The novel ends abruptly because, well, the novel has to end somewhere. The novel is full of Shalini, her observations about the place and the people, her desire. If Vijay is making a point, other than a literary one, about Kashmir, it’s easily missed. However, the attention seems misplaced: the novel seems less about Kashmir than a story perhaps serendipitously set there. The novel has garnered much praise (and has even been shortlisted for an award in India) for the way it talks about the situation in Kashmir since the 1990s. If this novel is the only thing that brings certain readers the closest they have been to Kashmir, Vijay’s writing, well, checks the box of the description of the landscape. It’s the same old story: Kashmiris as caught between the militants and the Indian army. It is hard to miss the tone of Kashmir-as-an-exotic-place, a setting quite suitable for a quest-as seen through the eyes of non-Kashmiris. In Madhuri Vijays exquisite debut novel, The Far Field, grief propels a young woman. The author was born and raised in Bangalore, as is the narrator. The Far Field is illuminating about the persecutions in Kashmir. But this remembrance narrative gets complicated when Kashmir is super-imposed. Vijay’s prose rearranges, re-orders and unveils the different stages of the characters’ lives, especially Shalini’s, neatly taking the reader in and out of various episodes of her life.
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