THE IVORY SWING

by Janette Turner Hospital ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 1983

A professor's wife, Juliet, already feeling too far from the excitements of city life in her small Canadian college-town, obligingly journeys with husband David (and their two children) even further: to Kerala in southern India, for David's research sabbatical year. While David studies temple sculpture and falls in love (chaste) with an unhappy and tormented young widow living on the estate of David and Juliet's Indian landlord, Juliet tries to do without servants. (An impossibility: ""They have a way, Juliet thought uneasily, of making my democratic instincts seem gauche and clumsy. In bad taste."") More important, she tries to come to terms with the unthinkable poverty and rigid castes--to try to fight off her hunger for freedom, her doubts about her marriage, her thoughts of taking a lover. But, like David, Juliet also becomes involved--sympathetically, mirroringly--with the misfortunes of the young widow Yashoda. And it's around Yashoda's sculpted, shadowed character that most of the moral ambiguity of the novel revolves: by turns she is tormented, beseeching, seducing, exiled, shamed, and--eventually--horrifyingly destroyed. Hospital writes with grace and balance: the English spoken by her Indian characters is perfect-eared, spooky; a scene in which Juliet and the children are nearly killed (when the bus they're riding in is overturned by political rioters) is remarkably vivid and taut. And though the book has slack fingers when called on to hold its various strands in one grip, each separate sequence is involving enough to distract from the looseness of the structure. Solid, atmospheric fiction from a truly talented writer: winner of the 1982 Seal Book Award for first novelists.

Pub Date: May 23, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION