Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
In her debut novel, Burnt Sugar,Avni Doshi has crafted a harsh and honest novel that follows Tara and Antara’s complicated mother-daughter relationship, strained even further by Tara’s early-onset memory loss. The novel begins in modern day India where Antara, an obsessive artist in her thirties, struggles with Tara’s memory loss, the lack of diagnosis to explain it, and having to now care for Tara, for whom Antara harbors immense resentment, while remaining deeply attached. Throughout the novel, there are many flashbacks that provide context for Antara’s intense relationship with Tara, outlining the ways Tara had failed Antara as a mother, but also exploring what life had taken away from Tara. Unlike Shuggie Bain, where the reader may find themselves desperate for Shuggie to be properly angry at his mother, Burnt Sugar does not hold back any punches. Antara’s anger is palpable, and the reader can feel her seething through the pages.
After reading The New Wilderness, I partially wondered why it had even been shortlisted in the first place. In contrast, after reading Burnt Sugar, I was convinced it was deserving of being shortlisted. Burnt Sugar was impeccably written, utilizing thoughtful metaphors, symbolism, and repeated imagery to tie the novel together into a tight, concise work of fiction. Antara’s interactions with dogs, sugar, and drawing help build the plot while providing more meaning to Antara’s feelings and observations about women, hunger, and memory. The choice of first-person narrative was a brilliant choice that further enhanced the novel. Antara is honest and intense; her narration is brutal. Were the book written in third person, I don’t think it would have felt nearly as intimate, and every character would have come across as cold, flat, and emotionless, when, in reality, each character possesses great depth and rather intense emotions.
In her piece “On the 2020 Booker Prize”, Tara Menon asserts that “hatred this unadulterated and unashamed is rarely portrayed, and it makes for exhilarating reading. But it also risks self-indulgence…the narrative doesn’t spare much time on Tara’s unenviable early life and the unfair expectations place on Indian women, even those who occupy the upper echelons of society.” While I agree with Menon that Antara’s level of resentment is rarely shown in novels, I disagree that it “risks self-indulgence” and I also disagree that Doshi should have included more focus on Tara’s unfortunate childhood (specifically, an arranged marriage as a teenager). I think Doshi’s choice of narrative solidified that her novel’s focus is on Antara, her life, her development, her thoughts, and her feelings. While all of these exist within the framework of India, it’s culture and the pressure it places on young women, and Tara’s own experiences with those pressures, they are secondary to Antara’s experience. Antara’s lack of forgiveness for her mother, despite all the ways Tara could be viewed as a victim, does not limit the reader from coming to conclusions about the ways certain aspects of Indian culture are unfair to women. I believe it encourages the reader to consider the situation from a complicated and unique perspective, while still maintaining the message Menon seems to think was missing.
The novel’s unique perspective is further strengthened by Doshi’s own unique perspectives. Doshi is an American woman who grew up in New Jersey. Her parents were Indian immigrants, though her mother’s family lived in Pune, India (where Burnt Sugar takes place), so Doshi visited often. She moved to India in her mid-twenties, and now lives in Dubai. Her experience gives her an interesting perspective on both American, Indian American, and Indian culture. While Antara and Tara are both Indian women, Antara’s husband, Dilip, is an Indian American, raised in the Midwest and returning to India later in life for work, similar to Doshi’s real life experience. Dilip’s character provided insight on, perhaps, some of her own personal experiences as an Indian American, and an emigrant. Doshi has stressed that her novel is not autobiographical, which I think makes it an even more successfully written novel. The emotions expressed in her novel came across as honest and real, and its commendable that she was able to capture those emotions when she herself may not have experienced anything like them.
Lastly, I think the content of the novel played a major role in its selection. Burnt Sugar is very consistent with the other shortlisted novels in that it analyzes a complicated and painful parent-child relationship. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I’m beginning to wonder if a literary novel, especially a prize-winning literary novel, must include this element to some degree. In “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestseller, and the Time of Reading,” Piper and Portelance discuss the difference between bestselling and prizewinning novels. They argue that a major indicator of a novels prize worthiness, is nostalgia. They state that the “interlocking nexus of nature, childhood, and retrospection…does indeed appear to mark out the high cultural work of prizewinning novels, just as the diligent attention to the present on the part of bestselling novels comes into sharper relief through the lens of prizewinners.” In other words, bestselling novels, because they are written for the purpose of entertainment and commercial success, focus on the present and moving forward at a pace that hold the interest of the reader. Prize winning novels, on the other hand, tend to veer from the plot to make room for reflection or nostalgia, defined by Piper and Portelance as “a retrospective look back at one’s own life, ideally in a longing kind of way.”
All of the 2020 Booker Prize shortlisted novels include nostalgic passages where the protagonist, or another character, reflects on their past to make sense of their current situation. Most of the novels begin in the “present” (whatever that is in the given novel), and continuously shift backwards in time, making constant reflections that provide context or meaning to the present. If nostalgia is as strong a determinant of prize worthiness as Piper and Portelance suggests, I would argue that Shuggie Bain deserved to win, as I think it most artfully utilized reflection and nostalgia while still maintain a strong plot that held the reader’s interest. However, I think Burnt Sugar would be a not-so-distant second, because of the ways Doshi used reflection and nostalgic passages to make a point about memory, forgiveness, and the cycle of trauma.
So far, Burnt Sugar is my second favorite novel on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist, following Shuggie Bain, and followed by This Mournable Body, The New Wilderness, and Real Life. Overall, Doshi has written a beautiful, thought provoking, and unsparing novel, certainly deserving of being shortlisted, and in my opinion, a close contender for first prize.
Works Cited
Menon, Tara k. “On The 2020 Booker Prize.” Sewanee Review, vol. 129 no. 1, 2021, p. 131-
158. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sew.2021.0005.
Piper, Andrew, and Eva Portelance. “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading.” Post45, 29 Mar. 2018, https://post45.org/2016/05/how-cultural-capital-works-prizewinning-novels-bestsellers-and-the-time-of-reading/.
