Mad Girls’ Love Song is one of those books that will hook you with its enticing blurb — literary history, detective story, romance, post-colonial fable.
The book is a first-person account by Pari, a “schizoid childwoman” from the mythical town of Tempke.
In her real life, Pari is the daughter of the richest man in Tempke, sent off to the local convent school to board, after her mother kills herself. At school she discovers literature in English, a language she is far more comfortable with than any Indian language.
In her mind’s journeys, Pari is another being, an angel or a bat, her life intertwined with the lives of the poets and authors she discovers in the school library — Sylvia Plath, William Blake and D.H. Lawrence. As she continues reading their works and starts delving thereon into works about them, she starts imagining herself in their lives. She converses with them, encourages them, provides them a muse, or leaves with them messages — in her mind, she guides them towards their greater achievements.
She is the voice pushing them towards newer boundaries — in her head she takes Plath to the local Baba in Tempke, gives Blake the idea of inventing the technique of relief and inspires Lawrence out of his post-war malaise.
Over the course of the book, Pari talks of these interactions, in long and rambling detail, and woven into this are the events that have troubled her in her real life in the past as well as the events she must confront now.
She wants to find out, among many things, the reason behind her mother’s suicide, the riddle of a turkey that is killed before it can become the Christmas dinner and has deeper questions on love.
Rukmini’s writing is clear, interspersed with some bits that stand out — Lawrence’s wife Frieda’s voice is conveyed through a few short but distinctive sections, and a brief description of the apsaras is particularly striking. There is a tinge of humour too — a fine piece has Pari describing herself as a bat in Lawrence’s room and thereby inspiring him to write Man and Bat.
The premise of the book is reasonably uncommon. It reminded me, in its flip-flopping between the real and imagined states, of Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontës Went to Woolworths, but without the frivolity of the earlier work.
I entered into both books with a lot of expectations. Unfortunately, not all of them were quite met.
The narrative flits dizzyingly through time, mind state and geography — moving from the reality of playing with friends in Tempke to a visit with Blake to see a tiger in London, back to the reality of her psychiatric treatment in England, to a meeting with other angels and back to present-day reality in Tempke. It breaks off a few times to digress into history, hat-making and other such titbits.
The resultant disjointed and rambling style of storytelling, clearly adopted in keeping with the nature of Pari’s mind, is interesting at first but gets tedious after a while. The digressions start off as interesting, but then become too prolonged; their link to the story weakens to the point where it almost has to be explained. The book does stretch a bit. I found myself flipping through parts of it because they just didn’t hold my interest. At the same time, the end seems rushed.
The book is split broadly into sections by poet. Section-wise, the Sylvia Plath part has a balanced mix of Pari’s conversations with Sylvia and her piecemeal memories of Tempke. To me the D.H. Lawrence section seemed most hurried. The William Blake section, unfortunately, meanders, moving away from Pari’s mysteries and memories. Unfortunate because it is actually the more interesting portion if you were to read patiently through it, filled with nuggets on his life and work, reflecting the amount of research and effort a work like this needs.
Therefore to me it is literary, yes; romance, perhaps; detective, no, not really. The mysteries mentioned early in the book are constantly undermined by the rambling, so much so that when the narrative returns to the
story of the turkey, it holds little interest.
This book is a beautifully painstaking result of an abiding love for literature and poetry. It is, however, a tough read if you don’t share an equal amount of passion for them, as the author does. To me, exposed to these poets in intermittent doses, it works partially, at best managing to revive an interest in them.
The author acknowledges as much — that this book needs “readers who are as crazily familiar with Plath, Blake and Lawrence as the protagonist” to get a sense of it. I would agree. However, I do wish she had not mentioned in the acknowledgements an easy way out — splitting the book into sections and offering the reader the option of reading as per one’s interest. To me it feels that would result in an incomplete understanding of Pari’s thoughts and doings. I would have preferred it if each segment worked equally strongly in pulling you closer towards developing a deeper interest in the respective poets.
Nirupa Subramanyan wishes she lived in a bookstore