in the mother-daughter relationship is not oft-explored, but here is truly where I surprised myself in wanting more. I would have liked Avni to have dug deeper and to have provided me with more layered exploration of the push-and-pull of this socially idealised relationship. Were these depths in myself which I feared, yet wanted, to explore? A further exploration of self is what a talented story teases out in the reader.
Burnt Sugar made me think, but it did not sadden me (as had, for example, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry). It was well worth putting aside my trepidation.
PS: There are some interesting bits on a cult ashram based on, if I remember correctly, the Osho Ashram – the subject of Wild Wild West on Netflix – which I hear is rather a good watch.