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Fasting, Feasting | 
 enlarge | Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £7.98 (100%)
New (20) Used (99) Collectible (3) from £0.01
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 56606
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0099289636
EAN: 9780099289630
ASIN: 0099289636
Publication Date: June 1, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: 24 Hour Dispatch from the UK (05) / has had some water damage hence crinkly pages but perfectly readable / different cover to Amazon
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Anita Desai, through her short stories and novels, two of which, Clear Light of Day and In Custody, have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is one of the most accomplished and admired chroniclers of middle-class India. In this, her latest novel, she tells the story of plain and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, daughter and son of strict and conventional parents--"MamaPapa" in Uma's mind, so united are they in their unyielding views and dictums. Desai perfectly matches form and content: details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and needs given no place. Uma, as daughter and woman, expects nothing; Arun, as son and male, is lost under the weight of expectation.Now in her forties, Uma is at home. Attempts at arranged marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, she is at the beck and call of MamaPapa, with only her collection of bangles and old Christmas cards for consolation. Arun, at university in Massachusetts, is having to spend the summer with the Patton family in the suburbs: their fridge and freezer full of meat that no one eats, and Mrs Patton desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun most wants is to be ignored, invisible. The novel's counterpointing of India and America is a little forced, whereas Desai's focus on the daily round, whether in the Gangetic plain or suburban America, finely delineates the unspoken dramas in both cultures. And her characters, emblematic in their suffering. but capable of their own small rebellions, give Fasting, Feasting its sharp bite. --Ruth Petrie
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 An unexpected treat March 28, 2008
Flibertigibbit (Ireland)
This is in part, a compelling portrait of a post- colonial Indian (Christian) family and the ruinous effect of India's rigid and feudalistic social conventions - exemplified perhaps by the custom of a bridegroom's family requiring a (usually) extortionate dowry from the bride's father. The first part of the novel follows the misfortunes of Uma, whose education is cut short by her parents when they decide that she must help to raise an unexpected first son, Arun. Uma's parents' attempts to arrange a marriage twice end in disaster and both times, the bridegroom's family swindle a dowry from Uma's father (Papa) but renege on their promises of marriage. In the first part of the novel, Uma's patriarchal; Anglophone father is an especially memorable character. There is for example, a wonderful scene - lasting no more than three quarters of a page - where Uma and her mother, attentive to the last detail of his needs, go through the ceremony of peeling and feeding him an orange, piece by piece. It is like a slow, wordless but vivid cinematic close-up in which the part of the father might easily be played by Om Puri - the brilliant, veteran Indian actor. Papa believes in fact that the only way forward for Indians is for them to abandon vegetarianism (one source of their weakness) become meat eaters and adopt the English tongue. The deeply conservative values and preoccupations of this middle class Indian family are so familiar that, being from Ireland, I felt I could be reading about their landed, rural Irish counterparts. There is a ruthless, financially-driven pragmatism at work, reminiscent of John McGahern's disturbing short story, Korea. I was not surprised to see this novel described as in fact, two novellas. Part two of the novel is almost a different work. It is I think, also better written. This is a novel that gets better the more you read of it and by part two, Desai has moved on to even, deeper and darker territory. Arun, only a fleeting figure and still a child in part one, is now a young adult and sent by his ambitious father to study abroad in Massachusetts. Through the outwardly impassive person of Arun, we witness the perverse American nightmare - the American dream gone wrong and nothing that Arun would have expected before he arrived. We see the stark contrast between affluent, free America and impoverished, socially rigid India. Both societies share inherent contradictions, but what they have in common is that they are both sick - albeit, the causes and symptoms of their respective malaises are different. India's woes are largely a result of its poverty while many of America's are due to a surfeit of wealth and an excess of consumption. This novel was an unexpected treat, with quite a profound message that I immediately wanted to read again. Short listed for the Booker prize in 1999.
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai February 23, 2008
Philip Spires (La Nucia, Spain)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In her novel, Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai eventually accomplishes what many writers attempt and then fail to achieve. She uses light touch, simple language, uncomplicated structure, but at the same time addresses some very big issues and makes a point.
Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity that parents present. These parents, however, are not at all alike. Mama is protective, perhaps selfish, and not a little indolent. Papa is a parsimonious control freak who locks away the telephone because someone might use it. But they are at least together. Their relationship has survived, despite the long wait for a son, and their disappointment at his disability.
Uma and Arun also have a sister, Aruna. She is bright and pretty, but in her own way she is also disabled, because she is a woman. Arun's disability is visible, but Aruna's exists because of the her society's preconceptions about women.
Uma is not pretty, nor is she academic. She wears thick glasses and has fits. And so in the middle class society the family inhabits, Uma can pursue only two possible roles. Either she can be married off, or she can become a labourer, a near slave for the family. The former, of course, is the same as the latter. Only the location is different. For Uma marriage doesn't happen. It does, but it fails before it starts, since the groom was already married and merely wanted to collect another dowry. The arranged marriages of both Uma's sister and her cousin also fail. Initially well starred, both end tragically.
The first part of Fasting, Feasting suggests a domestic drama, a faintly comic family trying to cope with their own cultural minority status within India's vastness. It takes awhile for the tragic elements of the story to surface. But when they do, they also disappoint, because only the two disabled characters, Uma and Arun, eventually display any honesty or compassion, everyone else being merely selfish, even those who kill themselves to end the pain. For women, it seems, even achievement is nothing but an asset to assist their trade. When offered a place at Oxford, a girl's duty precludes acceptance and necessity frames the letter as evidence of her greater eligibility. So what seemed to be a pleasant family tale of the idiosyncrasies of culture becomes a tragedy, and a tragedy for all women. Ugly, unmemorable Uma is the only apparent survivor, and that only because she is not even a competitor. She exists on the scraps of life she is allowed.
But what of Arun, the disabled boy? Well he is quite a bright lad. He goes to university in the USA, and to an institution with status in Massachusetts. But what is he to do in the holidays when the college is closed? We can't afford to bring his all the way home, concludes parsimonious Papa.
So Arun lodges with the Pattons, an all-American nuclear family, an American Dream of sorts, mum, dad, two kids, one of each. But Dad is a laconic type. A beer from the fridge keeps him quiet. The son has all kinds of ambitions, and yet none that are realistic. Mom is an emotional wreck. She years for something in her confusion, but has not idea what it might be. And her daughter is bulimic. Happy families.
So through Arun's eyes, and to some extent as a result of his culturally challenging presence, Anita Desai presents a picture of middle class American life that is utterly dysfunctional. But it is again the women who are most deeply affected. Mom does all the shopping and cooking to feed the unappreciative men and the daughter who cannot eat. She fantasises about Arun's cultural authenticity, sees in him qualities for which she yearns. The daughter is a complete head case. She is fat wanting to be thin, eating to fast, stuffing sweets until she vomits, perhaps a slave to a male-generated concept of female perfection. And Arun witnesses all of this. Eventually, in his deformity, he is the only presence that is not self-obsessed.
The title is important. Fasting, Feasting presents apparent opposites, two contrasting, if imbalanced scenarios, India and the USA. It offers two deformed observers, Uma and Arun. It unpicks two contrasting cultures and finds that women are slaves in both. The opposites are thus ultimately similar, hardly opposed.
 feasting then starving January 25, 2008
A. Leger (UK)
The first part of the book is brilliant. It describes the sometimes dysfunctional aspects of the family, is engaging and enjoyable. The reader really feels for the girl. The second part feels like coming down after a hangover. First the euphoria, then the sinking feeling that things have gone wrong. I felt like giving up reading the end of the book, quite frankly. Still a good book.
 moving September 6, 2004
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
touching, moving and at times acarely realistic. The writing is controled and Desai never falls into the trap of melodrama that so many Indian authors seem unable to avoid.
Food, glorious food June 20, 2001
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
The two halves of this book never gelled into a whole. I found the second, shorter story about the brother in America more interesting than the first (about the sister in India). Whereas the second story said something the consumer society and obsession with food of America, what did the first have to say on the same subject? If it said anything, I must have missed it. The family of the protagonists were very well off, so it certainly wasn't contrasted with want and hunger (of which there are plenty in India). I also found the first story confused and difficult to follow at times.
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