I was lucky enough to receive this book as a proof from Little Toller in return for an honest review.
Davina Quinlivan writes fluidly and hauntingly as she weaves a narrative constructed from history, memories, and family mythologies that spans decades and continents. From her Burmese father's childhood and experiences migrating to England to her own childhood fragmented memories of Asian culture in her Anglo-Asian community, Quinlivan explores the signifiers that create meaning for us in this world. Certain words, meals, songs; they carry cultural memory through space and time, often inadvertently creating unease and ambiguity. Sorry, they seem to say; apologies that you thought about me right now, this recipe from your childhood, as you sit in your rural Devonshire home. The juxtaposition of past and present is felt everywhere in this work, seeping through layers of a life until we realise that everything is connected and comes together to make us the people who we end up being in our lives.
Shalimar. A real place, one of comfort and safety for her father, but also taking on something more akin to a mythological realm for Quinlivan. Imaginings of how life was, in the before time, when her family had yet to move to England. Watching how they tried to replicate the place after their immigration: various aunties cooking the same foods, placing the same bowls and dishes on the same places at the table, all set against the grey English weather. The same but not the same. Familiar and also new. And then sometimes, the uncanny feeling that creeps in when the worlds collide unexpectedly, like when Quinlivan sees the 'Made in Myanmar' tag on her clothes and starts thinking about the working conditions of those workers. Although not on such an inter-continental scale, I too have moved from one area to another and feel that sense of uncanny strangeness sometimes as worlds collide.
I very much liked the realistic elements of this book especially when they were placed alongside the elements of magical realism. The thread running throughout is one of nature and the natural world being a part of us all. From the forbidden fruit eaten at the start of the work to the teak tree and the Green Man, Quinlivan explores this aspect of reality alongside aspects of climate and landscape. The book feels like a home, guiding her young family through their heritage into their futures, exploring her parents' heritage and her own grief along the way. What are we all really, but human?
Five stars!
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