"a lovely quiet come off the page, it was rich and held shards of past experiences."

This book is set in a fictional quiet suburb of Bombay (now Mumbai), Saraswati Park, and centres around a middle-aged married couple Mohan and Lakshmi. Their lives are settled, mundane and unexciting until one day Mohan's nephew Ashish comes to live with them for a year when work compels Ashish's parents have to leave the city. As Ashish struggles with school and relationships Mohan and Lakshmi must also confront the quiet little discontents that have grown and been left unspoken between them during many years of marriage.

Mohan belongs to a vanishing trade as a writer, spending his days sitting in the middle of the bustling city writing letters and money orders for the illiterate but he still manages to find peace and quiet in the chaos. He loves the sound of the pigeons overhead and to huddle with his fellow writers around cups of hot tea. Books are his passion and at home he sits quietly, drifting in and out of the novels he is reading barely aware of his surroundings. Lakshmi has no interest in books preferring TV soaps for her entertainment and now that their own children have flown the nest find their lives are slowly almost imperceptibly drifting apart.

When Ashish comes to stay with them, things start to unravel. So when Laksmi’s brother dies her underlying frustrations become apparent and she leaves the city to stay with her family helping to look after an ailing relative. It soon becomes evident that both are disappointed with their marriage. Mohan's life has become sedentary but Lakshmi’s absence spurs him into starting to write about what he sees about him and his experiences. The first steps are very tentative but through Ashish’s influence he gets more confident and one of his stories wins a prize and is published.

Ashish is in many respects like Mohan. He is a quiet student, who has to repeat a year because of poor attendance, he appears passive rather than pro-active but there is also a deep sadness within him. He loses one boyfriend shortly after moving in with his aunt and uncle and although he finds someone else this relationship also ends abruptly. Finally he realises that to have any future he must not only leave the city but he also leave the country and sets off for America.

Saraswati Park is therefore about love,marriage and loss but also about the power of imagination and memories, the beauty and danger of reading and ultimately also about writing.

Overall given that this was the author's first novel I felt that that she produced an accomplished piece of writing. You could see the combination of the outside world and the pressures that it puts on interior lives, meaning that the portrayal of the three characters was very good. However, I also felt that it was missing something. The plot was polite rather than dramatic and whilst you got some colour from this vibrant, disparate city (I had the good fortune to spend 5 or 6 weeks there some 30 years ago) I felt she just skimmed over the surface of it. It felt like a homage to it rather than a true exploration and as such I felt that I learnt nothing new or compelling. Overall I felt that this was an enjoyable read whilst it lasted but a bit like a salad or McDonalds not one that will live long in the memory. ( )

Mohan is a 59 year old letter-writer in Bombay, an occupation which has been long respected but the need is now diminishing due to improved literacy and the availability of cheap mobile phones. He spends much of his day observing the passersby and imagining their lives. His sister asks if he and his wife, Lakshmi, will provide a home for his nephew, Ashish, as he repeats his final year of study. Ashish is confronting his own homosexuality and struggles to stay focused on his studies. When Lakshmi's brother dies suddenly, she starts reflecting on her life and marriage and seizes the opportunity to support another family member who is ill, leaving Mohan and Ashish to fend for themselves. Mohan starts writing short stories and becomes aware of his own failings in his married life.

I found this a quick but nonetheless satisfying debut novel. The characters are well-drawn and evoke the readers compassion. The author creates a vivid picture of contemporary domestic life in India. ( )

Polite, well-behaved, civilised, workshopped-to-death prose about middle-class people having crises and anxieties in polite, well-behaved, civilised ways.

Once upon a time I would have had more tolerance for this kind of thing but now, almost none at all. ( )

It took me a while to get into this, but it's well worth it. S Park is a much better defense of the realist novel than Franzen's Freedom, for instance; it packs the same emotional weight into a third of the pages (and, at a guess, a quarter of the words). Like 'Freedom,' the book has a bit of a chip on its shoulder: while Franzen talks a lot about Tolstoy, Joseph's particular reference is Henry James, and there's some great, gentle parody of the modernists (James Joyce as captain of the pick-up cricket team, menacing the younger boys). I'm curious to know how much the media representation of this as a kind of anti-Magical Realism polemic is based on Joseph's actual feelings, and how much of it is just good marketing aimed at people who, like me, can't really be bothered trudging through 600 page novels about the 'color' and 'exoticism' of the sub-continent. Certainly you could read the novel as precisely that kind of polemic; but maybe it's not.

And if you don't care about that, it's just a lovely book full of the minor domestic dramas that we all live through, and an all too rare instance of a well-written book that suggests family life isn't there just so the young have something from which to escape. There are very, very few false steps in the prose, and one or two wonderful moments- particularly the paragraph which gives the book its cover in this edition. Certainly the writing isn't ambitious, but since so many young authors torture language in order to express nothing, I'm fine with that. ( )

E' superbo questo romanzo d'esordio di una giovane autrice indiana, in cui oltre le storie del giovane Ashish, dei coniugi Mohan e Lakshmi c'è la Mumbai odierna, brulicante vita, in cui anche gli uccelli, i cani randagi, la pioggia scrosciante e inesorabile del monsone sembra raccontare, ridere e piangere insieme agli uomini.
Ashish è uno studente acerbo alla ricerca della propria identità e di una prospettiva futura che lo appaghi con le sue sfide. Mohan e Lakshmi, sono gli zii che lo hanno temporaneamente adottato, assicurandogli ogni cura e sollecitazione affinché concluda gli studi. Ognuno di loro cela palpiti, desideri e bisogno d'amore. Ognuno sa che prima del rammarico tardivo è ancora in tempo per conquistare uno scampolo di gioia. ( )